Domestic stablecoin trading volume 'sign of a sharp decline'?…Reduced to one-fifth in half a year

Observers say the trading scale of the domestic stablecoin market is rapidly shrinking. At the end of last year, the average daily trading volume exceeded 1 trillion won, but in just half a year it fell to the 200 billion won range, shrinking to about one-fifth.

On the 10th, according to data submitted to Representative Park Seong-hoon (People Power Party), a member of the National Assembly's Strategy and Finance Committee, by the Bank of Korea, as of June this year the average daily trading volume of stablecoins on Korea's five major virtual asset exchanges was 238 billion won. This figure is about a 77% decrease compared with December last year (1.0229 trillion won).

Dollar stablecoins traded on major domestic virtual asset (cryptocurrency) exchanges (USDT·USDC·USDS) steadily increased in the second half of last year and peaked in December. Since then, they have turned to a downward trend this year, recording 923.8 billion won in January and 879.4 billion won in February, and falling to the 200 billion won range by June.

In a recently released Financial Stability Report, the Bank of Korea analyzed, "While the increase in market capitalization of global virtual assets is being maintained, especially global stablecoins saw an increase in domestic investors' trading volume earlier this year due to factors such as the enactment of related U.S. legislation, but recently the upward trend has stalled."