South Korea impeached yet another crazy president
this year. Now the new guy Lee Jang gets to take home the prize. An economy on life support and
US tariffs ready to pull the plug. And what does he decide to do about it? Go allin on crypto.
Of course, that’s right. The new South Korean president has hit the ground running with a
crypto-powered plan to pull the economy back from the brink. So, what’s up his sleeve? Will
it work? And what will it mean for the markets? Stay tuned to find out. My name is Nick and you’re
watching the Coin Bureau. South Korea. For years, it’s been one of the most unique and frankly
bonkers crypto markets on the planet. a place where crypto trading volumes can dwarf the
national stock market when nearly a third of the population owns crypto and where XRP
routinely does more trading volume than BTC and ETH. It’s a market defined by passion, speed,
and a trading culture that borders on a national sport. But in 2025, the game has changed. has
gotten a lot more serious. After the previous government offed itself in a unforced self coup
that would have been too hairbrain for Netflix, a new administration has taken power. And they’re
not just crypto friendly, they’re going allin, rolling out one of the most ambitious progrowth
crypto agendas in the world. We’re talking Shelvin Korea CBDC program, legalizing spot ETFs, building
a regulated stable coin market from scratch, and for the first time in 8 years, unlocking the gates
for corporations to pour money into the crypto markets. It’s a toptobottom architectural redesign
of the nation’s relationship with crypto. And on paper, it’s one of the most bullish policy agendas
in the world right now. But there’s a catch, a huge one. While the government is building out
a regulatory supercar for the future of finance, the economy of the present is running out of
gas and careening towards a wall. A wall made of near zero growth crippling household debt, a
domestic recession, and the looming threat of a fullblown trade war with the United States. So,
the big question is, can South Korea’s crypto dream survive its economic nightmare? Let’s break
it down. To understand what’s happening today, you have to understand the utter chaos of the
last 8 months. It all began last December. Now, two years into his term, former President Yun
Soyol and First Lady Kim Kong Yi had between them accumulated an amazing portfolio of scandals.
Serial stock market manipulation, electoral fraud, plagiarizing PhDs, accepting bribes from cults,
you name it. The list is really, really long. For his efforts, the public rewarded Yun with a sub
20% approval ratings. And as the evidence piled up and the walls closed in on Yune late last year,
it looked like a proper investigation was finally about to bite. That’s when uh one peaceful
December evening, he declared martial law, sent the army into the National Assembly, and
tried to start a war with North Korea. It was a surreal flop that failed within 2 hours, cementing
Yun’s place in the tragic annals of the self coup history. The public was outraged. The world
was stunned and all were left asking, “Sorry, he did what now?” Yun’s own party descended into
infighting and by April 2025, he was impeached and removed from office. This turmoil triggered a
snap election in June and the victor was Lee Jang of the Democratic Party. He’s a former provincial
governor with a reputation for being a disruptor. Lee’s party already controlled a supermajority
in the parliament. So when he won, it created a unified government. For the first time in years,
the president and the legislature are on the same page, controlled by the same party. And this means
that Lee has a clear runway to push through his agenda at speed. And a huge part of that agenda is
crypto. Oh, I didn’t see you there. Well, now that I’ve got you, I may as well let you know about
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Now you go back to the video. I’m going back to Chillax. Within days of winning, Lee’s party
introduced the Digital Asset Basic Act or DAR, the legislative foundation for his crypto agenda.
at its core is a focus on monetary sovereignty. In practice, this means building what Lee calls
a national stadium, a self-sufficient domestic crypto ecosystem protected from the outside
world. And this might raise a few eyebrows as South Korea has long been one of the most insular
and siloed crypto ecosystems in the world. It is already a walled garden that keeps foreigners and
institutions out and retail investors fenced in on a tightly controlled set of rails. Call it
remodeling then. Lee wants to give the walls a lick of paint and call it a stadium to promote
homegrown crypto champions and crucially quote prevent national wealth from leaking overseas. And
this is where his stable coin plan comes in. Right now, when Korean investors want stable coins, they
mostly must buy foreign dollar denominated ones like USDT or USDC. To the government, that looks
like capital leaking out of the country. They want to build their own pipes and keep that value at
home in a kind of a digital protectionism for the 21st century. So, DAR creates a framework for
Korean companies to issue their own fully backed, fully regulated stable coins. and the barriers to
entry are surprisingly low. Lee’s plan would allow firms with as little as 500 million1, which is
about $370,000 in capital to issue stable coins, a requirement low enough to ensure that everyone
with a PowerPoint presentation and a dream can become the Korean Pau Arduino. The central
bank is horrified and has warned that a flood of privately issued stable coins could quote
seriously weaken the effects of monetary policy and pose a systemic risk. Naturally, they argue
that any stable coin issuance should be handled by heavily regulated banks. Lee’s collision
course with the Bank of Korea is so significant that it has even prompted the shelving of the
government’s own CBDC project. The central bank was kneedeep in project Hun River. uh the plot to
introduce a digital Korean one. But in late June, they suddenly hit the brakes, citing high
costs and quote legislative uncertainty. But let’s read between the lines. The government
just created a clear, cheap, and commercially viable path for private firms to issue their
own stable coins. Why would those same banks want to spend millions on a clunky state-run CBDC
with no clear business model or profit incentive? they wouldn’t and they’re now scrambling to form
their own private stable coin consortium, seeing a clear path to market leadership by pausing
the state-run CBDC project and fasttracking a framework for private regulated onebacked stable
coins. The administration is aiming to achieve two goals. Empower Korean tech firms to innovate
and to reduce the economy’s reliance on foreign dollarated platforms. its industrial policy
disguised as financial regulation. The second main event in Lee’s national stadium is a fasttracked
approval of spot crypto ETFs which have long been banned in South Korea. The previous government
viewed them as a threat to financial stability. But with estimates placing the number of crypto
users in Korea between 10 and 18 million, a huge slice of the electorate, the crypto vote is
a constituency too big to be ignored. And that’s why both major parties in the recent election
promised to legalize crypto ETFs in a rare moment of bipartisan consensus. So the Financial
Services Commission or FSC, which previously blocked any discussion on the topic, has already
submitted a road map to the president’s office to get spot ETFs approved and launched by the end
of 2025. After a year and a half of watching tens of billions of dollars pouring into US
spot Bitcoin ETFs, they are finally feeling the FOMO. And this would give Korea’s massive
retail investor base a safe, regulated way to invest through their existing brokerage accounts.
It would also stop Korean capital leaking out into ETFs in the US and Hong Kong. And most
importantly for the crypto market, it would unlock a significant pool of capital by enabling
Korean institutional investors and pension funds to enter the market. So to recap the political
situation, a new unified and highly motivated government is ramming through legislation for
domestic stable coins and spot ETFs. On paper, it’s an agenda that could have been written on up
bit. But who exactly is going to be buying? Since 2017, corporations and institutions in South Korea
have been effectively locked out of the crypto market. A bizarre and sweeping ban prevented any
corporate entity from opening an exchange account. And that’s finally changing. But the government is
being extremely careful. As such, think of it less like a floodgate opening and more like a rusty
pipe starting to leak at the joints. The reopening is happening in phases. Phase one earlier this
year was just a sell only period, which is exactly as bearish as it sounds. The police, universities,
even the tax office were allowed to finally open special accounts to sell all of the crypto they’d
seized in criminal cases or had donated to them over the years in a state sanctioned market
dump. Phase 2 started on June 1st. Nonprofits and charities can now open exchange accounts to sell
crypto donations. In fact, we saw the first ever official sale. A charity called World Vision sold
a whopping 0.55 ETH on up, but it was a historic milestone and the first crack in the wall, but
market moving, it was not. Phase three is the one everyone is watching. Starting in the second half
of this year, a pilot program will allow about 3,500 listed companies and qualified professional
investors to open corporate accounts and actually trade crypto. Buying, selling, investing. It will
finally be on the table for Korean corporations. However, there’s still a big butt. First, Korean
traditions, the big banks, the brokerages, the asset managers are still excluded. they
can’t trade for their own accounts yet, and this means the first wave of investors will be
non-financial companies. Second, the true market impact depends entirely on the set of trading
guidelines that Korea’s FSC is set to release this autumn. And this document is the real catalyst.
Sources in Soul’s financial district suggest these guidelines will be highly specific. They could
cap crypto investments at a small percentage of a company’s net assets. They might initially
restrict trading to only Bitcoin and Ethereum, excluding the more speculative altcoins. And
they will almost certainly mandate the use of a qualified third-party custody solution, creating
a whole new subindustry. So, while the headline says 3,500 companies can now enter the market,
the reality is that their participation will be heavily managed and restricted by these rules.
The key date to watch then is the start of the pilots program. It’s the day those guidelines are
published. Now, when these institutions do start trading, where will they go? The Korean exchange
market is basically a two-horse race. You have the king up backed by tech giant cacao controlling
over 60 sometimes 70% of the market. And then you have the comeback kid that’s Bump. Bump was the
original market leader years ago, but a series of devastating hacks and management scandals saw its
market share collapse. They’ve spent a fortune on aggressive zero fee trading promotions and have
clawed their way back to about 25% of the market on a good day. They’re also planning a massive IPO
on the CODAC later this year with a top tier firm, Samsung Securities, as the underwriter. A
successful IPO would give them a huge war chest and more importantly a new layer of corporate
legitimacy that institutions crave. And this renewed competition is good for everyone. It means
these new institutional players will have a choice and it will force both exchanges to up their
game on security, compliance, and service. But the biggest question of all is what will these new
players choose to buy? And this brings us to the XRP anomaly. If you look at Korean exchanges like
Upbit on any given day, there is a good chance you’ll see XRP attracting more trading volume
than Bitcoin and Ethereum combined. On some days, the XRP to1 trading pair makes up almost 20%
of the entire exchanges volume. And this is a uniquely Korean phenomenon, a legacy of early
listing, strong marketing, and a passionate platoon of the XRP army stationed on the Korean
peninsula. So, will the new corporate players follow the local retail herd and pile into XRP,
or will they stick to the global institutional playbook, which dictates a conservative
BTC dominant strategy? If it’s the former, we could see another localized XRP specific
meltup of epic proportions. If it’s the latter, it could be the beginning of the end for these
unique market dynamics as a wave of institutional money begins to normalize the Korean market,
bringing it more in line with global standards. The first trading data for this pilot will be one
of the most important signals of the year. Okay, so we have a government rolling out the red carpet
for crypto, unleashing institutional demand, and trying to build a homegrown stable coin
industry. Bullish, right? That all sounds great. But with Korea’s economy flatlining, a potential
crypto boom seems like a tall order. This year, the Bank of Korea is forecasting GDP growth
of just 0.8%. To put that into perspective, you only see numbers that low in Korea during a
major global financial crisis in 1998, 2008, and 2020. All major international meltdowns. And now
in 2025, the economy has been shellshocked by a messy political crisis and extreme bipolarization.
The construction industry, a major employer, is contracting sharply. Unemployment, especially
among the youth, is stubbornly high. The price of living keeps climbing. While the minimum wage is
still peanuts, domestic spending is weak because consumers are terrified and they have good
reason to be. Korean households are sitting on the largest pile of debt relative to GDP in the
global north. People are leveraged to the hilt on mortgages for apartments in Soul that cost 30 to
40 times the average annual salary. When interest rates rise and the economy slows, that debt
becomes an anchor that drowns consumer spending. In a recessionary environment, people have less
money to speculate with, and corporate treasuries aren’t exactly eager to start making multi-million
dollar allocations to a volatile asset like Bitcoin when they’re worried about making
payroll. But the domestic slowdown is only half the problem. The bigger, more immediate threat is
a geopolitical hurricane coming from Washington. President Trump’s 90-day grace period on his
so-called reciprocal tariffs is set to expire on July 9th, and he has made it crystal clear
he is not extending it. In recent statements, he has explicitly said that countries like South
Korea, which he claims have quote taken advantage of America for decades, will be getting formal
letters outlining new tariffs potentially as high as 50%. He even singled out Korean automakers like
Yondai and Kia, saying they won’t be getting any special deals. For South Korea, where exports
make up 40% of the entire economy, this is an existential threat. A significant tariff on cars,
semiconductors, and steel could instantly [ __ ] Korea’s most important industries and send
the already weak economy into a deep, painful recession. So the government can create the most
perfect, most regulated, most inviting crypto market in the world. They can build pristine
multi-lane on-ramps for institutional capital. But if a trade war sparks a deep recession, there
will be no capital to drive onto those on-ramps. Investor confidence will evaporate. Capital
will flee to safety. The macroeconomic outlook is an inconvenient roadblock for a muted crypto
renaissance. So, why is the government pushing so hard on crypto when the economy is in a shambles?
Well, it’s probably because crypto is just really popular in Korea. Nearly a third of the entire
country has traded crypto. Over half of adults under 60 have. The vast majority of crypto
users own only a very small amount of crypto, giving rise to the moniker ants, you know,
as compared to whales. In a society with skyigh housing prices, a shaky national pension
system, and a brutal job market for young people, crypto is a lottery ticket and one of the only
remaining paths to wealth creation. President Lee, who has deferred a controversial and already long
delayed crypto tax, has called crypto as a small but certain happiness for much of the population.
By championing crypto, President Lee’s government is tapping into that powerful social current. It
gives them a popular mandate for their policies, a tangible win to offer a public that is
desperate for good news even as the broader economy struggles and the political fallout
of that uh self coup continues to cast a long shadow over public life. So how does this all play
out for the rest of 2025 and beyond? It’s a tale of two completely different timelines operating
simultaneously. In the long run, say two to five years, the outlook for South Korea as a global
crypto hub is incredibly bullish. They are building a world-class regulatory framework from
the ground up. They have unified political will, a clear strategy, and one of the most crypto
literate populations on Earth. If they get this right, South Korea could easily become the
dominant digital asset economy in Asia, leaving Hong Kong and Singapore trailing in the dust.
But in the near term, don’t expect any miracles. Korea’s economy is cooked and the threat of US
tariffs hangs over everything like a guillotine. These macro headwinds could quite easily deter
money from flowing into Korea’s crypto ecosystem, regardless of whether or not it builds that shiny
new national stadium. Either way though, the show is going to be worth watching. Okay, if you
enjoyed that video, you’ll enjoy our latest one right over here. And if you’re not subscribed to
the channel yet, you can do that right over here. This is me, Nick, signing off. Thank you guys very
much for watching, and I’ll see you again soon.
