Survey Says South Koreans Invest $6k In Crypto

South Korea is among the few countries in the world that have started embracing cryptocurrency. Interestingly, a new survey suggests that people there are spending more fiat currency in an attempt to buy digital currencies. Here is everything about it in a nutshell.

Rise In Crypto Purchases

The survey was conducted back in December last year by the Korea Financial Investors Protection Foundation, which is a non-profit organization. Based on the obtained results, around 7.4 percent of 2,500 people who participated in the survey had purchased digital currency.

Apparently, the aforementioned figure was up by one percent on the prior year. And this even happened despite the many hurdles that the industry faced locally. These challenges, in particular, are mostly hacks experienced by crypto exchanges, as well as the many instances of shifting regulations.

It should be noted that the number of buyers is not the only that changed. Out of all those individuals who now owned digital currencies, a good number of them purchased more when compared to their buying decisions before.

When compared to 2017, the average investment per individual has increased to 64 percent. This is basically around $6,000 based on the results provided by the survey.

The data further suggests that the most common buyers of cryptocurrencies are older investors. The first ones on the list are in their 50s. They are then followed by individuals aging between 30 and 40 years old.

Bitcoin’s Price Hike

As previously reported, the price of Bitcoin (the world’s leading crypto) jumped to $5,300. This boost started back in the first week of April. It turns out that the crypto’s price hike resulted in a re-emergence of a bullish trend, which, in one way or another, is peculiar to the South Korean market.

The phenomenon is called the “Kimchi Premium.” Basically, it is the type that sees local traders deciding to pay a premium for BTC on crypto exchanges when measured in the U.S. dollar terms.

Still, there are problems experienced by market participants. One of these is the closure of a South Korean exchange recently. It is then followed by Bithumb, which continues to struggle after a hack in March resulted in a loss of around $18 million. As for Bithumb’s parent company, it managed to obtain at least $200 million investment from a Japanese fund. The firm subsequently announced its plans to expand in Japan and the United States.