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South Korea, Japan and Singapore lose big from FTX.com, Binance, OKX gain: Report
(Kitco News) -
A new report from Coingecko released Monday morning sheds light on the global impact of the FTX collapse.
The report compiled total monthly user visits to FTX.com from 30 countries between January and October 2022. It showed that East Asian users were among the platform’s most numerous and most active, with South Korea’s 297.2 thousand monthly visits, Singapore’s 241.7 thousand and Japan’s 223.5 thousand represented nearly 16% of the exchange’s total traffic share.
Russian users came in fourth with nearly 200 thousand monthly visits, and Turkey and Germany were each close to 190k to round out the top six.
UK users visited the exchange an average of 129 thousand times per month, placing them in 12th place. Canadians visited the site 100 thousand times per month, good for 15th place, and Australians were 16th, posting 96 thousand visits.
The U.S. was in 18th place, and their number of monthly user visits might seem low at 93 thousand, but US-based customers were directed to use FTX.US for their trading, so the vast majority of U.S. user traffic is not reflected in the report.
South Korea, a country of 52 million people, which alone represented 6.1% of the total traffic share, looks to be the country hardest hit by FTX’s collapse. The bankruptcy of the exchange has resulted in South Korea’s government fast-tracking the country’s new Digital Asset Basic Act (DABA), a comprehensive regulatory framework that was drawn up in June 2022 following the collapse of crypto firm Terra in May.
“As the market fell due to global austerity, Terra-Luna, Celsius and FTX failed one after another, making it a year of declining trust,” said Lee Myung-soon, senior vice president of the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) last week.
Kim So-Young, the vice chair of South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC), also said that because of the urgency of protecting users, it would be better for the country to quickly put minimum regulatory standards in place and add to them later, rather than waiting for international standards to be agreed upon. DABA is expected to be finalized in 2023.
Singapore is recognized as a major cryptocurrency hub in Asia and made up 5% of FTX.com’s global traffic despite a population of only 5.5 million people. When Binance shut down in the island nation in December of 2021, many of their users switched to FTX, which massively increased the country’s exposure to the firm’s collapse.
Late last week, Singaporean state holding company Temasek wrote down their entire $275 million stake in FTX after claiming their eight-month due diligence process into the firm raised no red flags.
Japanese users represented 4.6% of the global traffic share of FTX.com, and the collapse of FTX left the government and financial firms of the country of 126 million scrambling to protect against contagion.
Japanese investment giant SoftBank announced on Nov. 15 that they would write off the entirety of their $100 million investment in FTX, which they made earlier this year.
On the same day, Japanese crypto exchange Liquid also suspended all withdrawals from their platform. FTX bought Liquid in February 2022 to support FTX’s most recent push into the Japanese market because the deal meant the exchange got access to Liquid’s Type 1 Financial Instruments business license.
On Nov. 10, Japan's Financial Services Agency issued an order to FTX Japan to cease business operations and to hold assets equivalent to its balance-sheet liabilities within the country. "It is necessary to take all possible measures to ensure that this does not lead to a situation where the company's assets flow to foreign affiliates, etc. and the interests of creditors and investors are harmed," the FSA wrote.
With the FTX.com exchange now offline and in bankruptcy protection, the biggest beneficiaries in terms of user traffic have been rival platforms Binance and OKX. As of November 13, Binance has increased its market share by 7% to a dominant 64% of the total among the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges. OKX's market share increased 1.1% during the same period, going from 11.9% to 13%.
