Coinbase Pro announced SHIB trading was open the morning of Sept. 9, and didn't take long for things to go completely off the rails. 

SHIB opened on Coinbase Pro at $0.00001, or $1e-5, in scientific notation -- a value that was an order of magnitude larger than the market SHIB-USD price, which hovered around $0.000007, or around $7e-6. 

Coinbase Pro's API doesn't track SHIB any earlier than Sept. 9 16:12:00 UTC at press time, and I haven't set up my tools to pull data from other sources yet. But we can get an eyeball estimate of SHIB's value -- roughly $7e-6 -- by consulting coinmarketcap.com's price chart for the past seven days. 

When we input this eyeball value into a chart of Coinbase Pro's SHIB price, the difference is astonishing. For nearly a full day, SHIB's price on Coinbase Pro was around 8x the price of the general market. 

I didn't believe my eyes when I first saw these charts, but after double checking my code and reading the explosion of anger and confusion across Twitter and Reddit, the price difference seems to be real. Coinbase Pro did something behind the scenes to correct their market price earlier today, as we can see from the abrupt price correction after 2021-09-10 15:00:00 UTC. 

Coinbase Pro started and stopped SHIB trading several times it seems throughout this time frame, but I'm sure some people made or lost a fortune off this mistake. 

I'm running off to start my weekend, but this news was just too new and too important to ignore. I'm surprised at the lack of news or blog coverage on this debacle, so I figured I'd fill that hole and ring the alarm until more established outlets put out their news. I'll take a more in-depth look this weekend and put out an updated blog post hopefully. Make sure you scrutinize any trades you make on Coinbase Pro's SHIB markets very, very closely for the foreseeable future. 

As always -- thanks for reading, and happy trading. 

Thumbnail photo by Justin Lim on Unsplash.