Trading Bitcoin Gets Employees of South Korean Crypto Exchange, Bithumb, Banned

Bithumb Prohibits Bitcoin Trading For Its Employees

One of South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Bithumb, issues notice to ban employees who participate in Bitcoin trading. This signifies that the employees can no longer access internal accounts on the platform for trading. The CEO of Bithumb labels this as a move to ensure ‘transaction transparency’.

The Agreement With Its Employees

Bithumb’s management had conveyed this information to its employees in June. The information conveyed states that by July, the trading accounts of employees will face an indefinite ban. However, if the employees do not comply, they will be fined 100 million won ($88,000). The employees even took an oath to stop leveraging the platform.

The Oath Taken

The oath is as follows:

“From this month on, we will strictly manage whether or not employees comply with the regulations through continuous monitoring, self-audits, and internal reporting system operations.”

A Closed-Door Meeting

Recently the Financial Supervisory Service of South Korea mentioned that they would oversee South Korea’s crypto market themselves. Following this, a closed-door meeting took place between South Korean regulators and twenty other digital currency exchanges. One of the twenty was Bithumb, and following this secretive meeting, the employee ban was imposed. Other South Korean crypto exchanges, Upbit and Korbit, will also be following the same move.

The New Law

All this is regarding an upcoming law that will become effective from the 25th of September. This particular law requires local crypto exchanges to partner with banks by the 24th of September. Subsequently, this move is to open real-name bank accounts for customers to reduce fraudulent transfers. While bigger exchanges will meet the requirements easily, the smaller ones cannot. So this law might just shut down as many as fifty smaller exchanges.