South Korean crypto exchanges report 566K foreign accounts, but only 90 are active

South Korea’s crypto market has a ghost town problem. Exchanges across the country are sitting on 566,352 foreign-held accounts, and last month, exactly 90 of them did anything at all. That 0.01% activation rate, drawn from a report released by Rep. Park Sang-hyuk, is one of those numbers that looks like a typo until you do the math twice. It isn’t. The overwhelming majority of those accounts are simply sitting there, untouched. The numbers behind the dormancy Bithumb dominates the foreign account roster, holding roughly 484,846 of the 566,352 total accounts on its own. Across all exchanges, only 517 foreign accounts have completed KYC verification, which is 0.09% of the total pool. The value of digital assets and cash deposits sitting in those dormant foreign accounts comes to about 30.36 billion won, or approximately $21.9 million. For context, that is not a lot of money for half a million accounts. It works out to roughly $38 per account on average. Corporate accounts tell a similar story. Of 6,590 total corporate accounts, only 29 were active last month. Corporate KYC completion was higher at 711 accounts, or about 10.8% of the total, but active participation remained nearly no...