A South Korean court on Thursday overturned Bithumb’s six-month partial business suspension order, Yonhap News Agency reported.
Citing legal sources, the news agency said Judge Kong Hyun-jin of the Second Administrative Division of the Seoul Administrative Court accepted Bithumb’s application for a stay of execution on the same day. It has not yet been clarified whether the 36.8 billion won ($24.6 million) fine has also been suspended. South Korea’s financial regulator imposed fines and suspensions in March, accusing it of massive violations of local anti-money laundering rules.
Bithumb, one of South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, filed a court request in March to end suspensions and fines imposed by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) after the regulator said it found millions of violations of the country’s anti-money laundering rules.
The Financial Services Commission said in March that the sanctions stemmed from violations of the Certain Financial Transaction Information Reporting and Use Act.
The Financial Intelligence Unit said that Bithumb committed approximately 6.65 million breaches, of which 3.55 million involved a failure to perform required customer authentication, while 3.04 million were related to the exchange’s failure to properly block transactions that should have been blocked.
While the court ruling ending the suspension is good news for exchanges, it comes after reports that South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission has launched an investigation into Upbit, Bithumb and other platforms for sharing order books with overseas platforms.
The case against Bithumb is part of South Korean regulators’ efforts to tighten oversight of the cryptocurrency market. In 2025, the Financial Intelligence Unit imposed a three-month partial trading suspension and a fine of 35.2 billion won on Dunamu, the operator of Upbit, the country’s largest exchange, over compliance lapses. Rival platform Korbit faces a smaller penalty of 2.73 billion won and an agency warning.
Bithumb was founded in 2014 and is currently one of the largest exchanges in South Korea by trading volume, according to CoinGecko. The suspension ended two months after Bithumb mistakenly distributed billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin to users.
