Millionaires in 40 minutes: A crypto platform accidentally sent $44 billion to its customers
Illustrative photo. Source: Dreamstime.com
A technical glitch turned hundreds of users of South Korean cryptocurrency platform Bithumb into multimillionaires in 40 minutes. Instead of one dollar, the exchange mistakenly transferred 44 billion dollars to participants in a promotion, according to Reuters, cited by Agerpres.
Specifically, Bithumb mistakenly sent around 620,000 bitcoins to hundreds of users who participated in a promotional event on Friday. Instead of receiving the set reward of 2,000 won (about $1.37), the 249 selected winners received an average of 2,490 bitcoins each, equivalent to about $166 million at the market price.
The platform apologized for the error and announced on Saturday that it was able to recover 99.7% of the transferred assets.
Bithumb said it halted transactions and withdrawals at 7:40 p.m., immediately recovering 618,212 bitcoins. Another 1,788 bitcoins, which had already been sold by users in the meantime, were also recovered, but around 125 units still remain unrecovered.
The company assured that the incident was caused by an internal system error and not a cyber attack. “There are no issues with system security or customer asset management,” Bithumb said in a press release.
The incident caused a brief drop in the price of bitcoin on the South Korean exchange due to selling by some of the recipients. The price hit a low of 81.1 million won before stabilizing again at over 104 million won.
