Bithumb's $44 Billion Typo [Report]

A Bithumb employee typed “BTC” instead of “KRW” while processing a routine promotional giveaway. The “Random Box” event was supposed to distribute modest cash prizes of ₩2,000-50,000 (roughly $1.37 to $34) to participants. Instead, the system credited 620,000 Bitcoin, worth roughly $44 billion, to 695 user accounts. Each recipient received at least 2,000 BTC, approximately $142 million per person at the prevailing price of ~$71,000/BTC. That phantom sum equaled nearly 3% of Bitcoin’s total supply and exceeded Bithumb’s actual Bitcoin holdings by a factor of 15.

 

The credited Bitcoin existed only on Bithumb’s internal ledger, not on-chain. No actual Bitcoin was transferred on the blockchain. But that distinction made no difference to the order book. Users who suddenly saw enormous BTC balances began selling immediately into real buy orders. In the roughly 35-minute window between the erroneous distribution and account freezes, 86 users managed to sell approximately 1,788 BTC worth of phantom Bitcoin on the open market. Bithumb CEO Lee Jae-won later admitted in parliamentary testimony that the exchange reconciles its internal ledger with actual crypto holdings only once every 24 hours, a gap that allowed phantom balances to be traded as if they were real.

 

Bitcoin on Bithumb crashed 16% in minutes. At 10:36 UTC on February 6, 2026, BTC/KRW hit a low of ₩81.1 million (~$54,990), creating an unprecedented “inverse Kimchi premium” where Bithumb was trading at a steep discount to every other exchange. Global prices on Binance, Coinbase, Bybit, OKX, Kraken, and even Upbit (Korea’s largest exchange, trading the same BTC/KRW pair) all remained stable around $65,500. Bithumb froze affected accounts and recovered 99.7% of the erroneous credits within hours, covering the full 1,788 BTC shortfall from corporate reserves.