Williamson, a nursing student, woke up on the morning of June 16 to check his trading account on Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, and fell out of bed. His trading account showed a balance of more than $1 trillion, which would make him the first-ever trillionaire in the world.
“I woke up, it’s like 9 am and I always check my phone to check how my crypto is doing and I’m just like, ‘Naw, I’m sleeping’. I look at it again and I’m like… at that point, I fell out of my bed, literally,” Chris Williamson told US-based Fox 5 network.
That’s as good as it got for Williamson.
He went on micro-blogging site twitter the same day to get a handle on things. “I’m gonna need someone to explain what the heck is going on and then write me a check. I got a mega yacht shaped like a penguin on standby,” Williamson wrote on his twitter handle.
It turned out, that the $20 worth of RocketBunny cryptocurrency that Williamson had purchased using his Coinbase account had not turned into more than $1 trillion overnight. The balance being reflected on Williamson’s Coinbase account was a ‘technical error’.
I’m gonna need someone to explain what the heck is going on and then write me a check. I got a mega yacht shaped like a penguin on standby. #cryptotrillionaire @RocketBunny2021 @coinbase @CoinbaseSupport @CoinbasePro pic.twitter.com/dyxKvx11WS
— Christopher Williamson (@Christo44044658) June 16, 2021
“Sorry — the penguin yacht may have to wait — our team is aware of the display error causing this wishful thinking for some ERC20s. They’re working to fix — in the meantime, trading the asset will reflect its current market value,” the Coinbase twitter handle responded to Williamson’s tweet two days later.
Before dwelling deeper into Williamson’s troubles, it is important to acknowledge the cryptocurrency Williamson purchased for $20.
RocketBunny is a recent entrant in the world of cryptocurrency promising to be a deflationary token with a maximum supply of 777 quadrillion. The concept of the cryptocurrency is unique to bigger and more popular peers like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
This is how RocketBunny describes its currency: “Each transaction incurs a 4% tax that is distributed in four equal parts: 1% to holders, 1% burned to The Rabbit’s Hole, 1% locked liquidity, and 1% as a bonus to liquidity providers. As volume increases, the amount burned increases logarithmically, eventually leading to an exponential decrease in supply.”
The cryptocurrency was last quoting a price of $0.000000000036. Yes, that’s 12 decimal points after the zero! The value of the cryptocurrency has nosedived 76 per cent over the past 22 days, making the possibility of Williamson becoming a trillionaire because of the cryptocurrency a near impossibility.
Williamson’s harrowing experience did not end soon. Despite numerous pleas to both Coinbase and RocketBunny, the problem of a $1 trillion balance in his trading account could not be sorted out till the time of publication.
Williamson updated on twitter on Monday that the value of his account was still going up, but he could not cash out as it had been frozen by Coinbase. “Support responded to the user on June 18. Also, I wanted to clarify that the user’s account was never locked and he never lost access to the account,” a representative of Coinbase was quoted by Dailymail.
Day 6: @CoinbaseSupport @coinbase – I never understood Otis Campbell until y’all came into my life. pic.twitter.com/E6LwufAVUo
— Christopher Williamson (@Christo44044658) June 21, 2021
The attention drawn to Williamson’s story has boosted RocketBunnny’s coin as the cryptocurrency surged over 9 per cent on Wednesday.
Williamson’s story has captured the cryptocurrency world with many urging Coinbase to rectify its mistake, while other prodding him to make sure he gets some sort of relief for his emotional and financial troubles.
“The ongoing joke right now between me and like my friends in Coinbase and one of the emails I sent them was like: ‘Look, I need y’all to let me know what’s going on because I got a mega-yacht company ready to build me a penguin-shaped yacht’,” Williamson said.
