Crypto: How A Bitcoin Promotion Error Triggered A Regulatory Reckoning In...
A mistaken Bitcoin payout revealed how exchange ledgers work and why South Korea is rethinking internal controls for crypto platforms.
A simple data-entry error allowed 620,000 nonexistent BTC to appear in user accounts for 20 minutes because trades update a private database first, with onchain settlement happening later.
Around 1,788 BTC worth of trades were executed before the exchange locked everything down. What could have been dismissed as a harmless error turned into a serious operational and regulatory event.
Regulatory filings showed Bithumb held only 175 BTC of its own in Q3 2025, while it held custody of over 42,000 BTC for customers. This highlights how heavily the system depends on accurate internal accounting.
South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service focused on why faulty internal data could result in executable trades. It raised fundamental questions about safeguards and tradability controls.
Bithumb, one of South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, ran a regular promotional campaign in early February 2026. However, it turned into a major regulatory concern. What started as a simple internal data-entry mistake briefly displayed hundreds of thousands of “ghost Bitcoin” on user dashboards. Some account holders actually traded those balances, prompting regulators to examine the inner mechanisms of centralized crypto platforms more closely.
This article explores how the ghost Bitcoin incident became a key example of vulnerabilities in exchange accounting. It also discusses the reasons behind South Korea’s accelerated move toward more rigorous, bank-like supervision of virtual asset services.
Bithumb intended to offer a small reward program, crediting users with a modest amount of Korean won, typically 2,000 won ($1.37) per person. Reward programs are a standard tactic to boost user activity.
Instead, an input mistake caused the system to credit Bitcoin (BTC) rather than fiat. For about 20 minutes, the exchange’s internal ledger reflected roughly 620,000 BTC across hundreds of accounts. The value of the ghost BTC was in billions of dollars, vastly exceeding the exchange’s own holdings and total customer reserves.
Staff quickly detected the problem, froze the affected accounts and reversed the credits. But during that brief period, some users sold the ghost Bitcoin in their accounts, executing trades worth around 1,788 BTC before a full lockdown.
Source: CoinTelegraph
