Digital asset exchange Bithumb mistakenly deposited 2,000 bitcoins (BTC) per person while trying to pay 2,000 won in cash as an event prize, in an unprecedented incident. The total value of the wrongly paid bitcoins is estimated at about 133 trillion won.

On Thursday, the industry said Bithumb was running a random box event and planned to pay points worth 2,000 won each to 695 winners.

But due to an error believed to have been caused by an operational staff input mistake, 2,000 bitcoins rather than 2,000 won in cash were deposited in bulk into the winners’ accounts.

At the current bitcoin price of about 96 million won per coin, that amounts to about 192 billion won wrongly deposited per person. The total mistaken payout reaches 133.44 trillion won. This is the largest erroneous deposit incident in South Korea’s digital asset trading history.

Bitcoin prices on Bithumb briefly plunged as a sudden large volume hit the market. Some users who saw that hundreds of billions of won had been deposited into their accounts immediately sold at market price.

As a result, at around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Bithumb’s bitcoin price also plunged to the 81 million won range, more than 10 percent lower than other exchanges.

After grasping the situation, Bithumb moved immediately to take emergency measures.

It suspended withdrawals and trading for accounts where the erroneous deposits occurred and began recovery procedures. When accessing those accounts, a notice appears saying, "This is an account with services blocked."

But the scale of the incident is so large that a full resolution is expected to be difficult. The industry said 416,000 bitcoins that had not yet been traded among the wrongly paid amounts were recovered, but about 204,000 bitcoins, worth about 20 trillion won, had already been traded and could not be recovered.

Related online communities are also said to have posted verification messages such as, "I couldn’t believe my eyes because 200 billion won showed up in my account," and, "I pressed the sell button and it was executed."

Bithumb has not yet issued an official statement.