South Korea’s Second-Biggest Exchange To Suspend Crypto Withdrawals From January 27

Bithumb, which currently holds a 13% domination in the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange market, followed in the footsteps of the country’s third-biggest exchange, Coinone, after it made a similar announcement a few weeks ago.

Bithumb To Stop Withdrawals

With the new Travel Rules being implemented by March 25, the Korean Financial Intelligence Unit has asked all virtual asset service providers to register with the monetary unit.

This led Bithumb to suspend all the withdrawals until the operated accounts had been registered and reviewed.

Any unverified personal wallet will not be able to make withdrawals as they are required to perform another set of customer verification certifications (KYC) in order to verify their wallets.

For now, mostly those exchanges that have partnered with the NH Bank are enforcing these regulations as the wallets that are not whitelisted by January 27 will be directly blocked.

As per the news agency Money Today, investors weren’t happy with the stringent rules of using the video authentication system that they were not used to.

But since the whitelist system implementation is based on the contract of providing the real-name accounts to the bank, the wallets that are not registered will not be able to conduct any virtual asset withdrawal.

The KYC regulation was also implemented for withdrawals to other foreign cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance.US, Kraken, Bitstamp, blockchain.com (UK), and Bybit (Singapore).

South Korea and Blockchain

Apart from the existing cryptocurrency exchanges, the country itself has been at the forefront of blockchain technology adoption. Just yesterday, The Bank of Korea announced that it successfully completed the first phase of its CBDC (central bank digital currency) trial.

Moving ahead, the bank aims to complete the second round of trials by June this year, during which they seek to test the more complicated procedures.

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

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