"200 Billion Won Was Wired"... Bithumb's Plan to Pay 2,000 Won Each Turns into Mistaken Payout of 2,000 Bitcoins in Unprecedented Incident

[Financial News] South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb made a payout error while distributing event prizes, mistakenly entering the payment unit as Bitcoin (BTC) instead of won. As some users immediately sold the Bitcoins they had received, the Bitcoin price plunged and the market was thrown into turmoil.

According to the virtual asset industry on the 7th, on the afternoon of the 6th, some Bithumb users were mistakenly credited with 2,000 Bitcoins each. Even when calculated at Bithumb’s intraday low of 81 million won per Bitcoin, the total value comes to about 160 billion won.
Once Bithumb grasped the situation, it estimated that roughly 550,000 Bitcoins had been mis-credited and began recovery efforts, including blocking deposits and withdrawals of virtual assets. However, some of the unrecovered assets are believed to have already been withdrawn to external venues such as overseas exchanges, with the withdrawn amount estimated at around 3 billion won.
The incident appears to have occurred because, during the event reward payout process, a system error caused the unit to be entered as BTC instead of won. Around 240 users are believed to have received the mistaken payments. After confirming the erroneous deposits, some of them immediately started selling, and the Bitcoin price on Bithumb tumbled to 81.11 million won at around 7:30 p.m. that day.

Bithumb issued an apology five hours after the incident occurred. The company stated, "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused to our customers by the confusion that arose during the event payout process," and added, "We want to make it clear that this matter is unrelated to any external hacking or security breach, and that there are no issues with our system security or the management of customer assets."
Bithumb went on to emphasize, "We understand that no losses or damages to customer assets have occurred, but we will transparently share every step of our follow-up measures and take full responsibility to ensure that not a single customer suffers any harm."
Given the seriousness of the incident, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) have reportedly launched immediate on-site inspections and begun investigating how the error occurred.
bng@fnnews.com Kim Hee-sun Reporter