South Korea’s Financial Services Commission has ordered all cryptocurrency exchanges to implement near real-time asset settlement and undergo monthly external audits.
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The guidance follows a February operational failure at Bithumb, which briefly sent $56 billion worth of Bitcoin to hundreds of retail users.
Beethumb Incident
On February 6, 2026, Bithumb mistakenly deposited approximately 620,000 bitcoins (worth approximately $56 billion at the time) to hundreds of users during a promotional event.
The intended amount was 620,000 Korean won, or about $450. Some recipients immediately sold Bitcoin, causing the local price to fall by 10-17% on the exchange.
Bithumb froze the affected accounts and recovered most of the funds, but the FSC concluded that the incident exposed “structural weaknesses” in the industry’s internal controls.
New requirements
The FSC has set a deadline of the end of May for everyone Korean exchanges To comply with the new operational framework.
Main requirements:
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Settlement every five minutes: Exchanges should check customer ledgers against on-chain holdings at five-minute intervals, compared to the 24-hour cycle most commonly used today.
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Daily public disclosure of reconciliation results.
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Monthly independent audits by an external accounting firm.
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Up-to-date trade stop systems able to act immediately in the event of a significant asset mismatch.
What does this mean for the industry
These rules represent one of the first times that a major regulator has applied high-frequency internal audit requirements – the type typically associated with securities markets and clearinghouses – directly to Crypto platforms.
The focus is on operational risk: internal failures that occur without any external penetration, a category that the industry has historically treated as secondary to cybersecurity.
The requirements are expected to be codified under South Korea’s upcoming Digital Assets Basic Law. It remains to be seen whether other jurisdictions follow a similar model, however Bithumb error It gave organizers a concrete failure to point to.
This article was written by Tanya Chipkova at www.financemagnates.com.
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