Tom Lee Calls Korea's 17% KOSPI Selloff a Crypto Buying Opportunity

Korea’s 17% KOSPI Rout Reaches Crypto

BitMine chairman Tom Lee argues that a de-risking wave running through the United States, South Korea and Taiwan is now spilling into Bitcoin and the wider digital-asset market, and he reads the pullback as an opening for buyers. His case starts in equities. Lee names AI funding and safety worries, United States-Iran war activity, midterm election nerves and rising bond yields as the pressures behind the slide. Chip and memory stocks absorbed the shock first, in his account, and the Korean and Taiwanese benchmarks those sectors dominate followed.

South Korea carries the damage most visibly. The KOSPI lost 17% in October through October 16 and opened the Tuesday session down another 3.5%. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix accounted for 44% of the index as of May, and JoongAng Daily reported that between October 1 and 16 the two chipmakers shed 19.74% and 28.38% respectively. Brokers pushed leveraged traders out of their margin trading positions, with broker-forced liquidations above 50 billion won recorded over four consecutive sessions to October 16. Taiwan held up better, with the TAIEX down 1.73% over the same stretch, though it dropped 3.41% on October 15 once September US CPI of 3.7% came in above the 3.6% consensus.

Lee connects that regional selling directly to digital assets. “Crypto is widely held in the US, Korea and Taiwan. So naturally, when investors in those regions de-risk, this creates spillover pressures in crypto markets,” he said in his company’s investor-relations disclosure. Korea Securities Depository records show a net $1.4 billion of Korean money entered BitMine shares during 2025, a stake large enough to give Korean holders whale-scale weight in the treasury stock. The de-risking, in his telling, is not a crypto-specific event at all; it is portfolio math forced on investors whose equity books and digital-asset books sit in the same accounts.

Solus Points to Borrowing Costs

Digital-asset prices have moved far less than Seoul’s equities. Bitcoin (BTC) traded at $81,385, down 1.21% in 24 hours, while Ethereum (ETH) changed hands at $2,387.07, down 1.47%, at the time of writing. Longer horizons widen the gap: ETH sits roughly 52% below its $4,946.05 peak from August 24, 2025, and BTC is about 35% under its $126,080 high from October 6, 2025.

BitMine holds ETH as its treasury asset, so Lee’s buy call leans partly on the laggard of the two. The company’s latest disclosure put ETH holdings at 6.04 million tokens, with total crypto, cash and marketable securities at $15.1 billion. He still sees a setup for buyers, arguing that past declines where fundamentals held firm have tended to resolve into favorable entries for patient capital, a stance closer to a long-horizon HODL thesis than a rotation trade. His case rests on crypto’s part in rebuilding the settlement rails of global finance and on agentic AI, in which autonomous software executes tasks without human prompting.

Asian markets stress-tested that argument in August 2024. On August 5, the KOSPI plunged 8.77% and Bitcoin fell under $50,000, a level it had not touched since February. The following day the KOSPI gained 3.3%, BTC briefly pushed past $56,000 while ETH recovered above $2,500. The speed of that rebound fits the pattern Lee describes.

The catch is funding. Dan Greenhaus of Solus Alternative Asset Management points instead to higher borrowing costs, a pressure resilient fundamentals do not offset. Lee’s own trigger list includes rising bond yields, and the mechanics cut both ways: ETH’s next move hinges on whether forced selling in Seoul slows, while his buy case needs US rates to ease as well as fundamentals to hold. Seoul’s unwind, in other words, has more room to run than the one-session shock of August 2024.

Rates Are the Real Constraint

Our reading: the spillover into Bitcoin is equity-driven, not crypto-native. A 17% monthly loss on the KOSPI against a 1.21% daily move in BTC says the linkage runs through regional portfolios rather than through any break inside crypto credit itself. That supports Lee’s framing and narrows his buy call to one condition: rates. The de-risking wave is less crypto-specific FUD than mechanical equity selling, so the markers to watch are whether forced liquidations in Seoul slow and whether US yields turn. We covered how Bitcoin (BTC) reclaimed $82,000 with limited long-term holder selling, and our Bitcoin technical analysis desk now tracks whether the $81,000 area holds while Seoul de-levers.