A routine promotional event at Bithumb, South Korea’s second‑largest cryptocurrency exchange, briefly turned into a global market shock when a prize unit was entered as bitcoin instead of Korean won. The exchange launched a “random box” reward on Friday evening intended to award winners between 2,000 and 50,000 won (roughly CNY 9.5–237). Because the unit was misentered as BTC, some users were credited with hundreds or thousands of bitcoins instead of small won amounts.
The typo’s scale was surreal on paper: one cohort expecting 620,000 won ended up being credited 620,000 BTC apiece on Bithumb’s internal ledger, a nominal value that, at the moment, would have been worth tens of billions of dollars. Bithumb says most of the mistakenly issued coins were frozen and reclaimed within minutes after staff detected the error, and that 618,212 of the erroneously credited 620,000 BTC were recovered. A smaller tranche of roughly 1,788 BTC was sold into the market in the ensuing panic; Bithumb reports it has reclaimed 93% of the proceeds. A residual 125 BTC remains unrecovered, valued at about $8.6m at recent prices.
The episode coincided with an existing market downturn. Traders who saw the sudden, anomalously low quoted prices on Bithumb — created as the exchange handled the airdropped balances and ensuing trades — panicked and sold, contributing to a sharp intraday price plunge to roughly $60,000. Bithumb has pledged to reimburse customers who sold at the low prices between 19:30 and 19:45 local time, covering the full difference plus an additional 10% as compensation, and estimates user losses from panic selling at around 1 billion won.
Beyond the immediate customer remediation, the incident exposed deeper questions about custodial controls at crypto platforms. Bithumb’s own filings show it held only about 42,600 BTC in custody at the end of the prior quarter — far less than the 620,000 BTC that briefly appeared on its systems — creating what commentators dubbed a “ghost bitcoin” problem. The exchange says no bitcoin actually left its systems during the incident and that the majority of the erroneous credits were intercepted before market impact, but the mismatch has fuelled unease about record‑keeping and reconciliation practices.
Regulators treated the mishap as a serious systemic failure. South Korea’s Financial Services Commission, Financial Supervisory Service and Financial Intelligence Unit convened emergency meetings and dispatched a joint inspection team to Bithumb. Officials framed the event as a revealing example of vulnerabilities in virtual asset operations and ordered close monitoring of the exchange’s remedial measures, which include multi‑stage approvals for promotional payouts and strengthened automated anomaly detection and blocking systems.
The episode is a reminder that operational risk — human error, sloppy user interfaces, or weak internal controls — can be as consequential as market factors in digital‑asset markets. Crypto exchanges frequently combine elements of banking, trading platforms and payment processors, but many do not yet employ the mature control frameworks and regulatory oversight that typically govern analogous infrastructure in traditional finance. For users and regulators alike, the Bithumb slip up underscores that a single keystroke in an exchange back office can have outsized price and confidence effects in a thinly regulated market.
Trust damage may be the hardest cost to quantify. Even with rapid recovery and promises of compensation, the incident will likely accelerate regulatory scrutiny in South Korea and beyond, push institutional counterparties to demand tighter proof of custody, and prompt exchanges to harden release controls and reconciliation practices. For a market already sensitive to headlines, the practical lesson is stark: resilience requires not just cold wallets and multisig keys, but robust human‑machine governance that prevents catastrophic unit or denomination errors.