

South Korea’s finance minister said Wednesday that the country now has no plans to ban cryptocurrency trading, in the latest proclamation from a government that has been fighting internally over a proposal to do just that.
The announcement came from Kim Dong-yeon, the very same finance minister who said in a radio interview Jan. 16 that “the option of banning cryptocurrency trading was still on the table,” despite another government official saying the day before that the government wasn’t considering a ban.
“There is no intention to ban or suppress cryptocurrency (market),” Reuters quotes Kim as saying, adding that the government’s immediate task is to regulate exchanges.
Regulation of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency exchanges has been the alternative plan on the table for South Korea since it banned initial coin offerings in September. An emergency meeting was called in December, followed by the announcement of regulations just prior to the new year that included a ban on anonymous bitcoin trading and restrictions on cryptocurrency exchanges. The Reuters report noted that additional regulations now being considered include measures to prevent illegal foreign exchange trading using cryptocurrencies.
The news that South Korea, at least today, wasn’t banning cryptocurrency exchanges was also joined by an announcement from CoinMarketCap, a leading source of global cryptocurrency prices, that it would return South Korean markets to their tracking services. The site had previously stopped including price data from the country, citing “the extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity.”
Bitcoin itself turned a corner after having dropped below $10,000 on news that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex for fraud. As of 9 p.m. EST, it was trading at $10,117.46.
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