The South Korean financial authorities plan to raise the requirement for the proportion of cold wallet custody at exchanges to 99%

According to a report by South Korea's News1, industry sources say that the Financial Services Commission (FSC) of South Korea held an emergency security inspection meeting on November 2 with major cryptocurrency exchanges and custodians, using the Binance theft incident as an opportunity to discuss increasing the proportion of cold wallet custody at exchanges. The current proposal is to raise this proportion from the 80% stipulated by the existing Virtual Asset User Protection Act to around 99%, which is maintained by some large exchanges.

It is reported that the cold wallet custody ratio of Upbit user assets exceeds 99%, Bithumb is about 94%, Coinone is 85%, and exchanges like GOPAX are just above 80%. Industry insiders warn that increasing the ratio will reduce the assets available for immediate withdrawals in hot wallets, which may lead to withdrawal delays and increase the operational burden on small and medium-sized exchanges. In August of this year, Bithumb experienced delays of about 13 hours for withdrawals of some altcoins due to insufficient hot wallet balances. This proposal is still under discussion and has not yet been finalized.