Kiwoom Securities Joins Race to Buy Bithumb Stake Before Forced Dilution Rule
What You Need to Know
- Kiwoom Securities negotiates stake acquisition in Bithumb, joining three other major Korean securities firms.
- Financial Services Commission proposes capping major shareholder equity in exchanges at 20-34%, forcing Bithumb divestment.
- Korea’s upcoming regulations on security tokens and stablecoins position licensed securities firms for digital asset markets.
- Bithumb’s KOSDAQ listing delayed from 2025 to post-2028 due to accounting and internal control issues.
Kiwoom Securities is in talks to acquire a stake in Bithumb through a third-party allotment of newly issued shares, joining Samsung Securities, Mirae Asset, and Korea Investment & Securities in what has become a queue of traditional finance firms circling South Korea’s second-largest crypto exchange. The exact stake and investment remain unresolved, but Kiwoom shares rose 7.99% to 333,500 won on the news alone.
The timing is not coincidental. Korea is moving toward regulations on security token offerings and stablecoins that would give licensed securities firms an explicit role in digital asset markets, and owning a piece of a major exchange is the most direct way to position for that shift. The more immediate pressure is structural: the Financial Services Commission has proposed capping major shareholder equity in exchanges at 20%, with exceptions to 34%, and Bithumb Holdings currently controls 73.56% of the exchange. If the rule takes effect, Bithumb could be forced to divest more than half its ownership, which explains why multiple securities firms are moving at once rather than waiting. The comparable moment in Korean crypto history is May’s deal where three Samsung affiliates acquired a combined 4% stake in Dunamu, the operator of Upbit, at a valuation implying roughly $408 million for that slice alone.
Regulatory-driven forced dilution is a different kind of deal flow than voluntary partnership, and it tends to compress valuations.
Bithumb is also navigating a KOSDAQ listing that has slipped from 2025 to 2027 to now post-2028, with the exchange citing accounting policies and internal controls as the reason for the delay. That explanation sits uncomfortably alongside a 36.8 billion won fine from the Financial Intelligence Unit for AML violations and a current police investigation naming CEO Lee Jae-won as a suspect in a bribery case involving the hiring of a lawmaker’s son. For the securities firms in talks, the governance overhang is real: a pre-IPO stake in an exchange under active criminal scrutiny carries a different risk profile than the Upbit deal did.
What this signals more broadly is that Korean traditional finance has decided digital asset exposure is no longer optional, and the STO regulatory window is the justification that makes the investment defensible internally. The firms acquiring stakes now are not making a crypto bet so much as buying a license position before the rules are written. If the FSC’s shareholder cap regulation passes as proposed, Bithumb’s ownership structure will be reorganized whether it wants to be or not, and the securities firms currently in talks will have set the price floor for whatever comes next.
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