A South Korean cryptocurrency exchange, Bithumb, apologized after mistakenly sending 620,000 bitcoins—worth more than $60 billion—to users, triggering a brief sell-off and halting trading and withdrawals for 695 affected accounts within 35 minutes. The transfer was intended as part of a promotional distribution of about 2,000 won ($1.95) to each customer, but instead sent roughly 2,000 bitcoins per user. The platform said it had recovered 99.7% of the mistakenly sent bitcoins and would use its own assets to fully cover the amount lost.
The error caused temporary volatility in bitcoin prices on the platform. It admitted the error briefly caused “sharp volatility” in bitcoin prices on the platform as some recipients sold the tokens, adding that it brought the situation under control within five minutes. Its charts showed the token’s prices briefly went down 17 per cent to 81.1 million won on the platform late Friday.
In a separate statement released later on Saturday, Bithumb said some trades were executed at unfavourable prices for users due to a price drop during the incident, including “panic selling”. The platform said it would compensate affected customers, covering the full price difference as well as a 10 per cent bonus. It estimated losses at about 1 billion won ($976,579) and stressed that the incident was unrelated to external hacking or security breaches.
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