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By Francisco Rodrigues|Edited by Sheldon Reback
Jul 3, 2025, 1:20 p.m.
- Coinone won an appeal, forcing five customers to return double-withdrawn bitcoin.
- Coinone’s software misidentified slow Bitcoin network confirmations as failed transactions, leading to automatic account top-ups.
- The incident occurred during a period of significant Bitcoin network congestion in late 2017 and early 2018.
Coinone won an appeal to force five of customers to return bitcoin
they managed to double withdraw from the South Korean crypto exchange over a glitch in 2018.
According to local media, the Seoul Western District Court’s second civil division said the traders benefited from “unjust enrichment” because the exchange had already completed the first withdrawal on-chain before its server restored their balances.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
The mix-up began when Coinone’s software flagged slow confirmations from the Bitcoin network as failed transactions, and automatically topped up users’ accounts even after the withdrawals were properly processed. The traders then withdrew same coins again.
The Bitcoin network experienced significant congestion back around that time as transaction volumes skyrocketed, in the culmination of a years-long scaling debate that had led to the Bitcoin Cash
hard forka year earlier.
At the time, the average transaction fee on the Bitcoin network reached a then-record $55, while the memory pool, a sort of “waiting room for transactions,” grew to 250,000 unconfirmed transactions.
A lower court initially blamed Coinone’s own servers and ordered the payment of only partial damages. On appeal, judges called the network delay an outside event, said the platform need not shoulder the loss and told the users to repay the funds.
Coinone has faced controversy in the past. In a separate trial in 2023, former employees admitted receiving as much as 2 billion won (around $1.46 million) to list tokens.
Francisco is a reporter for CoinDesk with a passion for cryptocurrencies and personal finance. Before joining CoinDesk he worked at major financial and crypto publications. He owns bitcoin, ether, solana, and PAXG above CoinDesk’s $1,000 disclosure threshold.
