Paros Labs Survey: 28.4% of Korean Investors Expect Bitcoin (BTC) to Rise Next Week

Weekly Poll of 2,000 Korean Investors

South Korean cryptocurrency sentiment barely moved over the past seven days, and a recurring investor poll puts numbers on the standoff: just 28.4% of domestic respondents expect Bitcoin (BTC) to rise or surge in the coming trading week. The poll, a weekly tracking read on the domestic Bitcoin market, ran from Monday, October 19 to Friday, October 23, drew 2,000 participants and was tabulated by the research firm Paros Labs, with the results published on Sunday, October 25. Respondents were asked how the Bitcoin (BTC) price would move across five sessions running from Monday, October 26 to Friday, October 30. Bullish answers, covering both a rise and a sharp surge, reached 28.4%, a 0.3 percentage-point uptick from 28.1% in the previous poll. Forecasts of a fall or crash drew 38.1%, down from 41.3%, while 33.5% expect sideways movement, up from 30.6%. The bearish camp therefore stays the largest of the three for a second consecutive week, although its lead over the sideways camp narrowed to 4.6 percentage points. With a stated margin of error of ±3.0 percentage points at 95% confidence, each of those week-over-week shifts sits inside statistical noise, so the survey describes stability rather than a fresh turn. Read plainly, the figures picture a market that has not changed its mind: bears lead, bulls trail by 9.7 percentage points, and the single largest group of respondents expects neither direction. Framing matters here too: the question was pinned to a dated five-day window, which makes the poll a measure of near-term mood, not a verdict on where the market trades or where it heads after Friday, October 30.

Regulation and Taxation Draw 71% of Blame

A separate question in the same poll asked respondents to name the single biggest obstacle to growth of the domestic crypto market, and the answers clustered hard on policy. Excessive regulation led at 36.8%; the option presented to participants described the current domestic regime as one in which initial coin offerings, ETF trading and derivatives trading are all prohibited. Tax enforcement followed at 34.2%, keeping the two policy answers within 2.6 percentage points of each other; combined, they account for 71% of the sample. Negative perceptions of the market, citing price manipulation, hacking and criminal misuse, drew 17.7%, and 11.3% of respondents pointed to a decline in the market's investment appeal. Because the question allowed a single choice, the split reflects each respondent's top pick rather than a full accounting of how many consider both policy factors significant. The ordering of the top two could flip inside the ±3.0 percentage-point margin of error, so the safer reading is that regulation and taxation run effectively tied as the named barriers. The wording of the regulation option implies that domestic access to listed crypto products is confined to spot trading, though the figure measures the perception of that restriction, not the rules themselves. The remaining answers split into two camps that describe demand rather than policy: one covering reputational damage from scams and breaches, the other covering fading willingness to participate. Neither the poll nor its published summary ranks concerns beyond these four categories, so second-order topics, such as liquidity depth or cross-border access, were not captured. For the polled week, the leading answer beat the third-place answer by 19.1 percentage points, a gap that survives any margin-of-error argument and leaves the top pick unambiguous.

The two weekly sentiment prints are statistically indistinguishable, which makes this a stable bearish tilt rather than a new deterioration. The instrument itself has limits worth keeping in view. The 2,000-person sample is not broken out by account size or tenure, so the poll cannot separate retail accounts from crypto whale wallets. A five-day directional question measures mood rather than positioning: an investor who plans to HODL for years can still call the week down without selling anything. The poll also does not anchor its question to a market reference, such as the distance from Bitcoin's all-time high, so the answers say little about valuation; directional sentiment and chart levels are separate instruments, and our Bitcoin technical analysis coverage tracks support and resistance independently of the poll. The exact wording of the questions, beyond the option labels summarized above, is not on the record, and how a question is put shapes a split like this as much as what investors think.