It's facetious (and bad 'journalism') to claim $100B vanished. It was never there to begin with: market cap isn't something you can cash in on. It's merely the result of price multiplied by supply. If you owned a significant portion of all the coins in the world, and tried to sell them all at once, you wouldn't end up with number_of_coins * price, it would (realistically) be a smaller number given the market slippage…
>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…
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.