South Korea blocks 27 crypto exchanges, two of them out-trade its home market

South Korea's Financial Intelligence Unit has blocked website access to 27 unregistered crypto exchanges, KuCoin, MEXC and BitMart among them, after the Korea Communications Standards Commission cleared the reviews on 6 and 7 October. South Korea blocks crypto exchanges in stages: mobile apps went first, pulled from the Google and Apple stores during 2025. The browser was the last route in, and it closed on 13 October.

How many were blocked

Twenty-eight virtual asset service providers hold a Korean registration. The blocked list runs to 27. The unit has referred 44 unregistered operators to investigators, so this action covers 61% of that pile and leaves seventeen waiting. The blocked list is one short of the entire legal market, which says how much of Korean trading happened outside the registry.

How big they are

KuCoin trades $1.36bn in a day and MEXC the same, on public exchange data. Upbit, the largest Korean venue, trades $1.28bn, Bithumb $0.58bn and Coinone $0.17bn. Two of the blocked exchanges together move 1.34 times the volume of the three largest licensed Korean platforms combined.

A website block stops nobody who already knows what a VPN is. It stops the customer who would have arrived through a search result, and that customer is the one an exchange pays to acquire.

“User assets remain safe and secure, and we will communicate any further updates through our official channels”

— KuCoin, Statement on the Korean block

KuCoin says user assets stay safe and promises updates through official channels. Nothing in the Korean action touches custody: it removes the path to the login page while the balances sit where they sat.

What happens next

Korean regulators have been tightening for two years. About $110bn left Korean exchanges during 2025 as the rules hardened, which at Upbit's current daily volume equals 86 days of its entire turnover. The same instinct showed up in Thailand this month, where new ETF rules shut foreign platforms out of a market before it opened.

Three things settle from here. Whether the remaining seventeen referred operators get blocked. Whether Upbit and Bithumb pick up measurable volume in the weeks after, which our exchange ranking will show. And whether any of the 27 registers rather than leaves, given that registration means an FIU filing plus the security and anti-money-laundering standards that kept them out to begin with.

Informational material, not investment advice. Exchange volumes come from public market data on 13 October 2026 and move from day to day, while the blocking decision itself is permanent until a venue registers.