Bithumb

Who Bithumb fits

Bithumb has been running since 2014, two years longer than Upbit, and for years traded places with it as Korea’s largest exchange before settling into a consistent second place by KRW volume. If you’re a South Korean resident with a local bank account, a Korean phone number, and an interest in the same deep won-denominated liquidity and Korea-specific token listings Upbit offers, Bithumb is the other realistic option, worth comparing directly rather than assuming either is a clear default. The two run on the same mandatory real-name banking system, are both spot-only by regulation, and both carry security histories that matter; where they diverge is in the details, Bithumb’s bank partner, fee promotions, and regulatory record are its own, and this review treats it on those terms rather than repeating the market-structure explanation already covered in our Upbit review.

If you’re reading this from outside Korea, treat it as informational. Bithumb stopped accepting new overseas registrations in 2021, and even where an account exists, full functionality depends on a Korean mobile number and a real-name bank account that foreign residents without Korean documentation generally can’t obtain.

Security and custody

Bithumb’s security record has two distinct incidents worth understanding separately, because they’re different in kind. In 2017, an attacker used a compromised employee computer to access personal information (names, phone numbers, and emails) belonging to roughly 33,000 users. The stolen data was then used in a phishing and voice-phishing campaign against those individual customers; some users reported losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from accounts drained this way, separate from any breach of Bithumb’s own systems. It was a customer-targeting incident enabled by a data leak, not a direct theft from Bithumb’s wallets.

The June 2018 incident was different: attackers compromised Bithumb’s hot wallet directly and made off with roughly $30 million in cryptocurrency, later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, the same group South Korean police would later formally link to Upbit’s 2019 breach. Bithumb covered the loss from its own reserves and shifted a larger share of holdings into cold storage afterward. There’s no indication of a comparable hot-wallet breach since, but a data leak and a direct wallet theft in consecutive years is a real pattern to weigh, not a closed chapter; it’s worth reading Wallets and Custody Explained as a reminder that no exchange’s history is a substitute for thinking about how much you actually keep on any single platform.

Deposits and withdrawals

KRW deposits and withdrawals require a real-name-verified account at Bithumb’s partner bank, currently KB Kookmin Bank, which replaced NH Nonghyup Bank in March 2025 when that multi-year contract expired. As with Upbit’s K Bank relationship, this is a periodically renewed arrangement rather than a permanent one, and it’s the same real-name verification system South Korean law requires of every domestic exchange, not a Bithumb-specific hurdle. Won deposits are free; won withdrawals carry a flat, low fee. Crypto deposits and withdrawals move at normal network speed once confirmations clear. International users, where an account exists at all, are generally limited to crypto-only deposits and withdrawals with no access to KRW fiat rails, since those rails depend on the Korean real-name banking system.

Fees

Bithumb’s fee structure is genuinely harder to pin down than a simple maker/taker pair suggests. The standard KRW-market rate has run around 0.25% for both maker and taker, but Bithumb has repeatedly run time-limited promotions, including fee-event windows offering rates as low as 0.04%, and a six-tier membership program that pays back value rather than cutting the posted rate directly, weighted toward maker order flow at the higher tiers. That combination of a standard rate, rotating promotions, and a separate rebate program means the number you’ll actually pay depends heavily on which promotion is live and which tier you’ve reached, so check the current schedule directly before trading rather than assuming either the standard or a promotional rate applies. See our exchange comparisons for how Bithumb’s structure stacks up against flatter fee schedules elsewhere.

Bithumb’s product lineup

Bithumb is a spot exchange, full stop, the same regulatory constraint that shapes Upbit’s product lineup: South Korea doesn’t permit domestic virtual asset service providers to offer leveraged trading to retail customers, so there’s no margin, futures, or options here. Within spot, Bithumb carries a broad set of KRW trading pairs with meaningful depth in major assets and in Korea-popular tokens that trade thinly or not at all on international exchanges. Bithumb has also built out a coin-lending service, most recently expanded in 2025, letting users borrow against crypto or KRW collateral through partnered institutions, a genuinely different product from the trading side and worth understanding as a separate risk (collateral and liquidation terms) rather than an extension of simple spot holding.

Regulatory footprint

Bithumb operates as a registered virtual asset service provider under South Korea’s Financial Services Commission and Financial Intelligence Unit framework, the same oversight structure that applies to Upbit, Coinone, and Korbit. Its recent regulatory history, though, has been rougher than its larger rival’s. In March 2026, Korea’s FIU fined Bithumb roughly 36.8 billion won (about $24.6 million) and ordered a six-month partial suspension affecting new customers, tied to a finding of about 6.65 million AML-related violations: roughly 3.55 million failures to complete required identity verification and about 3.04 million cases where transactions that should have been blocked weren’t. The suspension, running from late March through late September 2026, would have barred newly registered users from moving crypto in or out while leaving existing customers unaffected. Bithumb challenged the order, and in late April 2026 a Seoul court granted an injunction staying the suspension pending a full ruling. As of this writing, the stay remains in effect and the case is unresolved, so treat this as open rather than settled, and check for a final ruling before assuming the current status still holds.

Separately, Bithumb has spent several years pursuing a public listing on a Korean stock exchange, a milestone that would make it the first crypto-native company to go public in Korea. That target has slipped repeatedly (from a 2025 goal, to 2027, to a 2028 target announced in August 2026), driven in part by a genuinely complicated ownership structure spread across Bithumb Holdings, Vidente, and other stakeholders, and a new 20% cap on major shareholders in Korean crypto exchanges that will likely force an ownership restructuring before any listing can proceed.

Customer support

Support is built around Korean-speaking users. Live chat and KakaoTalk-based support are generally reserved for Korean users, while international users are typically limited to email support, with the translation gaps and slower response times that implies. The site interface itself supports several languages, English included, but that’s a translation layer over a support system still fundamentally oriented toward Korean customers. If you can’t communicate comfortably in Korean, expect any account or transaction issue to take meaningfully longer to resolve than it would on an English-first exchange, and weigh that against how much you’re comfortable holding on the platform.

Who should look elsewhere

If you’re not a South Korean resident with local banking, ID, and a Korean phone number, Bithumb’s core product isn’t realistically usable regardless of its liquidity depth; an international-first exchange like Binance or Kraken will serve you far better. If you want margin, futures, or options, look elsewhere entirely, Bithumb doesn’t offer them by regulatory design. And if an unresolved AML enforcement dispute carrying a multimillion-dollar fine, on top of a security history that includes both a customer-data breach and a direct hot-wallet theft, is more open-ended risk than you’re willing to hold through, that’s a reasonable line to draw; it’s also worth reading Common Crypto Scams alongside this review, since the 2017 incident here started as a data leak that fed a phishing campaign rather than a direct exchange hack, a pattern that shows up well beyond any one platform.