Korea Stock Exchange Executive Calls For More Legislation as Crypto Volume Catches up to Equities Volume

The CEO of Korea’s stock exchange, Sohn Byung-doo, says more rules are needed to institutionalize crypto.

article-image
share

key takeaways

  • The CEO of Korea’s stock exchange, the KRX, has said that it’s time to embrace virtual assets and called for proper regulation to help institutionalize the asset class
  • He also revealed that trading volume for crypto might soon catch up to equities in the country

Sohn Byung-doo, a former regulator and now CEO of Korea Exchange, the operator of the country’s sole stock exchange, has called for a comprehensive set of regulations for cryptocurrency. He said that it’s time to “embrace digital assets” as any other component of capital markets. 

“The virtual asset market is no different from the capital market in that it must support investor protection and transaction stability,” Sohn said during a speech at the 2021 Global ETP Conference.

“Since virtual assets have become ‘major’ investment assets, it is time to prepare an institutional framework.”

Sohn believes that Korea’s regulatory patchwork, which categorizes digital assets as something similar to intellectual property or patents — intangible assets, in accountant speak — isn’t conducive to domestic development of the sector. 

Within Korea, the government is set to implement a steep capital gains tax on capital gains from digital assets next year. In addition, in order to push for higher KYC/AML compliance, local exchanges will soon be required to partner with legacy banks. 

In turn, this has driven many traders offshore, as they don’t feel confident with the Korean regulatory regime. 

“Now is the time for exchanges to compete directly with overseas exchanges,” he said, saying that the world is now in a “global one market era” which requires competition between regulators. 

Sohn said that there are an estimated five million onshore digital assets traders in Korea, with more offshore. 

And these millions of traders are able to push nearly $12 billion in daily volume. For comparison, Korea’s composite index, the KOSPI, has a daily volume of $16.1 billion.

In some ways, Korea finds itself in a similar situation to Indonesia, where there are more digital asset traders than stock traders. Indonesia’s daily turnover of trading is around $900 million a day while its cryptoasset volume is about $166 million, showing that digital assets trading in-country is the domain of small, retail investors.
Unlike in Korea, Indonesia’s digital asset trading industry is facing headwinds from the country’s national religious council, which, in mid-November, said that Muslims are forbidden to trade crypto.


Get the day’s top crypto news and insights delivered to your inbox every evening. Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter now.


Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Interchain Labs will focus on sovereign L1s and institutional demand, abandoning plans for smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday