South Korea’s Financial Services Commission has urged domestic crypto exchanges to hold more customer assets in offline cold wallets. The push follows the roughly $6.3 billion theft from an internet-connected Binance wallet.
At a November 2 emergency meeting, the commission reviewed exchanges’ system access controls, administrator privileges and procedures for approving and signing withdrawals. It also urged operators to monitor deposits and withdrawals continuously, share alerts about unusual access attempts, add incident response staff and build reserves.
The commission left the requested cold-storage percentage unspecified in its public statement. Watcher.Guru reported on November 3 that South Korea was considering a 99% requirement for exchanges.
Under the Virtual Asset User Protection Act, providers must keep at least 80% of the economic value of customer crypto assets offline.
Cold-storage levels already vary across exchanges. At the end of September, Upbit held 99.17% offline, Bithumb held 94.76% and Coinone held 85%. GOPAX was closer to the minimum at 80.54%, according to Financial Supervisory Service data reported by ETNews.
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