Some mistakes are learning experiences, and then there are those that involve accidentally sending 2,000 BTC to a platform’s users… who immediately rushed to sell it, triggering a 10% drop below its market price.
The Bithumb platform pays out 2,000 BTC to its users… by mistake
Update: The Bithumb platform recently confirmed a much larger amount totaling 620,000 BTC, or over $40 billion. Each user reportedly received 2,000 BTC. At the time of writing, it claims to have already recovered 99.7% of the funds paid out in error.
Most cryptocurrency exchanges position themselves as secure spaces for trading, but also offer certain rewards, as in the case of users of the Bithumb platform, which is very popular in South Korea.
In fact, this exchange intended to conduct an airdrop denominated in won (KRW)—the Korean currency—to some of its users, distributing amounts equivalent to a few cents at most.
The problem? The employee in charge of these payments reportedly made a mistake by substituting Bitcoin for KRW. It’s not that hard to make such an error, since platforms can issue as much “paper” BTC as they want through a simple accounting entry!
As a result, and quite against its will, the Bithumb platform ended up paying out a total of 2,000 BTC to some of its users—equivalent to $130 million at the time. To fully grasp the scale of the blunder, this amount is equivalent to about $1.40 in Korean won!
The question on everyone’s mind is how users reacted to these unexpected payments. Clearly, without giving a second thought to returning them to the sender…
BTC Plunges 10% Below Market Price
The rest of the story is no less amusing than its beginning, as users who received these fortunes in BTC immediately rushed to sell them in order to cash in on these windfall gains as quickly as possible.
Result: Faced with this significant and unexpected selling pressure, the BTC/KRW pair quickly fell 10% below the market price of Bitcoin, before returning to normal.
The KRW/BTC pair drops 10% in a matter of minutes
The incident illustrates how internal ledger and off-chain accounting errors can still cause significant market distortions, even in 2026, without any actual movement of Bitcoin on the blockchain. A costly reminder that the risk associated with exchange platforms remains very real.
Bitcoin News
The story does not say whether some shrewd individuals had the presence of mind to take advantage of this drop to pull off a nice arbitrage trade. Nor does it mention how the Bithumb platform will—obviously—attempt to recover all of these funds.
