A Bithumb employee who, in the process of paying out event prize money, paid 620,000 bitcoins (about 62 trillion won) instead of 620,000 won in cash is still reporting to work as usual, according to confirmations. Bithumb says it sees the root cause of the incident as an internal system issue rather than an individual problem and plans to focus on fixing it.
According to a compilation of ChosunBiz reporting on the 11th, Bithumb is not currently discussing holding the individual employee accountable or imposing disciplinary action. A Bithumb official said, "There is a consensus that the cause of the current situation is structural rather than individual. We are focusing on reviewing and improving the internal system that led to the incident."
On the 6th, Bithumb was scheduled to pay a total of 620,000 won to 249 event winners, in amounts ranging from 20,000 to 50,000 won each. However, due to an employee error, the payment unit was entered as "bitcoin" instead of "won," resulting in an erroneous credit of 620,000 bitcoins. This was not an actual payment; it was a figure entered only in Bithumb's internal ledger. Before recording it on the Blockchain, Bithumb canceled payments for 618,121 units, so in reality only 1,788 bitcoins were paid.
A lax ledger system is cited as the fundamental cause of this incident. Centralized exchanges (CEX·Centralized Exchange) like Bithumb first record transactions in a ledger and later reconcile them with balances. Because Bithumb reconciles ledger quantities and balances once a day, trades can temporarily proceed even if ledger quantities and wallet balances do not match.
Internal controls were also weak. Upbit separates the functions of asset securing, disbursement execution, and balance checks and applies a multi-step approval structure, but at the time of the incident Bithumb made disbursements with a single approval. It was a structure where a single misclick could cause an incident like this at any time.
An industry official said, "There were so many outward-facing issues to handle that there was likely no room to discuss employee discipline."