The Bank of Korea has been surveying 31 South Korean financial firms since 23 October on how far they have gone into crypto and how three kinds of shock would hit them, Herald Business reported on Monday 2 November, citing financial-industry sources. The Bank of Korea crypto survey went to 18 banks, among them KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana, Woori and NH NongHyup, and to 13 brokerages. Answers are due on 4 November, according to the Korean outlets Youth Daily and Financial Post. Herald Business calls it the first survey of its kind by the central bank.
The Bank of Korea has published nothing on it: we found no press release, in English or Korean, and no outlet has printed the questionnaire. Two unnamed central bank officials are quoted by Herald Business, so the survey is more than industry talk. The Korean reports we read cite the same kind of source on the same morning, though, and may not be independent of each other. Cointelegraph, which ran it the same day, also credits Yonhap, which we have not read.
It is a request for information. Nothing reported so far describes a new rule, a ban or a stress test with published results, and no outlet gives a figure for what these firms hold in crypto.
What the Bank of Korea crypto survey asks firms
According to Herald Business, the questionnaire covers how each firm has organised and budgeted its crypto work, how far it has entered the market and what it plans next. It also asks how the firm assesses the risks of that business, which controls it has in place, and how much it has invested in crypto companies at home and abroad. Cointelegraph adds staffing and the reasons firms give for entering.
The officials give two motives. One is the law. “Financial institutions are making their own preparations even as virtual asset legislation is moving more slowly than the market expected,” one told Herald Business, adding that the aim was to “get an early read on what lies ahead”. The other is a hole in the data: firms file business reports with the Financial Supervisory Service, but a second official said “coverage of virtual asset-related activities is still lacking”. Those are Herald Business’s AI-assisted English renderings; its Korean original carries the same three remarks.
Use of the answers looks modest for now. Youth Daily and Financial Post say they will be internal reference material, and Financial Post adds that they will feed financial stability policy.
Three shocks, one of them a halt at Korea’s largest exchange
Herald Business and Cointelegraph describe the same three scenarios, and firms are asked how each would affect them:
- The largest exchange in South Korea by market share suspends operations after a large hack or a similar incident.
- The price of bitcoin and other crypto assets falls steeply, and a long slump in trading follows.
- Another financial firm suffers heavy losses from a crypto-related incident.
No outlet we read names the exchange. None says what size of price fall or length of halt firms must assume, or how they are meant to measure the damage. The first scenario is easier to follow with the basics of how a centralized exchange holds customer assets: clients depend on one company to reach their funds, so a halt there hits everyone connected to it at once. The third looks past crypto itself, at whether one firm’s loss could reach another.
The survey started before the Binance hack
Timing makes this story easy to misread. The survey began on 23 October. The theft at Binance came on or about 29 October, and the FBI has since attributed it to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group, putting the loss at “more than $6 billion”. Cointelegraph and Herald Business both give $6.3 billion. Cointelegraph states plainly that the survey came first, and treats the hack only as an example of the risk the central bank is examining. Herald Business mentions it as a source of tension in the Korean industry.
So the questionnaire was not a response to Binance, and the exchange in the scenario is the leader of the Korean market. Nothing we read says the hack changed the survey.
A closer Korean backdrop already existed. Cointelegraph reported on 15 October that the Financial Services Commission had proposed tighter security rules after a review found deficiencies at 130 of 555 financial companies. Security incidents at 16 companies, crypto exchanges among them, lay behind it.
What the central bank said about crypto risk before this survey
The survey follows two documents we have read on the bank’s own site. The Financial Stability Report of June 2026, released in Korean on 24 June, says the link between bitcoin and US shares has stayed stronger than in the past since US spot bitcoin ETFs arrived in 2024. At home, it says crypto prices “do not appear to have significant spillover effects” on Korean markets “at least for the time being”, because crypto ETFs cannot trade there and corporate participation is limited.
The caveat is the part that reads like a brief for this survey. Bitcoin’s correlation with the KOSPI has stayed elevated, the report says, and if institutions and companies join in, price swings could reach Korean shares and the currency through gains or losses on their holdings. Those developments, it says, “warrant close monitoring”.
The same report gives the scale of the domestic market the banks sit beside. Korean investors held 64.9 trillion won of crypto at five exchanges at the end of March, down from 81.7 trillion at the end of 2025, or about 1.8% of global market value. Customer cash at those exchanges was 7.2 trillion won, which by law must be placed with or entrusted to banks. That money is a banking link that already exists, whatever the firms answer in the survey.
The second document is the bank’s white paper on won stablecoins. It warned of short-term rate volatility, collateral shortfalls and risk passing between crypto and traditional markets through coin runs, in a passage Herald Business quotes accurately. Herald Business dates the paper to November 2025. The bank’s site and the paper’s own foreword say 27 October 2025.
Banks are moving toward crypto ahead of the law
The firms being asked are not bystanders. Cointelegraph points to KB Financial’s won stablecoin pilot, completed in May, and to the memorandum signed in September by Kakao Pay, KakaoBank and Fireblocks. KB is reportedly preparing to launch stablecoin services once Korea’s digital asset rules are in place, Cointelegraph wrote in May.
Those rules are late. Cointelegraph says disputes over which institutions may issue stablecoins have complicated the Digital Asset Basic Act, with the Bank of Korea pushing for bank-led issuance.
What is still unknown, and the next dates
We do not know whether the Bank of Korea will publish any of the results, in what form or when. Thirteen of the 18 banks and all 13 brokerages are unnamed. We saw no market reaction attributed to the survey.
For readers outside South Korea, nothing changes today. The survey concerns Korean firms and no source we read links it to US or European regulators.
The first date is the 4 November deadline. The Bitcoin Korea Conference runs in Seoul on 7-8 November. On tax, the 22% levy on crypto gains is still due on 1 January 2027 under current law, and a ruling-party lawmaker said on 30 October that any delay must be settled by the tax subcommittee in late November, ZDNet Korea reported. Closest to the central bank is 3 December, when exchanges start reporting crypto sent abroad under an amended law; the bank planned to fix the scope of those reports this month.