Over Half of South Koreans Have Crypto Trading Experience – Survey

A new survey has found that over half of South Korean adults have previously traded or currently trade crypto.

The survey was conducted by the Korea Financial Consumer Protection Foundation (KFCPF), the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported on April 22.

Half of South Koreans Now Trading Crypto, Survey Finds

The KFCPF spoke to 2,500 men and women aged 19 to 69. Respondents were all residents of Seoul, Gyeonggi Province, and six other metropolitan areas.

The survey also found that 52% of respondents said they had “made a profit” through their crypto investments.

And while over three-quarters of the respondents said they had traded or currently hold Bitcoin (BTC), the survey showed that South Koreans are also altcoin-keen.

On average, respondents said they hold or have traded more than three types of coin. Bitcoin took first place in the popularity stakes with 76%.

Following behind were Ethereum (ETH) with 52.8%, XRP with 32.2%, Dogecoin (DOGE) with 24.6%, and Solana (SOL) with 14.7%.

Most of the respondents said their crypto buys were a form of investment. However, a large minority said they were also motivated by “curiosity about cryptoassets.”

A much smaller minority still said they had bought crypto to access “specific services” or “use in transactions in place of fiat.”

Most people said they had made profits under the 10 million won ($7,000) mark, with the majority also saying they had sold their coins less than a year after buying them.

The news agency remarked that “short-term, small-sum investments” accounted for the majority of retail activity in the South Korean crypto market.

A growing wave of illegal high-interest lending in South Korea is leaving young borrowers trapped in cycles of debt and fear.https://t.co/QPbmXGTL1r

— The Korea Herald 코리아헤럴드 (@TheKoreaHerald) April 22, 2025

Scams and Hacks – Taking Their Toll?

However, one in five of the crypto traders said they had experienced financial losses “related to cryptoassets” from incidents such as crypto exchange hacks, bankruptcies, and outages.

The responses also showed that a large number of South Korean investors have fallen for crypto scams.

Forty-five percent of respondents said they had been duped by “false investment information” on crypto “reading rooms.”

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— The Korea Times (@koreatimescokr) April 21, 2025

In South Korea, this term refers to open, crypto-themed chatrooms on the Telegram and KakaoTalk chat apps.

A third of respondents also said they had been duped into investing in fake cryptoassets and illegal crypto exchanges.

The vast majority of these people (67.7%) said they “did not take any action after suffering damage” at the hands of crypto scammers.

Earlier this week, the Central Bank claimed that citizens held some $73.4 billion worth of crypto in exchange wallets at the end of 2024.