Just a week ago, Korean retail money had drained out of Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit and Gopax and into a red-hot KOSPI, up roughly 114% over the year through July 22.
The combined daily turnover on the five won exchanges had fallen close to 89% year-on-year, to around $305 million from $2.82 billion. Even Korbit had to sell Bitcoin and Ether just to cover costs.
South Korea’s major crypto exchanges have witnessed their trading activity go downhill over the past year as the country’s stock market surged, suggesting retail speculative interest may be shifting toward equities, analysis shows.
By mid-July the index had shed roughly 20% in three weeks, sliding into a technical bear market, and its volatility has now overtaken Bitcoin's own, an inversion only few would have called a year ago.
While the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) has seen a surprising surge over the period, eToro's Zavier Wong has flagged that Samsung and SK Hynix alone now carry close to half the index's weight, up from about a quarter at the end of last year, meaning the performance of South Korea's stock market are largely in the hands of just two semiconductor giants.
On July 14, KOSPI fell as much as 4% intraday, while Upbit's 24-hour volume spiked over 1,400% to roughly $4.2 billion, with Bitcoin and XRP absorbing nearly a fifth of all trades. Tiger Research's Ryan Yoon has argued the buyers, which were mostly Koreans in their 40s and 50s, were rotating out of battered domestic and U.S. equities straight into XRP, because of the May's selloff, when XRP briefly out-traded both Bitcoin and Ether on Upbit and Bithumb, but the spike didn't hold.
Seoul Economic Daily's own tally of CoinGecko data shows daily average volume for July 1–16 still down 83.6% from June, suggesting panic-day trading rather than a durable rotation back into crypto.
According to Tiger Research, the widening gap between equity turnover and crypto volume did not necessarily mean that Koreans had lost complete interest in crypto, but rather that investors had more alternatives.