UPDATED 22:34 EDT / DECEMBER 12 2017

EMERGING TECH

South Korea calls emergency meeting to consider cryptocurrency regulations

South Korea’s central bank has called an emergency meeting to discuss cryptocurrencies as bitcoin speculation sweeps the country.

Reuters reported Tuesday that officials are not saying exactly what will be on the table at the meeting. But policymakers in the country have been called upon to regulate cryptocurrency markets because of ongoing volatility, saying that trading in it has created something called “bitcoin zombies.”

Local English language news source The Korea Times said the term refers to “those who check the bitcoin price day and night expecting its value to increase.” The publication added, “More and more people have been jumping onto the bitcoin bandwagon in recent weeks when the value for the cryptocurrency surged by a huge margin.”

Suggesting that the concept of “bitcoin zombies” may be real, CNN claims that South Korea has gone “bitcoin wild.” Students reportedly are checking the price between classes, workers are trading it as they line up for coffee and grandparents are playing the market at home.

There are two possible options South Korea may be considering: an outright ban on cryptocurrency trading or the implementation of strict regulations. Although the ban option may be extreme, South Korea did ban initial coin offerings in September.

In October, the country’s finance minister, Kim Dong-yeon, told local media that he was “reviewing the role of virtual currencies such as bitcoin” and that “currently, the finance committee is preparing countermeasures against virtual money at the level of the government, and it should be dealt with as an axis of the economy in the financial sector.”

Local traders believe new regulations are the likely outcome from the emergency meeting. Joyce Kim, co-founder of the South Korean cryptocurrency startup Stellar, said she believes that the Korean government will regulate bitcoin exchanges but not ban them. “Exchanges will have six reasonable requirements on KYC/AML, key storage, separation of fiat into 3rd party accounts, consumer warnings (about) trading, transparency of orderbook,” Kim claimed.

Despite figures from Bitcoincharts suggesting that South Korean won bitcoin trading only accounts for 4 percent of the global market, the news nonetheless spooked markets. The price of bitcoin dropped from an intraday high of $17,623.45 to trade at $16,640.68 as of 10:20 p.m. EST.

Futures traders on the Cboe Global Markets exchange were less negative on the news. XBT.1 January 2018 bitcoin futures contracts traded at $17,550, only slightly down from their price of $17,760 at this time Monday.

Photo: Pixabay

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