Bithumb ordered to pay damages for outage during bitcoin's 2017 rally: Yonhap

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Quick Take

  • Crypto exchange Bithumb has been ordered to pay $200,000 in damages to investors over a long downtime in 2017.
  • The court originally ruled against the investors but the ruling was overturned.

Crypto exchange Bithumb has been ordered to pay $200,000 in damages to more than a hundred investors over an exchange outage during bitcoin's rally in 2017.

Bithumb has been ordered to pay each of the 132 investors damages from 8,000 won ($6.47) to 8 million won ($6,470), according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.

The exchange went down for 11.5 hours on Nov. 12 2017, when bitcoin's price fell by $700 to $6,300 on the road to its epic rally to $20,000. The exchange went down because it couldn't handle the number of trades being made, which had doubled in size.

The ruling initially went against the investors but it was later overturned on appeal. "The burden or the cost of technological failures should be shouldered by the service operator, not services users who pay commission for the service," said the appeals court.


© 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

AUTHOR

Tim Copeland is the Head of Growth at The Block and host of The Crypto Beat, a live-streaming podcast. He was previously the company's Editor-in-Chief and spent seven years covering the industry as a journalist. Prior to joining The Block, Tim was a news editor at Decrypt. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of York and studied news journalism at Press Association Training. Follow him on X @Timccopeland.

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To contact the editor of this story: Lucy Harley-McKeown at [email protected]

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