South Korea stablecoin outflows hit $10.4B, rivaling the country’s overseas stock investments

South Korea has a stablecoin problem, and the numbers are hard to ignore. Over 18 months, from January 2025 through June 2026, net stablecoin outflows from the country’s five major crypto exchanges reached $10.4 billion, or roughly ₩14.92 trillion. That figure now rivals the country’s total overseas stock investment over the same period, which is a comparison that tends to get policymakers’ attention fast.

The data comes from South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service, the country’s top financial regulator. It covers activity across Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and Gopax, the five exchanges that dominate domestic crypto trading. The pattern is consistent: Korean won gets converted into dollar-pegged stablecoins, and those stablecoins get moved offshore.

Where the money is going and why

Korean retail investors want access to higher leverage and financial products that domestic exchanges either don’t offer or aren’t permitted to offer under local rules. Stablecoins are the bridge. Convert won to USDT or USDC, move it to an offshore platform, and suddenly you have access to a much wider menu of risk.

In June 2026 alone, the outflow hit ₩560.3 billion, which works out to roughly $390 million in a single month. That monthly figure represented 77.6% of the net overseas stock purchases made by domestic investors during the same period. In Q2 2026, stablecoin outflows reached ₩1.69 trillion, slightly exceeding the ₩1.62 trillion in net selling recorded in overseas stocks during the same quarter.

The domestic market is feeling it

The active user ratio across the five major exchanges dropped from 35.7% at the end of January 2025 to just 19.5% by the end of June 2026. More than 400,000 KYC-verified users have stopped trading entirely since the peak activity recorded in March 2026.

Total virtual assets held by domestic investors have fallen by 54.7% over the same window.

Lawmakers Lee Jong-wook and Min Byeong-deok, both members of the National Assembly, have raised alarms about capital flight and called for a won-pegged stablecoin as a potential fix. The argument is intuitive: if Korean investors had access to a domestic stablecoin denominated in won, with competitive financial products built on top of it, the incentive to move assets offshore would be reduced. Right now, the domestic market offers the won but not the products. Offshore platforms offer the products but require dollar-denominated stablecoins to access them.

What this means for investors and the broader market

For anyone watching Korean crypto markets, the active user decline is the metric worth tracking most closely. A drop from 35.7% to 19.5% active user ratio is not a blip. It is a structural change that affects exchange economics, market depth, and the overall attractiveness of the domestic market to new participants.

South Korea has historically moved quickly on crypto regulation when it perceives systemic risk. The country introduced real-name account requirements for exchanges years before most Western regulators moved, and it passed its Virtual Asset User Protection Act with relatively little delay.

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