Bank of Korea calls for stock-style circuit breakers on BTC exchanges

Crypto's 24/7 global trading across hundreds of venues makes it difficult for any single country to halt the market.

What to know:

• The Bank of Korea has proposed introducing stock-market-style circuit breakers on domestic cryptocurrency exchanges, folding the rules into the pending Digital Asset Basic Act.
• The recommendation follows a February incident at Bithumb in which a promotion error briefly created about 60 trillion won in phantom bitcoin and triggered a 17 percent price plunge on the exchange.
• Regulators and market participants are debating whether circuit breakers, long used in traditional finance, can effectively stabilize a globally traded asset like bitcoin that continues trading on other venues during local halts.

The Bank of Korea is pushing to install stock-market-style circuit breakers on the country's cryptocurrency exchanges, a proposal that would bring crypto under the same trade-halting rules used by the Korea Exchange.

The recommendation appears in the central bank's annual Payment and Settlement Systems Report, published April 13, and calls for automatic halts when crypto prices swing sharply or abnormal orders hit the book. The central bank said the rules should be folded into the pending Digital Asset Basic Act.

The catalyst for the policy suggestion comes from an incident at Bithumb in February when an employee running a promotion entered the reward unit as "BTC" instead of "KRW," distributing roughly 60 trillion won ($43 billion) in phantom bitcoin before supervisors caught the error 20 minutes later. Panic selling crashed BTC on Bithumb by a 17% drop while the token continued to trade at market prices on other venues.

Upbit, Bithumb and Korea's three other licensed exchanges already run high-speed matching engines with price collars and fat-finger checks built in. CME Group runs a similar system on bitcoin futures, halting trading for two minutes when prices move 10% inside a 60-minute window.

The harder question is whether halts would work, given the global nature of BTC trading. If Upbit paused for 20 minutes, bitcoin would keep trading on Binance, Coinbase and dozens of others — and Upbit's price would snap to wherever global markets moved when it reopened.

Circuit breakers are a familiar tool from traditional finance, a visible signal that markets are being brought under control. But crypto does not have a single venue to stop, and the problems regulators are trying to solve do not neatly map to price volatility.

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