Bank of Korea Calls for Crypto Market Circuit Breaker After Bithumb Error

• The Bank of Korea said South Korea’s crypto market needs a circuit breaker mechanism similar to those used in stock markets.
• The central bank pointed to Bithumb’s February error, when 620,000 BTC was mistakenly distributed and not stopped for 20 minutes.

South Korea’s central bank is pushing for a circuit breaker in the local crypto market, arguing that the Bithumb giveaway blunder earlier this year exposed just how thin the sector’s operational safeguards still are.

In its latest Payment and Settlement report, the Bank of Korea said the domestic digital asset market needs a halt mechanism similar to those used in equities, where trading can be paused when extreme errors or volatility threaten to spiral.

The recommendation is notable because it comes not from a crypto lobby or exchange operator, but from the country’s central bank.

Bithumb’s mistake became the case study

The trigger was Bithumb’s February 6 fat-finger incident. As part of a promotional campaign giveaway, the exchange mistakenly distributed 620,000 BTC across hundreds of user wallets, an amount worth about $43 billion at the time.

The reported cause was almost absurdly simple. A staff member entered the reward unit in BTC instead of KRW, the Korean won.

That kind of mistake should have been caught quickly. According to the Bank of Korea, it was not.

The report said Bithumb took 20 minutes to identify the error and failed to stop the bitcoin from being moved or sold during that window, widening the losses for users. For the central bank, that delay seems to have been the more important point. Human error can happen anywhere. What matters is whether systems exist to contain it before it spreads.

The central bank sees a control gap, not just a one-off failure

The Bank of Korea linked the incident to weaker internal controls and lighter regulation in the digital asset market compared with traditional financial institutions. That comparison matters. In stock or banking infrastructure, a mistake at this scale would normally run into multiple layers of checks, automated controls and trading halts.

Crypto exchanges, by contrast, still often operate with less mature guardrails.

So the central bank’s proposal is really about market structure as much as one exchange’s mistake. A circuit breaker would not eliminate operational errors, but it could slow the damage when something goes badly wrong and give platforms a chance to intervene before an internal failure turns into a full market event.