Upbit's trading volume rose 273 percent in the wake of the recent Bitcoin rally. Within 24 hours, the South Korean crypto exchange handled USD 1.84 billion, its highest daily volume since mid-March 2026.

Upbit is South Korea's largest crypto exchange and belongs to operator Dunamu. On the platform, investors swap the local currency, the won, for cryptocurrencies. Offering that won pairing requires a real-name banking partnership under South Korean rules, and only five exchanges in the country hold one. Most recently, Upbit handled almost twice the volume of Bithumb. Before that, a bear market had pushed Bitcoin from around USD 90,000 down to USD 60,000, a decline that had run since early 2026. At the same time, the benchmark KOSPI index nearly doubled in the first half, driven by the semiconductor boom at Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Korean capital therefore flowed into equities instead of tokens. Now part of it is coming back. On Upbit, XRP led the ranking with USD 418.9 million. Bithumb, the country's number two, also reported a gain of 132.9 percent.

XRP Leads the Trading Volume Rally at Upbit and Bithumb

At USD 1.84 billion in 24 hours, Upbit reached its highest daily turnover since mid-March 2026. The figure comes close to four times the previous day. XRP led the activity and accounted for USD 418.9 million on its own, with Bitcoin, the stablecoin USDT and Ether following. The ranking stands out because an altcoin rather than Bitcoin delivered the largest single share of turnover. For Korean retail investors this is less unusual than it may look elsewhere: trading on local venues has long skewed toward large-cap altcoins, and XRP has regularly ranked among the most-traded assets on Upbit and Bithumb.

Bithumb, the country's number two by volume, posted a gain of 132.9 percent to USD 934.9 million. XRP also topped the list of most-traded assets there, although the increase reached only half the strength of Upbit's. Together, the two exchanges thus handled almost USD 2.8 billion in a single day.

The price moves match this ranking. Bitcoin traded at around USD 77,700, 13.2 percent higher than 24 hours earlier. Ether added a comparatively moderate 8.4 percent to about USD 2,387. XRP, in contrast, jumped 25.2 percent to USD 1.37. Korean volume therefore concentrated on the asset with the strongest daily gain: a single altcoin accounted for a good fifth of Upbit's turnover.

The Impulse for the Bitcoin Rally Came from Washington

The recovery did not start in Seoul. The expanded announcement by the US Treasury on buybacks of its own bonds counts as the trigger. In such a buyback, the Treasury takes outstanding paper off the market and replaces it with new issuance. Markets read these operations as a signal for additional liquidity, and risky assets usually benefit first. Bitcoin then gained sharply within two trading days. Only afterwards did the Korean exchanges react.

For investors in South Korea, the impulse also met a changed environment. Since late June, the domestic equity market has swung more widely, and many investors kept their focus on the semiconductor rally.

The volume jump at Upbit is therefore the result of a global move, not its origin. A Korean volume jump without a preceding global impulse would instead signal demand of its own. The current increase shows investors following a rally that is already running. Consequently, markets outside South Korea will decide how far the effect carries. One yardstick observers use to separate genuinely local demand from a global move is the so-called kimchi premium, the spread between prices on Korean exchanges and global benchmarks; it has historically widened at moments of strong domestic buying, exceeding 40 percent at its early-2018 peak.

South Korea's Crypto Exchanges Lost Ground During the KOSPI Boom

The return meets exchanges that have just reported a weak half-year. Upbit operator Dunamu booked operating revenue of KRW 408.1 billion (USD 289 million) in the first half of 2026, a decline of 49.1 percent. Operating profit also slumped by 79.7 percent to KRW 111.5 billion (USD 79 million). At the bottom line, KRW 108.4 billion (USD 77 million) remained, 74.1 percent less than a year earlier.

Bithumb fared worse. Revenue fell 48.7 percent to KRW 168.8 billion (USD 120 million), a decline almost identical to Dunamu's. Operating profit shrank by 83.4 percent to KRW 14.9 billion (USD 11 million). A net profit of KRW 55 billion eventually turned into a net loss, which reached KRW 108.7 billion (USD 77 million). Revenue at both exchanges comes mainly from trading fees, so the profit collapse ran much deeper than the revenue decline. That dependence also cuts the other way: because fee income scales with turnover, the exchanges' next quarterly disclosures will show whether high-volume days like the current one are beginning to feed through to earnings.

Across all five licensed exchanges, trading volume fell to USD 146.4 billion in the second quarter, a drop of 49.5 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. Both houses attributed this to a contraction of liquidity in the global crypto market, which had weakened investor sentiment.

The contrast with the domestic equity market is equally clear. Bitcoin lost more than 30 percent in the first half, and Ethereum fell from USD 3,000 to around USD 1,600, while the KOSPI rose almost 100 percent over the same period. Capital and attention consequently moved to Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and the AI memory boom. A trading day worth USD 1.84 billion changes little about that record for now.