Bithumb facing probe after giving away $40bln in bitcoin

The exchange, Bithumb, announced this weekend it had accidentally given out $40 billion in the world’s most popular crypto to customers as part of a promotional rewards program

A South Korean cryptocurrency exchange is facing regulatory investigation following a $40 billion bitcoin-related mistake.

The exchange, Bithumb, announced this weekend it had accidentally given out $40 billion in the world’s most popular crypto to customers as part of a promotional rewards program. The company said it has since recovered nearly all the coins in question.

A report on the incident by Reuters said the company had planned to distribute small cash rewards of 2,000 Korean won ($1.40) or more to each user as part of the promotion, but winners received at least 2,000 bitcoins each instead.

We would like to make it clear that this incident is unrelated to external hacking or security breaches, and there are no problems with system security or customer asset management, Bithumb said in a statement.

However, financial regulators in South Korea said the incident has exposed the vulnerabilities and risks of virtual assets, the Reuters report added.

Regulators say they will conduct an on-site inspection of Bithumb and other crypto exchanges if irregularities are discovered in reviews of their internal control systems, along with their holdings and operations of virtual assets, the report said.

In other crypto news, PYMNTS looked at the state of the market amid the massive decline in the price of bitcoin, which dropped to $70,000 in recent days after hitting a record high of more than $126,000 in October of 2025. The coin is now at its lowest point since November 2024.

And what is important here isn’t just bitcoin’s decline, but how balance sheets, equity markets and forced behavior interact when that happens, PYMNTS wrote.

Companies whose valuation narratives are explicitly tied to bitcoin, most famously Michael Saylor’s Strategy and its cadre of copycat crypto treasury businesses, all function such as leveraged bitcoin ETFs, even if they’re not structured that way, that report added. When bitcoin drops 10%, the stock might decline 25% or 40%. That volatility doesn’t stay isolated; it can spill into broader risk sentiment, especially for tech and speculative growth names.