South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb will have to compensate the users who lost funds because of a bug in the platform’s withdrawal system.
According to a Feb. 9 report by local financial news outlet FNNews, the Seoul Central District Court ruled that Bithumb will have to reimburse about 1.1 billion won—nearly $1 million as of press time—to the users damaged by the bug.
But, they are not being compensated at bitcoin’s current price, which is more than 10 times what it was when the users’ bitcoins were lost.
In November 2018, six people accessed Bithumb and withdrew bitcoins (BTC) to an address saved in their account’s address book to transfer the assets to a competing cryptocurrency exchange, the report stated. But, due to a bug in the platform’s system the funds were sent to an unknown address and lost.
The users who lost the funds because of the bug initiated a civil lawsuit to have Bithumb compensate for the damage sustained by them. The damaged Bithumb users also explained that bitcoin was worth about $4,660 at the time of the accident, but has since soared to its current value north of $47,000 which is the rate that they argued should be used to calculate the damages. But, the court saw it differently:
“It is difficult to agree that the plaintiffs at that time might have known about the future increase in the price of bitcoin, so they could not be guaranteed to make a profit.”
Bithumb made the news quite frequently over the last couple of months. In January, gaming conglomerate Nexon was rumored to be preparing to acquire the exchange, but then denied those reports, according to industry news outlet Cointelegraph.
In November last year, rumors spread that China’s top crypto exchange Huobi planned to acquire Bithumb, but an investigation of Huobi by Chinese law enforcement squashed the deal.
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