South Korea’s Supreme Court has decided on a case involving an outage of service on the nation’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, Bithumb. On Friday, the court ordered the exchange to pay damages of 251.4 million won ($203,120) to investors who sued Bithumb after the service interruption.
The complainants argued they had suffered monetary losses due to sharp drops in the prices of numerous digital assets like Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic when the outage occurred on November 12, 2017. Court documents revealed the average number of orders per hour had doubled during the disruption, leading to slowed transaction flows.
The first ruling by a district court was in favor of Bithumb, however, an appeals court overturned this decision and commanded the company to pay between 8,000 and 8 million won to each of the 132 plaintiffs. The Supreme Court has now upheld this ruling.
The appellate court stated that the service provider must bear the burden and cost of technological failures, not the user who has paid a fee.
Do you think crypto exchanges should be held accountable for outages that cause investors to experience financial losses? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
