SEOUL — South Korea accounts for roughly 30% of global cryptocurrency trading volume. Its retail investors hold more altcoins, proportionally, than almost anywhere else in the world. And yet, when those investors try to contact the teams behind the tokens they own, most of the time, nobody answers.
That is the central finding of a two-week investigation by TokenPost, which attempted to reach all 637 projects listed on South Korea's five major won-denominated exchanges — not as journalists, but as ordinary retail investors.
The results were stark. Only 51 projects, or about 8%, responded. More than 140 had no publicly available email address. Twenty-seven are currently suspended or facing delisting. The remaining majority offered silence.
"This isn't a PR problem," said Sungmin Kwon, Editorial Director of TokenPost, which has covered the domestic crypto market since its founding in 2017. "It's a gap in investor protection."
A Market Built on Altcoins, Increasingly in the Dark
South Korea's outsized role in global crypto markets has long been documented. According to research firm Kaiko, the country's weekly trading volume reached $26 billion, representing approximately 30% of worldwide crypto turnover — a figure that dwarfs Japan's monthly volume of $20 billion to $30 billion.
The composition of that trading, however, raises concerns. Kaiko data shows that retail investors in Korea allocate 85% of their crypto holdings to altcoins, with Bitcoin accounting for just 9% and Ethereum 6%. Korea is, by this measure, the world's most aggressively altcoin-oriented market.
The timing is troubling. Roughly 40% of altcoins are currently trading near all-time lows — a level that exceeds the 37.8% recorded in the immediate aftermath of the FTX collapse in late 2022. Korean retail investors are heavily exposed to some of the most distressed assets in the global crypto market, and many of them cannot get a response from the teams managing those assets.
The Numbers Behind the Silence
TokenPost's investigation, conducted between April 21 and May 5, covered all projects listed across Upbit (254 tokens), Bithumb (453), Coinone (387), Korbit (198), and Gopax (132), with duplicates removed to arrive at 637 unique projects. Only 32 tokens are listed across all five exchanges simultaneously.
Critically, the investigation deliberately avoided using journalist access, exchange relationships, or industry contacts. The team used only the methods available to any retail investor: official project websites, public social channels, and publicly listed email addresses.