A new survey has found that over half of South Korean adults have previously traded or currently trade crypto.
The survey was conducted by the Korea Financial Consumer Protection Foundation (KFCPF), the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported on April 22.
The survey also found that 52% of respondents said they had “made a profit” through their crypto investments. On average, respondents said they hold or have traded more than three types of coin. Bitcoin took first place in the popularity stakes with 76%.
The KFCPF spoke to 2,500 men and women aged 19 to 69. Respondents were all residents of Seoul, Gyeonggi Province, and six other metropolitan areas.
Most of the respondents said their crypto buys were a form of investment. However, a large minority said they were also motivated by “curiosity about cryptoassets.” Most people said they had made profits under the 10 million won ($7,000) mark, with the majority also saying they had sold their coins less than a year after buying them. The news agency remarked that “short-term, small-sum investments” accounted for the majority of retail activity in the South Korean crypto market.
Following behind were Ethereum (ETH) with 52.8%, XRP with 32.2%, Dogecoin (DOGE) with 24.6%, and Solana (SOL) with 14.7%.
The responses also showed that a large number of South Korean investors have fallen for crypto scams. Forty-five percent of respondents said they had been duped by “false investment information” on crypto “reading rooms.”
However, one in five of the crypto traders said they had experienced financial losses “related to cryptoassets” from incidents such as crypto exchange hacks, bankruptcies, and outages.
Earlier this week, the Central Bank claimed that citizens held some $73.4 billion worth of crypto in exchange wallets at the end of 2024.
The vast majority of these people (67.7%) said they “did not take any action after suffering damage” at the hands of crypto scammers.
A third of respondents also said they had been duped into investing in fake cryptoassets and illegal crypto exchanges.