According to the company, the error occurred during a promotional campaign and was not related to hacking attacks or security issues.
As clarified by Bithumb, 695 clients were supposed to receive a bonus of 2000 won (approximately $1.37). However, instead, each of them received at least 2000 bitcoins. Many of the recipients immediately began selling off the cryptocurrency, which caused a sharp reaction in the market — the price of Bitcoin temporarily dropped by 17%.
The exchange apologized for the incident and noted that it has already returned 99.7% of the mistakenly issued 620,000 bitcoins. Bithumb is one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea, second only to Upbit in trading volume.
