On May 8, Revolut users saw Bitcoin listed at just two cents. The glitch, which lasted several hours, also dragged down prices for XRP, Solana, USDT, and USDC on the platform. The neobank blamed the mess on a failure at an unnamed external pricing provider — and offered no name for the culprit.
What users saw
Bitcoin at $0.02. That’s what some Revolut customers reported seeing in their apps last Friday. Push notifications even told a subset of users that the cryptocurrency had hit a 52-week low of two cents, according to posts on social media. Other major tokens followed suit, with Solana and XRP showing sharp drops simultaneously — an unlikely scenario in any real market.
The timing was rough for retail traders. Anyone who panicked and sold would have done so at a fraction of real prices. Revolut directed users to its status page and said engineers were working on a fix.
The likely cause
Experts following the incident said the most probable trigger was a corrupt data tick. A single bad price point pushed through Revolut’s system from the third-party provider, then cascaded across the app’s crypto listings. Liquidity wasn’t the issue; there were no unusual order-book movements on major aggregators like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko during the same window. That suggests the problem was purely a data feed breakdown, not a real market dislocation.
Revolut hasn’t named the provider. The company said only that the glitch was resolved and attributed to a service failure on the provider’s end. It’s a reminder of how fragile retail-facing price displays can be when they rely on a single external source.
No market impact
Outside Revolut, nothing happened. Bitcoin traded normally on other exchanges. No arbitrage opportunity opened up — because the price wasn’t real anywhere else. The incident was contained to Revolut’s interface, but the false data still reached thousands of users instantly.
That’s the risk: one bad tick, one unvalidated price, and a whole app full of people sees a crash that never happened. The push notifications made it worse — turning a back-end glitch into a moment of genuine confusion for users who might have acted on the alert.
What’s next
Revolut hasn’t said whether it plans to switch providers, add redundancies, or introduce sanity checks on price feeds. The company’s status page now shows the issue as resolved, but the unnamed provider continues to power crypto prices on the app. For now, users are left wondering whether the next tick could be another phantom two-cent Bitcoin.
