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The South Korean authorities are striving to improve the system of regulation of the virtual asset market. The main innovation is the expansion of the Travel Rule. Previously, this international standard, which obliges virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to exchange sender and recipient data, only applied to transactions over one million won. Now regulators want to extend these requirements to smaller transactions, significantly lowering the threshold for mandatory verification.

The first meeting of the working group at the Financial Intelligence Agency of South Korea (FIU) gave a start to work on these changes. The Group was created to review the provisions of the Law on Special Financial Information. Regulators plan not only to adjust the thresholds. The legislative reform implies the refinement and detailing of the regulatory framework governing the activities of all cryptocurrency platforms and exchanges in the country.

An important area is the development of anti-money laundering (AML) measures due to the growing popularity of stablecoins. The South Korean authorities want to create a legal framework in advance for this asset class, which is increasingly being used in the financial system.

The actions of South Korea's Financial Intelligence signal a change of approach: tracking selected major transactions is giving way to the creation of a global surveillance system for the crypto market. This will undoubtedly lead to an increased burden on services, which will need to reconfigure their compliance systems to work with the increased volume of information on small transactions.