Bithumb has been ordered to pay each of the 132 investors damages according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.
The crisis surrounding the South Korean bitcoin exchange Bithumb has continued, and this time, local courts have issued a judgement.The South Korean Supreme Court’s decision that the exchange must compensate investors for a 1.5-hour service disruption on November 12, 2017, was finalized on January 13.
A local news source estimates that the damages come to $202, 400, or 251.4 million won in the Korean currency. A district’s initial decision went against the investors, but it was later overturned.
According to the Supreme Court’s ultimate decision, the 132 investors implicated must pay damages that range from $6 to about $6,400.In its ultimate judgment, the court ruled that:
“The burden or the cost of technological failures should be shouldered by the service operator, not [the] service users who pay commission for the service.”
Its major cryptocurrency exchange is called Bithumb. The momentary outage happened as transaction flows became bottlenecked and the average number of orders per hour abruptly doubled.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC), according to investors requesting compensation, experienced significant drops during the outage.
Bithumb has been closely monitored by local authorities prior to this decision. Regulators are currently looking into Bithumb following inquiries into the former exchange chair and the untimely death of one of the top shareholders following allegations of theft.
The National Tax Service of the nation is conducting the “special tax probe”. Authorities searched the Bithumb offices on January 10 in order to look into possible tax evasion.
The local crypto ecosystem appears to be under increased scrutiny from South Korean regulators. The nation started looking into cryptocurrency exchanges for listing local tokens back in November 2022.
The South Korean city of Busan declared that it is abandoning its intentions to onboard third-party digital exchanges in the wake of the FTX incident.
