Overview
- The Bank of Korea, in a report released Monday, called for stock-market-style trading halts on crypto exchanges and for automatic checks that match exchange ledgers to blockchain balances, with both measures folded into the pending Digital Asset Basic Act.
- The recommendation follows February’s Bithumb error, when staff entered BTC instead of won and 620,000 bitcoin were credited to users, briefly crashing prices on the platform before most transfers were reversed.
- The central bank said weak controls let employees send coins without supervisor approval, a fraud-detection system failed to flag the surge, and a roughly 20-minute delay let 1,788 BTC be sold, leaving Bithumb to cover about $125 million from its reserves.
- Regulators have already tightened routine oversight, with the Financial Services Commission imposing stricter reconciliation and monthly verification by independent accountants, which forces exchanges to upgrade IT and audit processes.
- Analysts question how effective Korea-only halts would be because bitcoin trades nonstop on global venues like Binance and Coinbase, meaning local prices would likely snap back to the world market when trading resumes.