South Korea’s financial regulator plans to investigate transaction fees charged by domestic cryptocurrency exchanges, aiming to reduce trading costs for users, according to local media.
South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) will launch a probe into transaction fees imposed by local trading platforms and review potential intervening measures, the Herald Economy reported on Thursday.
The move is part of South Korea’s newly elected president Lee Jae-myung’s broader pro-crypto agenda. Lee reportedly promised to reduce crypto trading transaction costs to support young traders as part of his presidential campaign.
As part of the probe, the FSC plans to conduct a survey of crypto exchanges on their current fee systems, charging methods and collected amounts.
Do local exchanges charge more than overseas platforms?
According to Herald Economy, the FSC announced its plan to investigate crypto exchange fees during a policy briefing before the State Affairs Planning Committee, which serves as a presidential transition team for the Lee Jae-myung administration.
“We need to examine whether the current fees of domestic exchanges are an excessive burden on consumers and whether they are at an appropriate level compared to overseas cases,” an FSC official reportedly said.
The FSC also mentioned that it has not yet set a target commission rate and plans to establish policy standards based on a comparative analysis of domestic and foreign exchanges and user preferences.
Exchange supervision fee of 0.6% among previous efforts
South Korea’s plan to investigate the cost of crypto trades on exchanges comes months after the regulator reportedly requested exchanges to pay a 0.6% fee on operating revenue as a supervision fee in March 2025.
According to a report by the local news agency Naver, the estimated amount of annual supervision fees by the South Korean crypto industry would be 8 billion Korean won ($5.8 million).
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Operating revenue is based on the 2023 fiscal year, with Upbit’s parent firm, Dunamu, reportedly netting 986.2 billion won ($714 million), while smaller exchanges like Bithumb and Coinone totaled 135.8 billion ($98 million) won and 22.4 billion ($16 million) won that year, respectively.
Coinpectra approached the FSC and the local self-regulatory organization, Digital Asset eXchange Alliance (DAXA), for comment regarding the news but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
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