Cryptocurrencies were sold off in a big way on Monday afternoon.

The mass sell-off was due to an unannounced data adjustment by coinmarketcap.com (CMC).

CMC excluded data coming from the South Korean exchanges, making the price of cryptos appear to drop for no apparent reason.

Only Ethereum stood out as a safe haven and managed to stay positive throughout the day.



A massive sell-off gripped the crypto markets yesterday afternoon.

What caused it? An unannounced data adjustment by coinmarketcap.com. CMC is probably the biggest website in the world of crypto. I myself have included their information in these daily updates many times and according to the Wall Street Journal, the website is ranked in the same ballpark as Alibaba.

It seems the decision was taken to exclude data coming from the South Korean exchanges. As we've noted several times, the pricing on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ripple is frequently up to 25% higher in South Korea than it is in the rest of the world. So it seems the CMC felt that their data was being offset by this outlier.

The result of this sudden change appeared to many traders to be a sudden drop in the price without any real reason for it, which in turn prompted an onslaught of panic selling. The biggest and most noticeable drop was Ripple, which was already extremely inflated over the past few weeks and was due for a major correction. But the selling soon spread to the entire crypto-market. Only Ethereum stood out as a safe haven and managed to stay positive throughout the day.

The good news is that because people figured out pretty quickly that the sell-off was due to a fluke, the prices rebounded pretty quickly. The not so great news is that these sudden movements do seem to be sparking further volatility in the market as well as other side effects.

For example, I noticed an anomaly on Cryptocompare.com. From this graph, it appears as if the US Dollar controlled 100% Bitcoin volumes for a few minutes. This is of course highly improbable and is more likely due to imperfections in the data. They did tweet about some delays on their site at around that time and tried to reach out to them for comment but I guess they're probably pretty busy at the moment.

Ethereum As a Safe Haven

Over the last year and throughout the current crypto-boom Ether has stood out as the most solid blockchain network not just in price and "market cap" but in the number of transactions, transaction speed, the broad variety of use cases, and many other metrics.

But the biggest use case that has just been announced is not receiving nearly as much media coverage as it should.It seems that the government of Brazil is about to use the Ethereum public blockchain to streamline their political process.

Of course, we haven't heard any official announcement from the government as of yet but sources say that this is not only likely but necessary to restore confidence in the Brazilian Electoral Process. We will, of course, keep our ears to the ground.

Obviously, a nationwide government backed ERC20 token in the world's fifth most populated country could have a big impact on the network and on the infrastructure of global technology as we know it. Many thanks to Alanis Morissette for the title of today's update.

Even though it's been a while, feels quite natural to insert her jagged little pill inside my own. As always, please feel free to reach me directly through eToro or any other social network anytime with any questions, comments, feedback, and resources.

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Mati Greenspan is the Senior Market Analyst at eToro, a global social trading and investment platform. Mati is a licensed portfolio manager in the European Union and his main focus is on macroeconomic analysis, portfolio diversification and cryptocurrencies.