During a marketing event on Friday, intended to gift users small cash rewards of roughly 2,000 won (c. £1), a technical glitch resulted in 695 customers receiving at least 2,000 Bitcoins each instead. This massive oversight triggered a temporary 17% price slump on the platform as the market reacted to the anomaly, Channel News Asia reports.

Bithumb acted quickly to stabilise the situation, restricting trading and withdrawals for affected accounts within 35 minutes of the blunder. The exchange has since successfully recovered 99.7% of the 620,000 distributed coins.

Management clarified that the incident was an internal administrative error rather than a security breach or external hack, assuring users that asset management remains secure. Despite the brief volatility, prices on the exchange eventually recovered to standard market levels.