South Korea's largest Bitcoin exchange Korbit announced support for ETC transactions, no handling fees

Korbit, South Korea’s largest bitcoin exchange, has announced the launch of Ethereum Classic (ETC) trading, allowing Korbit users to buy and sell ETC for Korean won without any transaction fees.

On July 18 this year, the Korbit development team officially announced its decision to suspend Ethereum transactions — including the storage and withdrawal of ETH — in order to protect users from the impact of the hard fork.

South Korea's first major Bitcoin exchange to support ETC

The Korbit team had told users to restart Ethereum transactions once the Ethereum network stabilized after the hard fork.

The Korbit team told customers via email:

“In response to the hard fork, all ETH deposits and withdrawals will be stopped at 5pm on Wednesday, July 20, or one hour before the hard fork. Once the Ethereum network is stable after the hard fork, we will reopen ETH deposits and withdrawals.”

However, unexpectedly, this hard fork gave birth to ETC, a network dedicated to the development and maintenance of the original chain of the Ethereum network. As ETC's market value and trading volume grew (due to the support of large global cryptocurrency exchanges Poloniex and Kraken), the Korbit team decided to become the first large-scale Bitcoin exchange in South Korea to support ETC.

All ETC transactions will be zero-cost

More importantly, in order to accelerate the development of this new trading feature, the Korbit team announced that all ETC transactions will be zero-cost, temporarily eliminating trading and exchange fees for all users.

The Korbit team said:

“Korbit’s ETC-Korean Won (KRW) trading has launched. You can now trade ETC with KRW directly on the exchange. Similar to our BTC-KRW, you can trade ETC by setting your own price in a full order, as well as depositing ETC through our website. To celebrate the launch of this new exchange, there will be no fees for trading ETC for a short period of time.”

Korbit, one of the two venture capital-backed Bitcoin exchanges in South Korea, currently controls the majority of the market share of the Korean cryptocurrency market, with very high daily trading volume and orders. Korbit received $3 million in Series A funding in 2014.

With Korbit fully supporting ETC, it is likely that other Korean exchanges will also launch ETC trading in the near future.