When we text about currencies in everyday life, we use signs to make things shorter. When it comes to monetary transactions, banks tend to use acronyms such as USD, EUR, CAD, or GEL. While banks must adhere to the ISO 4217 standard, which assigns currency codes, cryptocurrency exchanges operate under a different code. Which almost cost one of them $44 billion, according to a Reuters report. Well, every penny out of 44,000,000,000 USD.
A mistake between the '$' and 'B' signs at Bithumb, a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange, resulted in the unintended distribution of tens of billions of dollars' worth of bitcoin to users. The company said the incident was caused by an internal error during a promotional event, not by a security breach, and that nearly all of the mistakenly issued assets were reportedly recovered shortly after the event.
According to Bithumb, the problem occurred on Friday when a promotion intended to provide small cash incentives — starting at about ₩2,000 Korean ($1.40) per participant — instead sent selected users with bitcoin rewards, with recipients obtaining at least 2,000 bitcoins each. As a result, approximately 620,000 bitcoins, valued at approximately $44 billion, were distributed incorrectly. Good news (for the exchange, not for its users) said it identified the issue quickly and imposed restrictions on trading and withdrawals, which affected 695 accounts within 35 minutes, so almost nobody got rich. Well, except those 0.3% out of 99.7%, from which the assets were recovered.
The company stated that the incident was unrelated to hacking or external intrusion and that its systems and custody mechanisms remained secure, so customer funds were not compromised. In addition, Bithumb stated that the event was a procedural failure rather than a technical or security breach. ShIt happens, in short.
Unsurprisingly, South Korean authorities, including the Financial Services Commission, said the incident revealed systemic vulnerabilities in crypto exchanges and announced reviews of oversight procedures, with the possibility of searching the premises of suspects if irregularities are found. The story does not reveal why the irregularities were not discovered before the aforementioned error happened.
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