Real-name accounts
The defining feature of the Korean regime is the real-name account requirement. A virtual asset service provider must register with the Korea Financial Intelligence Unit, and registration in practice depends on securing a real-name verified account arrangement with a Korean bank, under which a customer’s exchange account is matched to a bank account in the same verified name.
This is a structural rather than procedural control. It eliminates anonymous fiat on-ramps, and it gives banks an effective gatekeeping role over which exchanges can operate at all — a number of smaller exchanges have been unable to secure such arrangements and have exited.
The Virtual Asset User Protection Act
In force from July 2024, this legislation moved Korea beyond an AML-centric framework into user protection. Its provisions address segregation of user deposits, holding a proportion of user assets in cold storage, insurance or reserve requirements against hacking and system failure, and explicit prohibitions on market abuse including the use of undisclosed material information and price manipulation.
The market-abuse provisions matter for how incidents are handled: conduct that would previously have been a matter for an exchange’s own rules became a statutory offence with regulatory investigation attached.
Tax
Taxation of individual gains from virtual assets has been legislated and then postponed on more than one occasion. Because the effective date has moved repeatedly, any summary risks being out of date within months. The National Tax Service and the FSC are the sources to check, and Conisec deliberately does not state an effective date here that it cannot stand behind on the review date shown on this page.
Sources
- Financial Services Commission (Korea), Virtual asset policy and legislation (1 Jan 2026)
Not legal or tax advice. This is a summary of published rules, not legal or tax advice. Rules change; check the primary sources linked above.
Last reviewed by Conisec Staff. Review cadence: Quarterly.