How did South Korea become the largest Ethereum trading market, surpassing China and the United States?

According to Ethereum price analysis on May 2, South Korea has officially become the world’s largest Ethereum trading market, surpassing China and the United States for the first time.

The Korean market's average daily trading volume of 1.05亿美元has triggered the interest of both institutional and retail investors around the world.

Five days later, Bithumb, South Korea’s largest digital currency exchange, still maintained the largest position in the global market for Ethereum-to-fiat currency trading volume, with a single-day trading volume of 1400万美元, accounting for 10.7% of the market share. Bithumb’s trading volume even surpassed Coinbase’s digital currency exchange GDAX, leading by $11.57 million.

Reasons for the increase in demand in South Korea

Judging from the current state of Ethereum development and the state of the Ethereum ecosystem in South Korea, the migration from Bitcoin to Ethereum and other altcoins seems to be a strategy of local investors to get a piece of the altcoin boom.

Cryptocurrencies like Litecoin (LTC) and Ripple have also gained a lot of support in the Korean community.

Most people still choose to support the Ethereum market as its price has achieved significant growth in the past few months and large companies such as Sony have also shown interest in the Ethereum network.

Since January this year, the market value of Ethereum has grown from $700 million to $9 billion, a nearly 13-fold increase in just five months. Investors have begun to choose to invest in cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, and the price of Ethereum happened to be rising, so it attracted the attention of most people.

At the time, the attention paid to the development of Ethereum by multi-billion dollar groups such as Sony further sparked local investors’ interest in the cryptocurrency.

A member of the Ethereum online community wrote:

I just attended a panel about fraud in the gaming industry. When asked about future developments, Sony's fraud prevention expert specifically mentioned Ethereum. I talked to her privately after the meeting and she knows a lot about smart contracts, and Ethereum seems to be on their development agenda. Fraud prevention seems to be part of their future research.

But he added:

But it’s too early to launch a dedicated project. Platform operators are still resistant to such changes.

While Sony’s announcement regarding Ethereum is not the main factor driving the global market for this cryptocurrency, it is enough of a boost for the South Korean market.

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

One thing that further convinced investors of Ethereum’s value was a surge in demand for the cryptocurrency in South Korea, as major groups such as Microsoft and JPMorgan joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA).

In addition, offline Ethereum meetups and conferences are also popular in South Korea. The community has begun to discuss the potential of decentralized applications (Dapps) and blockchain innovation.