Bithumb wins second court ruling over mistaken bitcoin payout

Bithumb has won a second court ruling ordering a customer to hand back proceeds from bitcoin the exchange mistakenly paid out in February. 

The company has two related suits that are still awaiting judgment. And while Bithumb fights to recover the last of the money it mistakenly paid out, smaller domestic rivals are offering lower trading fees.  

Why is Bithumb taking customers to court? 

Kim Yu-seong, a single-judge civil court judge in the Seoul Central District Court’s Civil Division 90, has sided with Bithumb in an unjust enrichment claim against a user identified only as A. The disputed sum in the case is 194,000,443 won, the second-largest of the four claims Bithumb filed.

A day earlier, on Aug. 26, the same court ruled in favor of Bithumb in a separate suit worth 4,989,990 won. Both cases were handled through public notice service, which is a procedure courts use to deem documents served, by posting them, when a defendant’s address or workplace cannot be found.

Bithumb’s back-to-back wins sets a good precedent for the two suits that are still undecided, with claims of 500 million won and 14.8 million won outstanding. 

The lawsuits are a result of an incident that occurred back in February when a Bithumb employee processing a customer event reward entered bitcoin as the payout unit instead of won. The mistake credited users with 620,000 units of BTC, a figure Cryptopolitan reported was worth around $43 billion at the time and far beyond what the exchange actually held.

Financial authorities said Bithumb froze transactions and withdrawals once it caught the error and managed to recover 618,214 units, but 1,786 BTC had already been sold. 

Bithumb has been pursuing those funds separately, and by March 10 it told the National Assembly it had clawed back 99% of the 1,788 units still outstanding at that point. In the same month, it took four users who had sold the coins and kept the cash to court.

How did Bithumb’s payout incident affect the market? 

Following the payout incident, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) proposed requiring every exchange to run an always-on reconciliation system that checks user ledgers against actual holdings every five minutes, alongside automated verification and multi-approval steps for manual transactions such as event rewards. 

Cryptopolitan reported that Bithumb had previously faced a 36.8 billion won fine (about $25 million) and a six-month partial suspension over separate identity-verification failures. The exchange managed to pause its suspension on May 1, letting it keep operating until it receives a final ruling.

Local competition is growing 

Meanwhile, Bithumb’s smaller competitors like Coinone are scrapping their trading fees. Coinone scrapped its fees across all listed cryptocurrencies and offered a renewable 30-day zero-fee voucher. Digital X, which runs Korbit, also waived fees in its won market for an entire year ending on Aug. 24, 2027.

Notably, Mirae Asset Consulting recently took control of Korbit after buying more than 97% of it, and Korea Investment & Securities holds a 20% stake in Coinone. 

Coinone and Korbit are still far behind Bithumb in terms of volume, with Coinone at 2.39% of won-based volume this month and Korbit at 0.52%, against Upbit’s 68.11% and Bithumb’s 28.95%.

Bithumb’s 24-hour volume topped 2 trillion won last Saturday as bitcoin briefly cleared $80,000. Bitcoin’s rally has ignited hope that the company will be able to revive its fee revenue after the operating profit for the first-half of the year fell by 83.4% at Bithumb.

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