South Korean cryptocurrency investors sent $110 billion (about 158.62 trillion won) to overseas exchanges in 2025, keeping up trading activity, blockchain media outlet Cryptopolitan reported on Thursday.

A joint report by CoinGecko and Tiger Research said the number of cryptocurrency investors in South Korea exceeded 10 million, about 20 percent of the population. In some cases, won-based trading among global fiat currency pairs also exceeded U.S. dollar trading volume, showing strong participation by domestic investors.

About 124 trillion won flowed from domestic exchanges to overseas exchanges from January to September 2025, triple the level in 2023. The report pointed to regulation at domestic exchanges as a main reason South Korean investors move funds to overseas centralised exchanges, or CEXs. Domestic exchanges allow only spot trading, but overseas exchanges offer a range of investment options such as leveraged derivatives, leading investors to look abroad, it said.

In 2025, fees paid by South Korean investors to overseas exchanges totalled 4.77 trillion won: 2.73 trillion won to Binance, 1.12 trillion won to Bybit, 580 billion won to OKX, 270 billion won to Bitget and 70 billion won to Huobi. That is 2.7 times the annual operating revenue of Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone and Gopax, at 1.78 trillion won.

Despite South Korean government regulation, investors moved 2.7 trillion won from centralised exchanges to personal wallets such as MetaMask during the first half of 2025. CoinGecko said, "Decentralised perpetual futures exchanges (Perp DEXs) are growing rapidly, and South Korean investors are increasingly choosing decentralised exchanges."

The report said improvements in transaction speed, user experience and liquidity at decentralised exchanges are increasing the likelihood that South Korean investors will move funds there rather than to overseas centralised exchanges. Investors prefer overseas platforms to find more investment options, and decentralised exchanges are also emerging as a strong alternative.