The blunder at Bithumb, South Korea’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, briefly turned ordinary users into nine-figure Bitcoin holders and triggered a brief crash that rattled the country’s tightly watched digital-asset market.

The incident happened Friday when a Bithumb employee was tasked with distributing giveaway prizes totaling 620,000 Korean won — about $425 — as part of a promotional “random box” event.

Bithumb, South Korea’s second-largest crypto exchange, mistakenly credited users with more than $40 billion in Bitcoin during a botched promotional giveaway. Bloomberg via Getty Images

Instead of entering the payouts in won, the staffer mistakenly put in the amount in Bitcoin, resulting in 620,000 bitcoins being credited across hundreds of customer accounts — a massive sum worth more than $40 billion at the time.

Only 249 of the 695 qualifying customers opened their prize boxes and received the erroneous payouts, according to regulators.

Bitcoin was trading at just under $70,000 per coin at the time, meaning the mistaken credits briefly transformed recipients into multimillionaires on paper.

The amounts credited far exceeded Bithumb’s actual Bitcoin reserves, and the company detected the error within minutes. It moved to halt trading and withdrawals on affected accounts within about 35 minutes, according to regulators.

But that short window was enough to spark chaos.

A staff input error at Bithumb turned a giveaway worth just a few cents into a $40 billion Bitcoin blunder. REUTERS

Some users sold the phantom Bitcoin on the exchange before controls were fully in place, triggering a sharp, localized plunge in prices on Bithumb.

At one point, Bitcoin prices on the platform fell as much as 15% to 17%, significantly below prices on rival South Korean exchanges.

Financial authorities later said 86 customers managed to sell about 1,788 bitcoins before the freeze took effect.

Some of the proceeds were withdrawn to bank accounts, while other funds were used to purchase different cryptocurrencies.

Customers at Bithumb were accidentally credited with 620,000 bitcoins — far more than the exchange actually held. Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bithumb said it has since recovered 99.7% of the mistakenly credited Bitcoin by reversing internal ledger entries and persuading users to return the assets.

About 125 bitcoins — worth roughly $9 million — remain unrecovered, according to multiple reports. The exchange has said it plans to absorb the loss.

In a public apology, Bithumb stressed that the incident was not the result of hacking or a security breach.

“We want to make it clear that this matter has nothing to do with external hacking or security breaches, and there is no problem with system security or customer asset management,” the company stated.

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The generous gesture came after the benevolent boss sold the company for $1.7 billion.

Graham Walker, the now-former CEO of Fibrebond, told The Wall Street Journal that he would not agree to sell his company if prospective buyer Eaton did not earmark 15% of the proceeds for its employees — even though none of them owned stock.

The deal, which was completed earlier this year when Eaton acquired Fibrebond, triggered payouts to 540 full-time workers, averaging about $443,000 per worker spread over five years.

Graham Walker, the former CEO of Fibrebond, required that 15% of the proceeds from the sale of his family company go directly to employees — a $240 million windfall. Fibrebond

Long-tenured employees received far more, according to The Journal.

Walker, 46, told the newspaper that the requirement was non-negotiable.

Without it, he believed many workers who had carried the company through decades of booms, busts and near-collapse would walk out the door.

In June, employees began receiving sealed envelopes detailing their individual awards. Some of them were overwhelmed with emotion while others thought it was a prank, The Journal reported.

Others sat in stunned silence.

Lesia Key, a 29-year Fibrebond veteran who started in 1995 making $5.35 an hour, broke down when she opened her letter, according to the report.

Key, now 51, had risen to oversee facilities across Fibrebond’s 254-acre campus, managing a team of 18.

She reportedly used her bonus to pay off her mortgage and open a clothing boutique in a nearby town.

The factory floor where employees who once made hourly wages walked away with life-changing payouts. Fibrebond

“Before, we were going paycheck to paycheck,” Key was quoted as saying. “I can live now.”

Another employee used his money to take his entire extended family to Cancún, Mexico. Others paid down credit cards, bought cars outright, funded college tuition or boosted retirement savings.

One longtime assistant manager, Hong “TT” Blackwell, 67, received several hundred thousand dollars and immediately retired.

Blackwell, an immigrant from Vietnam who spent more than 15 years in Fibrebond’s logistics operation, said she used part of her bonus to buy her husband a Toyota Tacoma and set aside the rest.

“Now I don’t have to worry,” she said. “My retirement is nice and peaceful.”

Blackwell said taxes took a heavy bite — nearly $100,000 — but the net amount was still life-changing.

Across Minden, a town of about 12,000 people, the money rippled quickly through the local economy.

Fibrebond’s 254-acre manufacturing campus in Minden, where 540 full-time workers shared in the sale proceeds. Fibrebond

City officials said local retailers saw a surge in spending as employees paid off debts, renovated homes and made long-delayed purchases.

“There’s a lot of buzz about the amount of money being spent,” Mayor Nick Cox told The Journal.

Fibrebond was founded in 1982 by Walker’s father, Claud Walker, with a dozen employees building shelters for electrical and telecom equipment.

It thrived during the cellular boom of the 1990s — then nearly collapsed when its factory burned to the ground in 1998.

The Walkers kept paying employees even as production stalled, a move workers still cite as the foundation of the company’s loyalty culture.

By the early 2000s, the dot-com bust slashed Fibrebond’s customer base to just three clients, forcing layoffs that cut the workforce from roughly 900 to 320.

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Graham Walker and his brother later took over day-to-day operations, selling assets and paying down debt while searching for a new market.

The turnaround came with a risky $150 million investment to pivot into building modular power enclosures for data centers — a gamble that paid off when cloud computing demand surged during the pandemic.

Sales jumped nearly 400% in five years, drawing acquisition interest from larger industrial players.

Walker told every potential buyer the same thing: 15% of the sale price had to go to employees.

When asked why he insisted on 15%, Walker told the Journal: “It’s more than 10%.”

Advisers warned him the condition could complicate the deal or invite lawsuits from former workers who missed out, the Journal reported.

Nonetheless, Walker pressed on.

The bonuses were structured as retention awards, paid annually over five years, requiring most employees to stay with the company to receive the full amount — a provision Walker said was critical to keeping operations stable after the sale.

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It’s not just because Lander is a knee-jerk leftist who rivals Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani when it comes to his out-of-touch patter on economic policy.

He’s also a dullard seemingly unaware of the core function of the job he’s held for the last four years.

Lander, as the city’s chief fiscal officer, is the fiduciary, investment adviser and custodian of the city’s $300 billion pension fund system.

He’s supposed to make sure the funds are invested in securities that grow in value so they can “fully fund” the retirement accounts of all the city’s police, firefighters and teachers.

Those accounts are not fully funded, and the shortfalls are poised to grow once Mamdani gets into office.

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Recall the mayor-elect’s pledges to raise taxes and turn the city into Moscow-on-the-Hudson, which will certainly cause more businesses and high earners to leave.

Now Lander wants to oust BlackRock from managing city retirement money because it refuses to embrace his weird green energy agenda, which envisions a future of windmills and bicycles along the streets of New York instead of cars — and energy bills that no one can afford.

Consider: BlackRock doesn’t suck at money management, it’s actually quite good at it.

Its CEO, Larry Fink, is considered among the best risk managers in the business.

BlackRock’s big crime is that it doesn’t want to be an accomplice to Lander’s wacky, unrealizable and maybe illegal campaign on the climate — i.e. reducing carbon emissions with brute force.

In Lander’s mind, the stocks of companies that drill for oil, frack natural gas, keep our lights on or make sure the AC works in the summer are pure evil.

The comptroller, of course, prefers those that embrace green energy — like those useless windmills off the coast of New Jersey that give the state some of the highest electricity bills on the planet.

What’s more, Lander literally wants the city to demand that all of BlackRock’s clients’ portfolios — not just the NYC retirement system’s — comply with his whims under threat of NYC yanking its funds.

Dumb and dumber

It’s among the most narcissistically dumb ideas to ever come out of a public official.

Let’s get real: little Brad Lander ain’t doing nothing to stop global warming; China keeps polluting and adding to carbon emissions every day. So does India and the rest of the ­developing world.

Plus, those green stocks often really do really suck (Google “Solyndra”) while companies that invest in good old-fashioned crude like ExxonMobil — with a five-year spike in its shares of nearly 200% far outstripping the S&P — really don’t.

BlackRock’s CEO, it should also be noted, is an odd target for Lander.

Fink was one of the key proponents of so-called Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing, which took into account carbon emissions of companies in which it invested.

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He got a bad rap from the political right for it, and BlackRock lost business — that is until Fink clarified the company’s position: As Fink told Lander years ago, the NYC comptroller can’t dictate what BlackRock does for the Texas state pension.

Plus, if BlackRock sold all of its $225 billion in energy-related stocks — the largest energy slug owned by any money manager — it would probably crash all major stock market indices.

How is that good for NYC retirees?

It isn’t, of course.

It shows how little thought Lander probably put into this attention-grabbing charade as he reportedly gears up to run for a seat representing lower Manhattan and progressive parts of Brooklyn in Congress in the 2026 midterms.

It also shows why lefty Manhattan Borough President and former City Councilman Mark Levine, who will replace Lander as comptroller, should just ignore his predecessor’s recommendation.

Levine probably won’t, of course, given how progressively cringey NYC politics has become.

I should point out that neither Lander nor Levine has the complete final say over where managers of the city’s retirement system invest all that money.

That say belongs to the trustees of the funds, of which the comptroller has one vote, while the mayor appoints members as well.

That doesn’t mean Lander should be given a pass in the court of public opinion for making this an issue.

Nor should he be given a pass when it comes to his legal obligations as city comptroller, i.e. maximizing returns in the retirement system, as opposed to tilting at windmills.

A fully functioning government should take action before Lander or whoever replaces him does even more damage to a city that has been losing population and business for years.

But our local prosecutors (Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, et al) are too busy jailing citizens defending themselves from criminals to make sure a raging leftist doesn’t defund pension funds that are already underfunded — and bound to get worse as the city goes full-on socialist under our new mayor.

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