>It's facetious (and bad 'journalism') to claim $100B vanished.
It's certainly not bad journalism, this is how all sorts of assets are reported on. Market Cap isn't a perfect metric but it's pretty good and keeps us from saying things like "AMZN is down 50%" when they do a stock split.
In the sense that yesterday if you summed up what all the individual holders saw when they checked their accounts you'd get $200b and today if you did the same you'd get $100b then $100b did vanish.
If 10% of stock holders are able to cash out without changing the price significantly, market cap would be an inaccurate measure, but not that far off.
If, on the other hand, only 0.1% of holders of some token are able to cash out without significantly affecting the price, the value they think they have just isn’t there (to a much larger extent than the case above).
To use an extreme example: if I issue 2^100 tokens, and manage to get a couple of orders in an order book with a mid (and “last trade”) price of 0.1 cent, and this price goes to zero, did 1.268^27 dollars of market value just vanish, or were the holders of this token misinformed?
The inherent inaccuracy of market cap value is inversely proportional to liquidity: the less liquid the asset, the further away from reality market cap value is. And these tiny tokens are some of the least liquid assets in existence.
If I bought monopoly money for $1B then later am able to sell 10% for 200M. I might believe and tell people my stash is now worth $2B, but most reasonable people would say your stash is worth $0 because its monopoly money and you got scammed for the first $1B.
It's certainly not bad journalism, this is how all sorts of assets are reported on. Market Cap isn't a perfect metric but it's pretty good and keeps us from saying things like "AMZN is down 50%" when they do a stock split.
In the sense that yesterday if you summed up what all the individual holders saw when they checked their accounts you'd get $200b and today if you did the same you'd get $100b then $100b did vanish.