Earlier this week, Bithumb, one of South Korea’s biggest crypto exchanges, accidentally credited users with 620,000 BTC. That’s around $40 billion instead of just a few hundred bucks in a promo.
What happened next? Well, some people started selling the “accidental” BTC, and Bitcoin dropped roughly 17% in minutes. The exchange quickly paused trading and withdrawals before things got even messier.
Good news: Bithumb recovered almost everything about 99.7% of the coins went back. But around 125 BTC (~$9M) were sold and haven’t returned yet. And just to be clear this wasn’t a hack. It was a straight-up human error. In a world full of digital billions, one slip of a finger can still wreak havoc.
This shows that even the biggest exchanges, handling millions of users and billions in assets, can spiral into chaos from a single human mistake. If you’re keeping your crypto there, think twice before leaving everything in one place.
