upbit

ApeCoin surges 1,950% on South Korean crypto exchange Upbit

The APE/BTC trading pair reached an all-time high of around $90 apiece on the exchange.

On April 12, Yuga Labs’ ERC-20 token ApeCoin (APE) briefly surged to $90.00 from around $4.20 apiece on the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit before most gains were wiped out in a sharp sell-off. However, the token is still trading at $10.90 apiece at the time of publication, representing a significant premium of around $4.50 compared to other exchanges.

Currently, the only APE trading pair listed on Upbit is BTC/APE; it represents only a tiny portion of the coin’s trading volume, with around 4 million tokens changing hands during the day compared to APE’s overall circulation of 369 million tokens. It appears the spike was attributed to an overall retail frenzy and constriction of available trading routes on the exchange. On the same day, Upbit suspended the deposits and withdrawals of Ether (ETH) and ERC-20 tokens, pending the completion of the Ethereum network’s Shanghai upgrade.

As a result, APE, an ERC-20 token regarded by some as a memecoin, could not be sold nor purchased into other ERC-20 tokens such as Tether (USDT) and ETH by Upbit’s users, leaving the Bitcoin (BTC)-to-APE (BTC/USD) trading pair the only available option. Since the rally, crypto price aggregators such as CoinMarketCap have flagged Upbit’s APE pricing as an “outlier” when computing aggregate prices.

Cointelegraph reported last year that Upbit had achieved a near monopoly in South Korea’s crypto exchange landscape, with total assets of $8 billion and 80% of the domestic trading volume. However, authorities are reportedly considering regulatory restrictions to tame the size of the firm’s operations.

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Korean police seize crypto for unpaid traffic fines in trial

Local police in a suburb of Seoul have the authority to seize crypto in order to clear the balance of delinquent fines from traffic violations.

A South Korean town near Seoul has been successfully operating a pilot program that allows police to seize crypto from the exchange accounts of individuals with delinquent traffic fines.

Gunpo, a city of about 275,000 in the northwestern Gyeonggi province, was selected by the national government to execute the pilot program in 2022. A Tuesday report from the JoongBoo Ilbo news outlet stated was a way to collect delinquent funds in an “untact,” or contactless fashion.

The program appears to have been successful, at least in the first half of 2022, with Gunpo police achieving an 88% collection rate on traffic fines amounting to $668,000, putting the city on pace to vastly exceed its goal of chasing $759,000 in traffic fines by the end of the year.

However, the trial only saw delinquent fines totaling an excess of about $759 by an individual subject to crypto seizures by the police, while crypto seizures were only a measure taken if the funds in the individual’s bank accounts have already been exhausted.

Jungo Ilbo reported that the fines collected through the first half already exceed the total annual collections over each of the past three years.

The Korean crypto market is a lucrative one for law enforcement to extract fines from as it grew to $45.9 billion in 2021, though the report did not state which crypto would be seized and sold to pay fines.