🚹 BREAKING CRYPTO STORY — MASSIVE BITCOIN ERROR AT BITHUMB

đŸ‡°đŸ‡·Â South Korea’s 2ndlargest exchange accidentally credited users with 620,000 BTC (~$40 bn) during a promotional event — far more than intended. 

📍 The event (Feb 6, 2026):
‱ Bithumb meant to give users a small reward in Korean won (~₩2,000 ≈ $1.40).
‱ Instead, due to a clerical unit entry mistake, the system credited 620,000 BTC into hundreds of accounts. 

⚠ The error briefly allowed phantom Bitcoin 🔄 to appear on balances and even trade in the internal order book, causing a price slump of up to ~17 % on Bithumb before it froze trades and withdrawals. 

📊 RECOVERY & IMPACT

✔ Bithumb recovered ~99.7 % of the 620,000 BTC after freezing accounts and reversing the credits — most of the phantom BTC disappeared from the system. 
✔ About 1,788 BTC (~$125 M) were sold / withdrawn before the freeze, and roughly 125 BTC (~$9 M) remain unrecovered. 
✔ Regulators view the incident as a systemic risk issue, leading to investigations and emergency hearings by South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS). 

📌 Officials have said the glitch isn’t a hack — it was a human + system control error, exposing deep weaknesses in internal exchange accounting and verification processes. 

📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS

‱ A simple data entry error turned into a ~$40 bn crypto mistake.
‱ Nearly all funds were recovered, but a small portion remains unrecovered.
‱ Regulators are holding hearings & probing exchange safeguards.
‱ The case highlights risks of internal controls on centralized platforms.

— Aswath Ravindran

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