Trading volumes are shrinking at South Korean crypto platforms – where it has now also become illegal for the staff and executives of crypto exchanges to trade on their employees’ platforms.
As previously reported, the vast majority of crypto trading platforms in the country have either closed down or removed fiat trading in the past few days – in order to comply with regulators’ new operating permits system.
The firms that chose to stay open without fiat KRW markets appear to have paid a huge price. The Chosun Ilbo reported that in the case of Flybit, 24-hour trading volumes shrank from USD 97.4m on September 24 to just USD 5.8m on September 26 – and were down a whopping 99% from September 8 figures of USD 692m.
The picture was equally grim at another of the nation’s biggest exchanges, Gopax. Here, trading volumes fell from USD 78m on September 24 to USD 2.1m on September 26. Gopax saw USD 155m worth of transactions go through its platform on September 3, making for a trading volume decrease (from September 3 to 26) of almost 99%.
Rivals like Coinbit and GDAC saw similar slumps.
By contrast, the four platforms that are still trading KRW are enjoying rude trading volume health – particularly Bithumb, whose transaction rate in the past 24 hours is the ninth-highest in the world, per CoinMarketCap data (USD 984m). Rival Coinone is also in the top 20 with around USD 202m.
Source: Cryptonews
