Topic: [2018-02-20] South Korea Investigating Cryptocurrency Regular`s Sudden Death (Read 114 times)

It may be small compared to other assets but crypto has been booming in South Korea lately. South Koreans even have a petition to stop government's crackdown on bitcoin and other crypto's in which the government did. However, they are preparing a air-tight regulation and the victim's job was to put it up which may lead to a very stressful life in the last couple of weeks leading to the apparent heart attack. Personally, I don't suspect any foul play here. Maybe the job really contributed to his death, but maybe its really his time already.

The authorities have been very careful about what they say. The cause of death is an ‘apparent’ heart attack. There are claims about very high stress levels, but we will have to wait till the cause of death is confirmed. South Korea has many exchanges, but cryptos are still very small when compared to other asset classes. Other regulators aren’t dropping dead.

Well, with this kind of dynamics, that job can really be so stressful. I am suggesting to that agency dealing with the cryptocurrency market to come up with a good health management strategy for their employees otherwise this same tragedy can also happen to anyone. Another idea is hiring younger people who are more attuned to the cryptocurrency movement and who can still absorb the rigorous requirement of the job. Now, in the same vein, we have to remember that traders themselves are exhibiting the same kind of stress syndrome.

A South Korean cryptocurrency regulator in charge of “devising measures against cryptocurrency speculation” was found dead in his home from an apparent heart attack on Monday, semiofficial government news agency Yonhap News reports. A government spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal they weren’t “sure about the cause of death.”

South Korean police are investigating the death of Jung Ki-joon, 52, who led economic policy at the Office for Government Policy Coordination. His job involved developing rules for regulating cryptocurrency in a largely unregulated, fast-growing market the South Korean government seeks to manage.

Ki-joon was in charge of organizing weekly meetings, which began in November of last year, on regulating cryptocurrency transactions. Hong Nam-ki, the minister of the Office for Government Policy Coordination, headed up the meetings.

Yonhap News reports his colleagues said he had been “under heavy stress” since taking the job late last year.


South Korea is a hot spot for trading Bitcoin. According to the government, the country’s 30 cryptocurrency exchanges saw 87.5 times more income in 2017 than the previous year, Yonhap News reports. The prices of Bitcoin have traded higher in South Korea than in other markets, at times by more than 50 percent.

The South Korean won, its currency, is the fourth most popular currency for exchanging Bitcoin after the U.S. dollar, Japanese yen and the euro. Roughly 5 percent of cryptocurrency transactions in 2017 were exchanged for won.

Ki-joon said in a briefing last month that cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, weren’t a legal currency and the government “would strongly respond to excessive cryptocurrency speculation and illegal activity,” according to WSJ.


South Korea continues to grapple with how to regulate the rapidly growing cryptocurrency market. The country’s finance minister, Kim Dong-yeon, said in late January that “there is no intention to ban or suppress cryptocurrency.”

When the country legalized cryptocurrency exchanges, they also issued a ban on anonymous exchanges, undermining the reason people use the currency to protect their privacy.

South Korea is also considering a Bitcoin licensing scheme for exchanges, with Business Korea quoting a government official saying: “We are positively considering the adoption of an exchange approval system as the additional regulation on cryptocurrencies.”

The country appears to be, at the very least, on the path to a more robust regulation system.

http://bitcoinist.com/south-korea-investigating-cryptocurrency-regulators-sudden-death/