How One Person Caused the Price of Cryptocurrencies to Plunge

It’s no secret that the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be volatile, but on January 8th the entire market took an unprecedented plunge—one that it still hasn’t recovered from. At the time, there was no shortage of factors to blame, from the threat of crypto-regulation by national governments to frivolous mainstream investment, but in this case, the drop in Bitcoin’s value may have been the work of exactly one person.

A report from The Wall Street Journal pins the blame on Brandon Chez, creator of coinmarketcap.com. The 31-year-old developer launched the site in 2013 from his apartment in Queens, NY. It tracks the ever-changing value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by combining data from a variety of digital currency exchanges. As cryptocurrencies went mainstream in 2017, coinmarketcap.com quickly became one of the most popular websites in the world, beating out competitors like Coindesk, Coinbase and Blockchain.info. The website also appears to make some money through Google’s ad network.