Following the Huobi competitor’s roadmap, formerly the largest foreign exchange in China, OKCoin will launch a trading platform on the South Korean market.
OKCoin’s expansion of South Korea
Earlier on January 19, South Korean media reported that NHN Entertainment, one of the country’s largest million dollar game developers in Hangame.com, has collaborated with OKCoin to create an exchange in the local cryptocurrency market.
According to South Korean statements News 1, OKCoin intends to list more cryptocurrencies than Bithumb and UpBit, which have combined 10 and 30 cryptocurrencies, respectively. Both Bithumb and UpBit are run by some of the country’s most influential conglomerates, including Dunamoo Kakao. Korbit, the third substantial foreign exchange market, is operated by NXC, a 10 billion dollars game company.
To encounter with local trading platforms such as Bithumb, Korbit, UpBit, and CoinOne, OKCoin has collaborated with a major conglomerate at NHN Entertainment to obtain sufficient resources and capital to address the South Korean market. OKCoin will also integrate 60 cryptocurrencies at its launch, more than all exchanges of cryptocurrency on the local combined market.
Chris Lee, OKCoin’s chairman, told News 1 that the company currently has 100 full-time developers and aims to evolve in a global exchange of cryptocurrency. Lee stressed that South Korea is an essential market for the company to address and penetrate, for OKCoin to expand internationally.
Last month, Huobi, another sizeable Chinese exchange of cryptocurrency that migrated to Hong Kong’s cryptocurrency market, declared that its partnership with the Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings would expand on markets in Japan and South Korea.
Due to the new crackdown on cryptocurrency transactions by the Chinese government, trading platforms in the Chinese market have begun to expand to other major Asian regions such as Japan and South Korea.
Confident for South Korea?
In addition to OKCoin and Huobi, another ten cryptocurrencies exchanges are expected to launch in South Korea market; they will be listed in the next few months.
Obviously, if the South Korean cryptocurrency market is fissiparous and the ban on trading is imminent, shifting exchanges would not allocate millions of dollars in development and compliance to expand on the South Korean market.
Local exchanges, including Bithumb, Korbit, and CoinOne, as well as across exchanges such as Huobi and OKCoin, are positive about the South Korean government’s normative roadmap, as the government re-affirmed that the ban on trading the cryptocurrency will not be required.
Recently, South Korea’s Fair Trade Committee chairman Kim Sang-Joo said:
The closure of cryptocurrency markets is not realistically possible. Based on the e-commerce law, the government has no authority to close the cryptocurrency trading platforms.
From an economist, it is not a fair and transparent decision to ban the economic activity. Whether it is excessive speculation or not, gain or loss is the responsibility of the investor.
Given that the South Korean government has formally rejected the demands of the Minister of Justice and rejected the proposal to ban cryptocurrency transactions, foreign exchange markets will expand on the local market to meet the growing exponentially increasing demand for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the world market.