Overview
- South Korea’s Financial Services Commission ordered exchanges on Monday to match internal ledgers with actual coin holdings every five minutes, with compliance due by the end of May.
- Platforms must post daily reconciliation results and submit to monthly reviews by independent accounting firms.
- The crackdown follows Bithumb’s February 6 error that credited about 620,000 BTC to 249 users during a promotion, after which the exchange froze accounts and recovered most of the funds.
- Regulators said three of the five biggest exchanges had only checked balances once every 24 hours and that some trade‑halt systems failed during large mismatches, so automated kill switches are now required.
- Officials plan to fold these operating rules into the Digital Asset Basic Act, and exchanges are preparing system upgrades that aim to catch errors fast and reduce the risk of wrong payouts or blocked withdrawals for customers.