Chinese crypto news blogger Collin Wu disclosed that many crypto projects were forced to pay multi-million to get a successful listing of their tokens on the top South Korean crypto exchanges.
Summary
- Bithumb & Upbit accused of taking millions for listing tokens.
- No response by the executives of these exchanges.
- Upbit imposed a transaction ban on some crypto accounts.
South Korea is a very big marketplace for the crypto Industry, as a very big percentage of the population invests in digital assets. All the top financial regulatory bodies regulate the crypto sector to ensure the prohibition of the entry of bad actors in crypto-related financial activities. These regulators are the Financial Services Commission (FSC), Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), and National Tax Service (NTS).
On 20 March 2025, Collin Wu, a Chinese crypto news blogger, reported that 4 crypto projects disclosed that they paid millions of dollars to the intermediaries of top crypto exchanges in South Korea to list their corresponding tokens.
Collin Wu said that he reached out to 7 crypto projects. 4 out of them said that they paid a fee ranging from 3% to 5% of the total token amount to the intermediaries to get listed on the Upbit crypto exchange successfully. In accurate figures, they paid approximately US$10 million and US$2 million to Upbit and Bithumb, respectively.
The intermediaries who took bribes were Upbit’s shareholders and market makers.
Here Bitcoinik.com readers need to know that Wu reached out to only 7 crypto projects & 3 of them clearly denied paying any fee for listing the token.
So here, we can’t call it misconduct by the crypto exchanges, but a thorough investigation into this unethical act is mandatory now.
So far, no response has come to the public domain by the officials of any of the accused crypto exchanges, but it will be interesting to see the clarification on this matter.
Earlier, similar kinds of accusations were faced by Coinbase & Binance, but many crypto projects defended these crypto companies against accusations & called the allegations fake.
FIU Action Against Upbit
In Feb 2025, The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) imposed a regulatory action against the Upbit crypto exchange, citing the breaches of KYC obligations.
The FIU’s investigation found 34,777 KYC violations and flagged 5,785 cases where users provided incorrect or missing address details.
As a part of the action, Upbit faced a temporary ban on new user crypto transfers between March 7 and June 6, 2025.
However, the Upbit exchange owner challenged this regulatory action in court, but still, no relaxation came for the exchange.
On 20 March 2025, this crypto exchange imposed restrictions on some crypto accounts suspected of running Ponzi schemes.
Read also: Finally, the SEC body drops Ripple ($XRP) lawsuit officially
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