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A Bitcoin Blunder for the Ages: $40 Billion Accidentally Given Away

A botched prize giveaway has landed a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange in hot water

By Timothy W. Martin and Sooyoung Rhee, The Wall Street Journal, 10 Feb 2026

[Image - The Bitcoin logo on display at a Bithumb exchange office.
Bithumb is South Korea’s No. 2 crypto exchange. - Seongjoon Cho / Bloomberg News]

SEOUL—The hundreds of prize payouts were mostly just a few bucks each, part of a promotional campaign by a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange. The total reward pot: 620,000 Korean won, or about $425.

Then came a colossal mistake. A staffer for Bithumb, South Korea’s No. 2 crypto exchange, didn’t distribute 620,000 Korean won.

Rather, the prizes, due to an input error, emerged in a different currency: 620,000 bitcoins, valued at more than $40 billion.

That meant a winner who should have received a sum of 2,000 won—enough to buy a cheap cup of coffee—reaped, at least momentarily, more than $120 million in bitcoins.

Enough recipients sought to sell or withdraw bitcoin that the market sank 17%, before Bithumb halted transactions after roughly 30 minutes. Those affected included investors who had held bitcoin before the botched giveaway. The losses totaled about $685,000, Bithumb says.

The company has since said it has reversed the transactions or had recipients voluntarily return more than 99% of the misdistributed bitcoins. But Bithumb is still trying to convince users who during the brief window of trading managed to offload more than 100 bitcoins, valued at roughly $9 million, to give back the equivalent funds.

The debacle has landed Bithumb—a trusted name in one of the world’s most active retail crypto markets—in a self-inflicted crisis. Lawmakers are calling for tighter laws. Local financial-market regulators say the gaffe has exposed fundamental weakness in the country’s digital-asset industry.

The company has offered to cover losses, plus other compensation, to anyone who sold their bitcoin in an effort to contain their losses. It dropped trading fees this week for all assets. Bithumb has pledged to establish a permanent “Customer Protection Fund” of roughly $70 million to protect users in the event of another accident.

Bitcoin’s fraud-detection system didn’t appear to have been triggered, according to local cryptocurrency experts. South Korean lawmakers have raised concern over the so-called “phantom coin” issue: How Bithumb was able to distribute 620,000 bitcoins when its own stockpile appeared to have numbered closer to 50,000.

On Tuesday, South Korea’s financial regulators said they had opened a formal investigation into Bithumb. That could lead to potential fines or other penalties.

Bithumb is fully cooperating with the investigation and has round-the-clock monitoring to prevent similar incidents, a company spokesman said.

Cryptocurrency exchanges, by local law, can’t allow trades exceeding the actual supply of coins held in their digital vault. But that doesn’t appear to be the case with the recent Bithumb activity, representing a “catastrophic failure of internal controls,” said Lee Jung-soo, who advises the South Korean government on digital-asset policy.

“For Korea’s second-largest exchange to have such porous IT systems is almost unbelievable,” said Lee, a law professor at Seoul National University, referring to the lack of a robust monitoring system.

Accidental giveaways and losses of bitcoin are rare, especially at this scale. An IT worker from Wales lost around 7,500 bitcoin he mined in 2009 after a hard drive was mistakenly thrown away during an office cleanup. In 2021, the now-bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi erroneously sent hundreds of bitcoins to some users, though it later recouped much of the funds.

A Bitcoin Blunder for the Ages: $40 Billion Accidentally Given Away A botched prize giveaway has landed a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange in hot water.

Bash All Day, Buy All Night

Why foreigners keep pouring money into America

[Image - Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Despite the mania for America’s AI stocks, it is unclear which companies will win the AI arms race © Brendan McDermid/Reuters]

By Ruchir Sharma, Financial Times, 9 Feb 2026

[The writer is chair of Rockefeller International. His latest book is ‘What Went Wrong With Capitalism’]

When it comes to the US, investors the world over now love to Bash All Day, Buy All Night. Travelling recently across Asia, Europe and the Middle East, I was struck by the rising intensity of complaints about America under Donald Trump, from its tariffs to designs on Greenland and apparent disregard for the old global order. Polls show the same erosion, with favourable opinions of the US plummeting worldwide.

Then I got back to New York, looked at the numbers and saw that, even as opinions of the US plunge, the money is flowing in like never before. Last year foreigners poured around $1.6tn into US financial assets, including nearly $700bn into stocks, both new records and significantly higher than the levels of recent years. The story is much the same for US corporate bonds, with foreign purchases up sharply.

But for a brief “Sell America” wave last April, foreigners were big buyers in every month of 2025. They were aggressively “buying the dip,” just like US retail traders. From Singapore to Seoul, they are staying up all night to trade on increasingly popular after-hours US trading platforms.

Among the few foreigners sitting out this buying spree were central banks, which have been moving money from the dollar into gold. And the one new hint of caution in 2025 was that global investors were hedging more of their unprecedentedly large dollar exposure than in the year before. Foreign institutions alone now own nearly 15 per cent of US stocks, a record share and up by half from the level a decade ago.

So why would people buy so heavily in a country they profess to increasingly despise? One reason is inertia. Until recently, the US had steadily outperformed the rest of the world since the global financial crisis of 2008, so many investors are still chasing past performance. They have come to assume that “there is no alternative” to investing in the US markets, given their vast scale and liquidity.

The rest of the world also remains in awe of the US lead in technology. While Europeans have long been perhaps the most enthusiastic buyers of American tech stocks, remarkably the single biggest source of foreign flows into the US stock market last year was South Korea, where the rage for assets tied to America or AI is acute.

Market trends don’t last for ever and the Bash All Day, Buy All Night habit is not likely to be different. The mania for AI stocks in the US is raising existential questions, since it’s not clear which companies will win the AI arms race, or that they will be American. China has shown it can compete, with some of its AI models offering similar performance, at cheaper training costs.

If the AI mania fades, American assets could be hit hardest. More than half of US economic growth last year can be explained by the billions US firms are investing in AI infrastructure, and the waves of capital flowing into US financial assets.

Meanwhile, in response to America’s market dominance and unpredictability, other governments are looking to diversify their risk. They are cutting bilateral trade deals, deregulating and investing more in defence and local technology. Despite the heavy capital flows into the US last year, markets in the rest of the world outperformed the US by wide margins.

The momentum is building as growth picks up outside the US. This year and next, economies in the rest of the world are expected to grow at one and a half times the pace of the US, widening this gap compared with recent years. And through 2027, average or “equal” weighted corporate earnings are set to grow twice as fast in emerging markets, and 50 per cent faster in other developed markets.

America’s spending habits rest more than ever on the sentiment of strangers. Last year, foreign portfolio inflows were large enough to finance the entire US current account deficit — and then some. The last time this happened was the mid-2000s, when the US markets were not as big and neither was the deficit. The scale of US dependence on speculative foreign capital has never been so high.

Notwithstanding all the America bashing, foreigners now own nearly $70tn in US assets, double the level a decade ago. And in the last year, most of those flows arrived as “hot money.” Foreign direct investment in factories and businesses, which cannot withdraw quickly, was much weaker than portfolio flows into assets such as stocks and bonds, which can reverse in an instant. If the world cuts back on buying America all night long, the impact could dramatically shock US markets.

Bash All Day, Buy All Night Why foreigners keep pouring money into America