{"id":52826,"date":"2026-06-15T00:43:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T00:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/52826\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T00:43:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T00:43:14","slug":"south-korea-crypto-exchange-bithumb-says-system-flaws-led-to-40-billion-error-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/52826\/","title":{"rendered":"South Korea crypto exchange Bithumb says system flaws led to $40 billion error"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Jack Kim<\/p>\n

SEOUL, Feb 11 (Reuters) – South Korea’s Bithumb said on Wednesday that serious flaws had left the crypto exchange’s internal \u200csystem susceptible to potential sabotage and failed to prevent an erroneous \u200ctransfer of more than $40 billion in assets last week.<\/p>\n

The country’s second-largest virtual asset exchange said \u200bit accidentally gave away about 620,000 bitcoin<\/a> (BTC-USD<\/a>) to customers during a promotional event, instead of 620,000 won ($426), triggering a 17% slump in bitcoin’s price.<\/p>\n

Bithumb CEO Lee Jae-won said the giveaway amounted to 15 times the exchange’s holding of 42,000 \u200cbitcoins, largely because a lag \u2060of about 24 hours in processing transactions delayed updates to the balance of virtual assets.<\/p>\n

“We are acutely aware of \u2060the deficiency in internal system control,” Lee told a parliament committee hearing on the incident that took place on Friday.<\/p>\n

The exchange’s policy of checking the volume \u200bof currency \u200bto be transferred against its actual \u200bholdings had failed and the \u200camount was also not earmarked in a separate account to ensure the safety of the transaction, Lee said.<\/p>\n

\"A A man watches the prices of bitcoin at Bithumb cryptocurrency exchange in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, June 20, 2018. Bithumb, South Korea’s second-largest exchange, said Wednesday that $31 million worth of virtual currencies have been stolen by hackers, a latest in the series of recent hacks that raised security concerns. (AP Photo\/Ahn Young-joon) \u00b7 ASSOCIATED PRESS <\/p>\n

Most of the bitcoins have been retrieved by the exchange, but 1,786 had already been sold within minutes before the exchange froze the accounts of the customers that received them, regulators have said.<\/p>\n

The \u200ccustomers who sold them are legally required \u200bto return them, they said.<\/p>\n

Members of parliament expressed \u200bdismay at the failure of \u200bgovernment and corporate oversight in the country’s virtual assets \u200cmarket, which is one of the \u200bmost active in the \u200bworld by trading volume.<\/p>\n

Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) Governor Lee Chan-jin said he personally believed the virtual currency market should be subject to the \u200bsame regulatory oversight as \u200cbanks and other financial services institutions, but it was not possible \u200bunder existing laws and regulations.<\/p>\n

($1 = 1,455.4700 won)<\/p>\n

(Reporting by Jack Kim; Editing \u200bby Ed Davies and Sonali Paul)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jack Kim SEOUL, Feb 11 (Reuters) – South Korea’s Bithumb said on Wednesday that serious flaws had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[457],"tags":[2819,5158,30165,337,864,30166,33,1157],"class_list":["post-52826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-korea-exchange","tag-bithumb","tag-crypto-exchange","tag-internal-system","tag-korea-exchange","tag-krx","tag-lee-jae-won","tag-south-korea","tag-virtual-assets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}