The US is institutionalizing the virtual asset market, unlike Korea, which is delaying it

Unlike Korea, where institutionalization is delayed, the U.S. is creating a position as a virtual asset suzerain state with President-elect Donald Trump at the center.

The United States is emerging as a virtual asset suzerain state, with President-elect Donald Trump at the center, while institutionalization in Korea is being delayed.

Trump has appointed David Sachs, former chief operating officer (COO) of PayPal, to the position of ‘crypto tsar’, a role that will involve establishing a virtual asset regulation framework. Sachs is also a close associate of Paul Atkins, the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who is pro-virtual assets.

Sachs, an American entrepreneur from South Africa, co-founded online payment company PayPal and served as its first COO. He is also a member of the ‘Paypal Mafia’. The Paypal Mafia were early executives of PayPal, an online payment system, who went on to participate in startups of high-tech companies such as LinkedIn, Palantir Technology, Tesla, SpaceX, and YouTube, which became a huge success.

Sachs is also an advisor to ZRX, a virtual asset project. On the news that Sachs was appointed as Tsar, Zero X rose 42% on the same day.

Atkins, the next chairman of the SEC, served as an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008 before stepping down just before the Lehman Brothers crisis. Since 2017, he has also been co-chair of the Token Alliance of the Digital Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Token Alliance is an association formed for the issuance of digital assets and the development of trading platforms.

An official from the virtual currency industry pointed out, "Trump's new cabinet is being introduced as a large number of people who are friendly to the virtual asset market and are devising policies with different paradigms, but Korea is only looking."

In fact, coin investors are increasingly leaving overseas in the domestic market. This is because they believe that there are much more investment opportunities in overseas coin exchanges and decentralized exchanges (DEX).

According to CryptoQuant, a virtual asset analysis company, stablecoin's monthly trading volume recorded 13.7728 trillion won in Korea's top five coin exchanges, including Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Cobbit, and Gopax, this month. This is the sum of the purchase and sale transaction value of stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC). Stablecoins are coins with a fixed price of $1 per unit, and they cannot aim for capital gains. It is mostly considered a demand for moving to overseas exchanges or personal wallets.

The monthly stablecoin trading volume of the country's top five exchanges reached 16 trillion won last month, exceeding 10 trillion won for the first time, and it has already exceeded 13 trillion won this month. The monthly trading volume of stablecoins on the nation's top five coin exchanges remained at around 2 trillion won earlier this year, but increased eight-fold in 11 months.