More Korean investors are turning to Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, even as domestic exchanges lose ground. Analysts say traders are leaving in search of stock-linked derivatives that cannot be traded in Korea.
Korean visits to Binance's website rose 14.74% last month from the previous month, according to crypto data platform Wu Blockchain. Korea accounted for 8.34% of total traffic, the second-highest share after India's 11.3%. Given that Binance recorded 36.04 million total visits in July, visits from Korea are estimated at about 3.01 million.
Upbit, Korea's largest exchange, drew just 4.16 million website visits last month, down 16% from the previous month. That means Korean visits to Binance amounted to about 72% of Upbit's traffic. Upbit's decline was the third-steepest among the 12 major exchanges surveyed by Wu Blockchain, after Deribit at 45% and HTX at 23%.
The shift reflects investment demand flowing to overseas exchanges with a wider range of derivatives, as the prolonged slump in the cryptocurrency market drags on. According to CryptoQuant, trading in stock-linked perpetual futures on major cryptocurrency exchanges reached about $250 billion last month, nearly a 17-fold surge from about $15 billion in April in just three months. Of that, about $193 billion — close to 80% of the total — was traded on Binance.
Binance in particular has been drawing users by expanding its lineup with perpetual futures based on Korean-listed stocks. Starting with Samsung Electronics and SK hynix in June this year, it has rolled out products tracking Naver, LG Electronics, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Hanmi Semiconductor and the KODEX 200 exchange-traded fund (ETF) this month. These products can be traded 24 hours a day with no holidays, and depending on the stock, they can carry leverage of up to 50 times. While Binance blocks trades from accounts that have completed Know Your Customer (KYC) verification under Korean names, Korean investors can still trade futures based on overseas-listed ETFs, such as KORU, a triple-leveraged KOSPI ETF listed on the New York Stock Exchange. An industry official said, "There is a need to review ways to accommodate this investment demand within Korea's regulated system."
