Bithumb Mistakenly Credits Users With 620,000 Bitcoin
Bithumb accidentally credited users with a combined 620,000 BTC during a promotional payout error, triggering emergency account restrictions and a sharp BTC/KRW price dislocation on the exchange. The operational failure was extraordinary in scale and later produced regulatory scrutiny and litigation.
On February 6, 2026, South Korean exchange Bithumb suffered an extraordinary internal accounting failure during a promotional event. Instead of distributing small cash-denominated Bitcoin rewards, the exchange credited participating users with a combined 620,000 BTC. Contemporary reporting placed the notional value of the erroneous credits in the tens of billions of dollars—far beyond the exchange’s own Bitcoin holdings.
Some recipients attempted to sell the credited bitcoin before Bithumb restricted the affected accounts. The resulting order flow produced a sharp local price dislocation in the BTC/KRW market, with Bitcoin briefly falling far below prices on other venues before recovering. Bithumb said its internal controls detected the problem and restricted transactions, and the company later reported that most of the erroneous balances had been recovered or frozen.
The event was not a blockchain transfer of 620,000 actual bitcoin. It was an internal exchange-ledger error, a distinction that is essential to understanding both the scale and the mechanism. The incident nevertheless mattered to Bitcoin users because exchange account balances function as claims on custodial assets, and a ledger failure can disrupt trading even when the Bitcoin network itself operates normally.
The episode also became a test of exchange governance and regulatory oversight in South Korea. Bithumb’s leadership later faced questioning over internal controls, and disputes over users who sold or withdrew value from the mistaken credits continued into later legal proceedings. Those later consequences are separate historical stages; the February event is the underlying Bitcoin-specific operational failure and market disruption that created them.