South Korea's ruling and opposition parties agreed to hold an emergency hearing over a large-scale bitcoin mispayment at local crypto exchange Bithumb.

The National Assembly's Policy Committee will hold a full meeting at 10 a.m. on Feb. 11 to question Bithumb and the Financial Services Commission, Financial Supervisory Service and Korea Financial Intelligence Unit. The parties have requested the attendance of Bithumb executives.

On the evening of Feb. 8, Bithumb tried to pay prize money of 2,000 to 50,000 won per winner to event recipients. It mistakenly entered the unit as bitcoin rather than won and paid out 620,000 bitcoin in error.

The unprecedented incident was assessed as a first-of-its-kind accident in which crypto assets worth more than 60 trillion won in book value were mispaid through the system.

Bithumb said it blocked trading and withdrawals 35 minutes after the incident and recovered 99.7 percent of the mispaid bitcoin. It also secured about 93 percent of 1,788 bitcoin that were sold during the process, but about 125 bitcoin is believed to have not been recovered.

About 13 billion won worth remained unrecovered, and customer losses from low-price selling and price distortion during that period were estimated at around 1 billion won.

The incident was prevented from spreading into damage on an astronomical scale, but criticism was raised that it exposed a system vulnerable to accidents. Bithumb activated its crisis management system and decided to waive trading fees for all listed items for one week starting the previous day.

[Yonhap News Agency]