emirates7 - South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb said on Saturday it had accidentally given away more than $40 billion worth of bitcoins to customers as promotional rewards, triggering a sharp selloff on the exchange.

Bithumb apologised for the mistake, which took place on Friday, and said it had recovered 99.7% of the 620,000 bitcoins, worth about $44 billion at current prices. It had restricted trading and withdrawals for the 695 affected customers within 35 minutes of the erroneous distribution on Friday.

“We would like to make it clear that this incident is unrelated to external hacking or security breaches, and there are no problems with system security or customer asset management,” Bithumb said in a statement.