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Photo courtesy of Yonhap News |
[Alpha Biz= Ellie Kim] Bithumb has compensated approximately 2.5 billion won (about $2 million) following a Bitcoin misdelivery incident that occurred in February, while Upbit paid around 790 million won in compensation related to a hacking incident last year.
According to data submitted to lawmaker Lee Hun-seung of the ruling People Power Party by the Financial Supervisory Service and five major cryptocurrency exchanges—Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and Gopax—the compensation details were confirmed on June 7.
The Bithumb incident stemmed from a staff error in February, when the unit of a promotional reward was mistakenly entered. Instead of distributing rewards worth 620,000 won, the exchange erroneously transferred 620,000 units of Bitcoin, far exceeding the intended amount.
Bithumb CEO Lee Jae-won had previously pledged before the National Assembly’s Political Affairs Committee to broaden the scope of victim compensation based on complaints received through regulatory inspections and customer service channels. The exchange subsequently provided compensation totaling approximately 2.5 billion won.
Meanwhile, Upbit suffered a major hacking incident on November 27 last year, when approximately 104.06 billion units of 24 Solana-based tokens—worth around 44.5 billion won—were transferred to an unknown external wallet.
The incident drew criticism after Upbit’s operator, Dunamu, disclosed the hack on its website only after concluding an event announcing a merger with Naver.
Upbit later froze approximately 2.6 billion won of the affected assets and proceeded with recovery and compensation efforts.
Including these incidents, the five major exchanges reported a total of 57 hacking and system-related incidents over the past six years (2020 through April 2026). By exchange, Upbit recorded 26 cases, followed by Bithumb with 14, Gopax with 8, Coinone with 6, and Korbit with 3.
However, standards for classifying incidents, as well as compensation 규모 and methods, varied widely across exchanges. For instance, Gopax counted asset listing errors as system incidents, while Bithumb only classified cases where core services were disrupted for more than 10 minutes.
Compensation practices also differed. Bithumb provided some users with fee waiver coupons instead of cash compensation for certain system outages.
In terms of compensation for system failures, Upbit paid about 3.21 billion won, Bithumb around 3.2 billion won, and Coinone approximately 49 million won. Korbit and Gopax reported no compensation payouts.
Notably, Upbit received 1,153 damage claims following a system failure on December 3, 2024, and compensated roughly 3.2 billion won after accepting 일부 claims. Bithumb, for its part, provided 120 million won in cash compensation and 100 million won in fee waiver coupons to 132 users affected by an emergency system maintenance on September 2 last year.
Coinone compensated approximately 49 million won after receiving 47 claims related to a temporary suspension of limit sell orders for the cryptocurrency Nilion (NIL) in March last year.
Alphabiz Ellie Kim 인턴기자(press@alphabiz.co.kr)
