Crypto marketplace sent $90 million to users, thanks to a bug. Now it wants the money back.

A technical glitch in a crypto marketplace has just made some cryptocurrency users tens of millions of dollars richer — and the marketplace founder's threats have ignited a debate about the rules of digital money in an authority-less world. 

Compound, a popular cryptocurrency platform, last week put out what should have been a routine update to the code that governs users' transactions. However, the update contained a bug that mistakenly sent up to $89 million worth of crypto tokens into some users' accounts.

Compound Labs noticed "unusual activity" late Wednesday, but at that point the tokens were already distributed with no easy way of getting them back.