AI Tokens Propelled South Korea’s Crypto Market to Top in East Asia — Chainalysis

• South Korea became East Asia’s leading crypto market, with a volume of $449 billion.
• This was driven by investors’ bet on AI tokens.
• It outpaced Japan and Hong Kong.

South Korea became East Asia’s largest crypto market from July 2025 to June 2026, building an economy worth $449.1 billion, according to a Chainalysis report. Its crypto market grew 12.3% year over year, with retail investors remaining the main driver as they actively traded tokens tied to artificial intelligence (AI). 

For comparison, Japan’s crypto economy totaled $228.3 billion, Hong Kong’s — $192.2 billion, China’s — $176.3 billion, and Taiwan’s — $140.4 billion.

South Korea Bet on AI Cryptocurrencies

According to Chainalysis, the growth of the Korean market was largely driven by the centralized crypto exchange segment, whose volume increased by 16.3%. At the same time, institutional participation remains limited due to legislative barriers.

“South Korea is famously retail-driven crypto market,” said Francis Kan, executive director of Korea Blockchain Week.

He said large financial institutions are only beginning to prepare for a broader push into the crypto sector. 

“Every major bank and securities firm now has a digital asset team, and most are running stablecoin, tokenization, or custody pilots,” Kan added.

One of the Korean market’s defining features was the popularity of AI tokens. By June 2026, they had become the largest thematic category by share of trading volume in Korean won, surpassing, among others, payment tokens such as XRP.

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Trading volumes in AI cryptocurrencies against the Korean won were 19.5 times higher than the same metric for the Japanese yen. Among the most popular assets were:

• Worldcoin (WLD) — $7.41 billion in volume
• SAHARA — $3.2 billion
• VIRTUAL — $2.7 billion
• BIO — $2 billion
• NEAR — $1.7 billion

At the same time, segment leaders are changing quickly: VIRTUAL and KAITO tokens, popular in 2025, have given way to Worldcoin and SAHARA. Chainalysis noted that Korean retail traders rotate between AI assets faster and more actively than participants in other surveyed markets.

Japan and Hong Kong Move in a Different Direction

Japan’s crypto market remained the second-largest in the region, with one standout feature being high activity on decentralized exchanges (DEX). They accounted for a 34.5% share of the services segment — the highest figure among East Asian countries with a mature centralized market.

Activity on Japanese DEX has risen by more than 200% since 2022, while centralized exchange usage has remained nearly unchanged. Roughly one in four users who withdraw funds from Japanese crypto exchanges later transfer them into DeFi protocols.

“The most visible activity is in perps,” said Taishi Sato, DeFimans CEO. 

According to him, Japanese traders use venues like Hyperliquid alongside stock portfolios “to manage directional and macro exposure, rather than treating them purely as crypto-native trading venues.”

Meanwhile, Hong Kong has become the region’s main institutional crypto hub. Institutional platforms, including OTC desks, custodians, and market makers, drove 16% of inflows into the city’s services segment — nearly three times more than in any other East Asian market.

Over the study period, Hong Kong received nearly $24 billion in domestic B2B transfers, while net cumulative institutional capital inflows via regulated services since mid-2022 reached $17.4 billion.

A separate trend emerged in China, where, despite the ban on crypto services, P2P transactions dominate. The share of the domestic P2P segment reached 59.1% of the crypto economy, and the number of unique wallets sending stablecoins between users increased 43-fold from Q1 2024 to Q2 2026.

As a reminder, South Korea plans to pass a digital assets law in the second half of 2026.

Сообщение AI Tokens Propelled South Korea’s Crypto Market to Top in East Asia — Chainalysis появились сначала на INCRYPTED.