South Korea Urges Exchanges to Increase Cold Storage

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission urged domestic cryptocurrency exchanges to increase the share of customer assets held in offline cold wallets, following the theft of about $6.3 billion from Binance hot wallets. The commission said the request came after an emergency review of the incident and exchanges’ security measures. The FSC said it convened regulators and industry participants to assess the breach’s potential impact on South Korea’s crypto market. The review included information-technology access controls, wallet withdrawal approvals and signing procedures, and the use of administrator privileges. The regulator also called for continuous monitoring of deposits and withdrawals, prompt reporting of unusual access attempts, additional incident-response staffing and reserves, and other security measures that could be implemented immediately. South Korean law already requires exchanges to keep at least 80% of customer cryptocurrency in cold storage. Financial Supervisory Service data cited in local media showed that, at the end of September, reported cold-storage ratios among major exchanges ranged from 80.54% at GOPAX to 99.17% at Upbit. Bithumb’s ratio was...