Bank of Korea to Receive Monthly Balance Reports on 1.27 Million Crypto Users

Monthly Balance Reports From December 2

The Bank of Korea will require domestic virtual asset exchanges to submit users' month-end holdings under a reporting manual obtained on Friday by People Power Party lawmaker Park Soo-young. From December 2, any customer of a Korean won exchange who has transferred digital assets to an overseas exchange, a foreign custodian or a personal wallet even once will have their balance reported to the central bank's foreign exchange computer network, including in months with no cross-border activity. The new report, labeled FX1021 in the manual, sets its reference date at July 19, 2024, the day the Virtual Asset User Protection Act took effect, meaning a single historical transfer places a user in scope indefinitely. Covered balances extend beyond listed tokens to dormant accounts, delisted assets and staking positions, where users delegate holdings to a validator. Holdings are snapshotted at 23:59:59 on the last calendar day of each month, priced from other domestic venues when an exchange cannot value an asset, and filed by 17:30 on the 10th of the following month. Users with a zero balance, or those who have left the exchange, still appear in that month's report and exit only from the next one.

Transaction Records and Resident ID Numbers

A second form, FX1020, captures the transfers themselves. Exchanges must file each cross-border movement by individual or entity, by asset and by transaction, recording the date, asset code, network used, the transaction identifier known as the TXID, quantity, unit price, the won-converted amount and fees. Personal identifiers sit at the center of the form: sender and recipient are logged as individual or corporate, resident or non-resident, with nationality and an ID number drawn from the resident registration number, business registration, foreigner registration, passport or the internal identifier an exchange assigns its users. The counterparty side lists whether the destination is an exchange, a custodian or a personal wallet, along with the overseas venue's name, its country and the asset address; counterparties the exchange cannot classify are filed as “other.” Transfers under 1 million won with an unclear counterparty fall into the same bucket, and the manual sets no minimum amount above which reporting applies.

Daily Filings and Shared Access

The Bank of Korea delivered the manual to DAXA, the joint council of the country's major digital asset exchanges, on October 2. Transfers completed from midnight to 23:59:59 each day must be reported by 11 a.m. the following morning, with weekend and holiday activity batched to the next business day. The collected records are not confined to the central bank: the framework routes them to the National Tax Service, the Korea Customs Service, the Financial Supervisory Service and the Financial Intelligence Unit for use in illegal foreign exchange investigations. The regime rides on the amended Foreign Exchange Transactions Act, which takes effect on December 3, with the balance-reporting obligation switching on a day earlier, on December 2. One question the manual leaves open is retroactivity: whether exchanges will be told to resubmit transfer records generated between July 2024 and the regime's start, a point the central bank says it will settle in consultations with transfer providers.

Lawmaker Flags Excessive Data Collection

The disclosure has already drawn political fire. Park's office calculates that 1,272,878 users carried out cross-border transfers on the country's five major Korean won exchanges between July 19, 2024 and September 30, 2026, a population that would fall under the monthly balance reporting as written. She argues that sweeping up a user's full profile because of a single past transfer amounts to excessive personal data collection, and warns that adding transaction surveillance to the pending digital asset tax could shrink the domestic market further. Her office secured the manual through the National Assembly's finance committee, where she sits.

Our reading: the design reaches well beyond the travel-rule identity data Korean exchanges already collect. A one-time transfer to self-custody triggers permanent monthly surveillance of everything the user still holds domestically, including dormant and delisted assets, and the absence of a minimum amount means small personal transfers are captured too. The compliance load on exchanges is heavy: per-transaction filings with TXIDs and counterparty addresses daily, plus a monthly portfolio report. The bigger behavioral question is direction. Users may move balances to offshore venues or self-custody wallets before December 2, activity the system observes only after the fact. Whether retroactive collection from July 2024 will be demanded remains unconfirmed, and it is the likely next flashpoint.