Bithumb holds first in-house AI contest with W10m prize

Bithumb announced Monday that it had held its first in-house AI contest, "AI Kkulpip It-seom (Thumb)?," uncovering 107 AI use cases in the process.

The contest drew 110 employees and was designed to share practical AI know-how gained on the job, with the aim of boosting overall organizational performance and work efficiency. Bithumb accepted a total of 107 submissions from Aug. 17 to Aug. 31 and selected 13 as final award recipients.

The top prize — AI Best User — went to Ko Ju-ho, a team leader in the IT division. Ko developed a monitoring tool that tracks real-time token usage and cache performance for Claude Code, an AI coding tool. The entry was recognized for demonstrating measurable cost savings by selecting AI models suited to specific tasks and optimizing cache utilization.

The second-place AI Power User award went to Um Seong-ryeol, a manager in the IT division, for an "AI-based SRE incident response automation platform." The entry earned high marks for using AI to automate repetitive tasks that arise during service outages, freeing staff to focus on root-cause analysis and rapid recovery.

Five entries shared the third-place AI Active User award. They included "MCP Server Centralization," which integrates in-house knowledge and work tools; an "AI-based information-leak monitoring platform" that analyzes tens of thousands of external file-transfer records each month; and an "advertising content pre-review assistant" that checks promotional and informational copy for regulatory compliance in advance.

Also taking third place were "Strategy Pipeline Automation," which cut a trading-strategy verification process that previously took about a month down to a single day, and Upgrade Watcher, a tool that analyzes how blockchain upgrades may affect deposit and withdrawal services.

Six entries shared the fourth-place AI Explorer User award, including an AI security operations analyst system and an automated AI-based vulnerability impact analysis tool.

Prize money is 10 million won ($7,550) for first place, 5 million won for second, 3 million won per entry for third, and 50,000 won per entry for fourth. Participation award recipients will receive gift certificates worth 100,000 won.

"Through this contest, we confirmed that efforts to embrace AI can drive positive change in embedding an AI DNA across the entire organization," a Bithumb official said. "We will continue to expand the related infrastructure and spread a culture of in-house innovation so that we can achieve new results by actively leveraging AI."

Meanwhile, Bithumb recently launched "Bithumb AI" in partnership with Surf AI, a service that provides analysis and market updates by cryptocurrency.