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

Exchanges • January 16, 2023, 6:36AM EST

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.

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Tim is the Editor-In-Chief of The Block. He writes about the evolution of crypto technology and the people who are at the forefront of it. He provided exclusive, source-based insights into the launches of the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, crypto sales by the FTX Estate and the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial project. 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.