"From Coins to Stocks"... Active Domestic Virtual Asset Users Plunge Below 20%

Active User Rate at Top 5 Exchanges Drops to 19.5%
Halved in Just a Year and a Half

Eight out of ten investors using domestic virtual asset exchanges have halted trading. This is attributed to a sharp decline in the investment appeal of the coin market, caused both by a prolonged slump in the virtual asset market and increased volatility in domestic and international equity markets.

Bitcoin once fell to around $72,000, marking its lowest level in 15 months, as shown on the Bitcoin price display on the LED board at the Upbit Customer Center in Gangnam-gu, Seoul on February 5, 2026. Photo by Kang Jin-hyung

According to data submitted on August 2 by Assemblyman Lee Jongwook, a member of the National Assembly’s Strategy and Finance Committee, based on information from the Financial Supervisory Service, only 19.5% of users at Korea’s five major virtual asset exchanges (Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and Gopax) were active as of the end of June this year.

This means that out of the total 11,155,038 users who have completed customer identification (KYC) and are eligible to trade, only 2,169,780 actually participated in at least one transaction—either trading, exchanging, or staking—during the month. The active user rate, which stood at 35.7% at the end of January last year, has effectively halved in just a year and a half. The number of users eligible to trade also dropped by more than 400,000 in three months—from a record high of 11.56 million at the end of March this year—indicating that new inflows have virtually come to a halt.

The cooling of the market is also reflected in outflows of investment capital. The total value of virtual assets held by Korean investors plummeted by 54.7%, from 125.7533 trillion won at the end of January last year to 56.9606 trillion won at the end of June this year. During the same period, exchange deposits also shrank from 10.6561 trillion won to 5.22 trillion won. The halving of the global virtual asset market capitalization (from $4.28 trillion to $2.18 trillion) has had a direct and major impact on the Korean market.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.