South Korea's regulators are now showing some impatience toward exchanges.
For several years, security incidents at exchanges have never stopped.
Official statistics make it clear:
From 2023 to 2025, several major platforms experienced a total of 20 incidents involving user funds.
Upbit alone had 6 incidents, affecting more than 600 people; Bithumb wasn't far behind.
The background is the major incident last November, when Upbit was hacked and lost $36 million, which ultimately sparked the current situation.
Upon checking the existing regulations, the maximum fine was only $450,000.
From a regulatory perspective, penalizing such a major incident to this extent indeed seems unreasonable.
Therefore, the leaked draft proposal now takes a much tougher stance:
If you get hacked, it's not bad luck,
and the maximum penalty will be set at 10% of the loss.
If calculated this way, Upbit's penalty from that incident would have been at least $3.6 million.
Internally, there are even more aggressive voices.
Some have even proposed ignoring the actual loss and instead imposing a fine based on annual revenue, up to 3%.
With Upbit's 2024 revenue at $1.2 billion, following this approach would result in a single penalty of $36 million.
The regulators' message is clear:
Since exchanges have become financial infrastructure,
their security standards should no longer be treated as those of ordinary internet products.
As for how exchanges feel about this,
Upbit and Bithumb have not yet publicly responded.
#加密监管 #Upbit #韩国政策