An employee reportedly made a critical input error during a small promotional reward distribution intended as 2,000 KRW, or roughly $1.50 USD per eligible user, as a “random box prize.”
Instead, due to mixing up the tickers/symbols typing BTC instead of KRW, hundreds of users were accidentally credited with large amounts of Bitcoin—totaling around 2,000 BTC across the affected accounts worth approximately $130–133 million at the time, depending on the exact price.
Many recipients quickly sold the unexpected BTC holdings on the platform, flooding the order book with sell orders. This caused a sharp, temporary flash crash often described as a “wick” or dip in Bitcoin’s price on Bithumb specifically—dropping about 10% below the global market price in a matter of minutes.
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Trading was reportedly suspended briefly on the exchange as a result. The price did not wick down to $55,000 globally or even platform-wide in a sustained way; reports describe a localized 10% deviation— if global BTC was trading around $66,000–$67,000, Bithumb might have seen momentary prints in the low $60k or high $50k range during the panic selling, but this was isolated to thin liquidity on that exchange and recovered quickly once the sells exhausted).
This was not a deliberate airdrop but an operational fat-finger mistake. It affected user balances directly (credited unexpectedly), leading to immediate dumps. Bithumb has not officially confirmed details yet as of the latest reports, but the price anomaly and social media/user screenshots corroborate the event.
This highlights ongoing risks with centralized exchanges: human error, liquidity thin spots during mass sells, and potential regulatory fallout in Korea where Bithumb is a major player.
These are human or operational errors—often involving misplaced decimals, wrong amounts, or input mistakes—that led to massive unintended transfers, fees, mints, or price impacts on exchanges.
Bitcoin’s price on Binance.US plummeted from around $65,000 to as low as $8,200 an ~87-88% drop in seconds, triggering a brief market-wide ripple. A former Alameda Research engineer later claimed it stemmed from an Alameda’s trader’s “fat finger” error—a misplaced decimal point during a manual sell order.
The trade executed at pennies on the dollar instead of market price, clearing the thin order book. The price recovered quickly, but it highlighted how one sloppy input can cause chaos on lower-liquidity platforms.
A crypto trading platform DeversiFi, linked to Bitfinex accidentally paid $24 million in Ethereum gas fees for a ~$100,000 transaction due to a coding/input error should have been ~$5. The miner who received the fee returned most of it voluntarily. This remains one of the largest “fat-finger” fee overpayments in crypto history and showed even pros can mess up transaction parameters badly.
Tether’s $5 Billion Accidental Mint (2019)
Tether mistakenly created over $5 billion in new stablecoins at once due to a “token decimals” issue during a chain swap preparation helping Poloniex move from Omni to Tron. This temporarily doubled circulating supply and rattled markets amid broader skepticism. It was quickly reversed, but it exposed fragility in stablecoin issuance processes.
Paxos / PayPal Stablecoin Minting Error (2025)
Paxos accidentally minted an absurd $300 trillion worth due to a fat-finger mistake in their system. This highlighted ongoing risks in automated scripts and centralized control over token supplies, even for regulated entities.
Paxos paid 19 BTC ~$510,000 at the time in fees for a small ~$2,000 transfer—another script misconfiguration/fat finger. Various DeFi examples; Uniswap 2024 trader lost ~$700k due to slippage misconfig + MEV bot exploitation; or massive unintended swaps hitting shallow pools.
Recent smaller ones include Bitcoin fees hitting $105k for tiny transfers in 2025 from manual errors. These incidents often occur on centralized exchanges or platforms with thin liquidity, manual overrides, or automated tools prone to decimal slips.
They frequently cause temporary flash crashes like the Bithumb wick, but recoveries are fast unless broader panic ensues. Crypto’s 24/7 nature and pseudonymous trading amplify the fallout compared to traditional markets.
Fat-finger errors aren’t unique to crypto—traditional finance has infamous ones too like the Mizuho’s 2005 J-Com typo offering millions of shares instead of thousands— but blockchain’s immutability and leverage make reversals harder or impossible without goodwill from recipients.