South Korea emerged as East Asia's largest cryptocurrency market, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. By country, South Korea stood out for retail investment, Japan for decentralised exchanges (DEX) and China for peer-to-peer (P2P) trading.

CoinPost reported on Oct. 6 that blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis analysed on-chain flows from July 2025 to June 2026 and estimated South Korea's cryptocurrency economy at $449.1 billion, or about 603.05 trillion won. That was up 12.3 percent from a year earlier. Japan ranked second at $228.3 billion, or about 306.56 trillion won, followed by Hong Kong at $192.2 billion, or about 258.00 trillion won, China at $176.3 billion, or about 236.70 trillion won, and Taiwan at $140.4 billion, or about 188.50 trillion won.

In South Korea, active trading by retail investors drove growth. AI-related tokens in particular emerged as the biggest theme in won-denominated trading. As of June, the share of AI token trading in the won market was 19.5 times that of the yen market, and Worldcoin trading volume alone totalled $7.41 billion, or about 9.95 trillion won. South Korea currently does not levy tax on capital gains from cryptocurrency trading, but taxation is scheduled from 2027 under the current law.

In Japan, expanded use of DEX stood out. DEX accounted for 34.5 percent of cryptocurrency service inflows, the highest among major markets in the region. Since 2022, DEX activity rose by more than 200 percent, while centralised exchange activity stagnated. Store-of-value tokens such as bitcoin still accounted for the largest share at 73.8 percent of yen trading volume, but smart contract tokens such as Ethereum and Solana expanded to 15.4 percent.

In China, P2P accounted for 59.1 percent of the cryptocurrency economy amid exchange regulations. The number of unique wallets participating in stablecoin P2P remittances rose 43-fold from the first quarter of 2024 to the second quarter of 2026. Chainalysis suggested it was possible that the social credit system, expanded into finance and the internet sector, affected increased use of unofficial financial channels.

The analysis said that within the same cryptocurrency market, East Asia is forming clearly different structures by country, such as retail investment in South Korea, decentralised finance (DeFi) in Japan, institutional finance in Hong Kong and P2P in China.