Mirae Asset now owns 97.15% of Korbit and has renamed it DigitalX, removing the bank-partnership dependency that shapes every other Korean exchange. Chairman Park Hyeon-joo’s internal letter
Every licensed crypto exchange in South Korea runs on borrowed banking relationships. Upbit needs K Bank. Bithumb needs NH Bank. Without a real-name account partnership from a commercial bank, neither platform can legally process a single won of retail deposits, and both have spent years managing that dependency as a structural risk rather than a settled fact. Mirae Asset Financial Group just bought the one exchange in the country where that risk doesn’t exist anymore, because it now owns the exchange itself.
The group completed its takeover of Korbit on Thursday, lifting its stake from 92.06% to 97.15% through Mirae Asset Consulting, and confirmed the exchange will operate going forward under a new name, DigitalX. Total spending across the acquisition reached 141.4 billion won, close to $97 million, following a revised filing that added roughly 7.2 billion won for the remaining shares. The deal cleared South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission earlier in July, which called it the first case of a domestic financial group taking direct control of a licensed virtual asset exchange.
Korbit’s trading volume barely registers next to its rivals, sitting at roughly 0.5% of the national market compared with Upbit’s 69% and Bithumb’s 28%. That gap is exactly why the FTC waved the deal through without competitive concerns. But trading share was never the point. What Mirae actually acquired is a fully licensed operator that already satisfies Korea’s real-name verification requirements under the Virtual Asset User Protection Act, without needing a separate bank to sponsor those accounts.
That distinction matters more than the price tag suggests. Upbit and Bithumb answer to banking partners who can, in theory, walk away or renegotiate terms. DigitalX answers to its own parent company, which changes the entire risk calculation behind the deal. The premium Mirae paid reflects a structural advantage none of its larger domestic rivals can replicate without years of separate negotiation with a bank willing to take on the compliance exposure.
Chairman Park Hyeon-joo didn’t frame this to staff as a trading platform purchase. In a letter sent the day the rebrand became public, he wrote that the “X” in DigitalX “symbolizes the unknown future and the infinite possibilities that arise when different values intersect and converge.” He described the acquisition as the foundation for a broader initiative he calls Mirae Asset 3.0, one meant to combine traditional financial assets with digital ones rather than operate crypto trading as a separate business line.
Park also invoked bitcoin’s early skepticism to justify the timing, telling employees that “those seemingly reckless beliefs came together to create today’s monumental market miracle” and that the group must “inherit the baton from that era.” He addressed compliance directly too, a notable choice given Mirae is absorbing a licensed platform rather than building one from scratch, saying trust “takes a lifetime to build but can collapse in an instant.”
Read against Mirae Asset Consulting’s actual holdings, that language points somewhere specific. The affiliate running this acquisition also oversees the group’s commercial property, luxury hotel, and golf course portfolio. The positioning points toward infrastructure aimed inward rather than a standalone exchange competing for retail order flow: a compliant rail through which the parent group could eventually tokenize its own physical assets and distribute them to retail wallets, without routing through a broker-dealer or custodian bank it doesn’t control.
MetricValueFinal Mirae Asset ownership97.15%Total acquisition cost141.4 billion won (~$97 million)Korbit market share (2025)0.5% of trading volumeUpbit market share~69%Bithumb market share~28%While Mirae was finalizing ownership internally, Circle was doing the opposite externally. The stablecoin issuer signed separate memorandums of understanding with Kakao Group and Toss Bank the same day, agreeing to explore won-denominated stablecoin payments, cross-border settlement, and merchant infrastructure. Kakao Pay, Kakao Bank, and Toss will study these use cases as partners, not owners, of whatever infrastructure eventually gets built.
Circle’s Chief Strategy Officer, Dante Disparte, told the Korea Times that large institutions want legal and regulatory clarity before moving “from prototyping to production.” That’s the negotiated-access model, and it depends on rules still being written by regulators who haven’t finished the Digital Asset Basic Act. Mirae’s approach sidesteps that timeline by acquiring a license that already exists, which is precisely the gap the two deals expose when placed side by side.
Owning the infrastructure solves the bank-dependency problem, but it doesn’t solve everything. South Korea’s capital flight restrictions still make it difficult for foreign investors to trade directly on domestic platforms, regardless of who owns them. If DigitalX can’t attract liquidity from outside the country, the ownership advantage stays theoretical. A fully controlled exchange with no international trading volume is still an exchange with 0.5% market share, just without a landlord.
Korbit told existing users that daily operations continue unchanged through the transition. Customer deposits and virtual assets remain segregated from company assets under the Virtual Asset User Protection Act, and the operating entity, Korbit Co., Ltd., keeps functioning without disruption to login, trading, deposits, or withdrawals.
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