Crypto exchange accidentally gives away $44 billion

South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb made a serious mistake during a promotional campaign on Friday: Instead of cash bonuses of 2,000 Korean Won (about $1.40), the platform distributed at least 2,000 Bitcoin per winner. In total, around 620,000 Bitcoin worth about $44 billion were accidentally paid out to 695 users.

According to Bithumb, this was an input error during the payout process. The exchange stated that it blocked trading and withdrawals for the affected accounts within 35 minutes. By Saturday, Bithumb reported that it had recovered 99.7 percent of the incorrectly credited Bitcoin (618,212 BTC).

The incident triggered a short-term Bitcoin crash on the platform. Many recipients immediately tried to sell the unexpected Bitcoin. The price of the cryptocurrency temporarily plunged by 17 percent on Bithumb, from about 104.5 million Won to 81.1 million Won, before the rate recovered. On other international exchanges, the Bitcoin price remained largely stable, as the selling pressure was locally limited.

Bithumb emphasized that the incident was not due to external hackers or security vulnerabilities. No erroneous Bitcoin payouts were transferred to external wallets, and customer assets remained securely stored. The South Korean financial supervisory authority FSC reacted with an emergency meeting. It announced that it would review the internal control systems of Bithumb and other crypto exchanges and conduct on-site inspections in case of irregularities.

(jo)