Crypto Goes Briefly Haywire. That’s No Joke.

Bitcoin hit $850 billion this past Tuesday while Ether popped to $179 billion per token. The prices weren’t real, of course. But they highlight how vulnerable crypto data providers and exchanges are to glitches and hacks.

The haywire prices came from crypto site CoinMarketCap. “A drastic volume of users…caused huge pressure in our servers and impacted our price calculation engine,” CoinMarketCap said in an email to Barron’s, adding that the issue was quickly fixed. Still, some faulty data made its way to Coinbase, which…