South Korea’s Crypto Exchange Delists Major Privacy Coins

Korbit, a virtual currency exchange based in South Korea just announced that it is withdrawing support from five virtual currencies. Steem (STEEM), Augur (REP), Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH) have all been pulled. Coincheck in Japan also just declared that it would no longer support digital currencies that are privacy-oriented.

The move by Coincheck came after a recent large hack in which more than half a billion dollars of crytpo was stolen. Regulators in the country consequently tightened their oversight on the industry resulting in new conditions being placed on virtual currency exchanges. In South Korea however it is not clear what drove the decision by Korbit.

With the delisting of the five digital coins the virtual currencies that are currently supported on the Korbit cryptocurrency exchange include Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Bitcoin Gold (BTG), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP) and Bitcoin (BTC). One of the virtual coins that Korbit recently added to its platform is Zilliqa (ZIL).

Korbit is among the four biggest virtual currency exchanges in South Korea with the others being Coinone, Bithumb, and Upbit. Earlier this month Upbit, which is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in Asia was raided.  Prosecutors suspected fraudulent activities such as insider trading, money laundering allegations, and coinless transactions. According to sources the raid was triggered by liquidity issues since the number of wallets that Upbit operated was only about 90 while it listed 130 virtual currencies. Since then the president of DunamuInc, the parent company of Upbit, Lee Seok-woo indicated that an internal audit had disproved the claims.