South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has launched an investigation into Bithumb following an incident involving the crediting of 620,000 BTC to user accounts. Authorities are determining how the exchange technically displayed assets it did not own and why the internal control system failed to catch the error. The regulator is prepared to take strict measures for market destabilization.
According to media reports, the glitch occurred during a promotional event. An employee mixed up the input fields: instead of the planned reward of 2,000 won (about $1.40), participants received 2,000 BTC each. The total value of the fictitious coins reached $42.8 B.
The platform managed to reverse most transactions, but 125 BTC ($8.6 M) remain unsettled. This single employee error exposed a vulnerability in the entire system: the exchange displayed balance volumes it did not possess.
The market reacted nervously to the incident. On-chain data recorded an outflow of 3,875 BTC (about $268 M) from the exchange’s wallets immediately after the failure. Experts attribute this both to attempts to withdraw the erroneously received assets and to an exodus of users who lost trust in the platform’s reliability.
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