During the first week of April, South Korea’s ‘kimchi premium’ on domestic cryptocurrency exchanges had jumped over 18%, but then leveled off, equalizing with global exchange rates over the last two weeks. On Monday, as bitcoin prices spiked 8% higher surpassing the $54k zone, in South Korea, the premium on bitcoin climbed 4.56% higher than the most trading platforms worldwide during the last 24 hours.
Data shows that Bithumb’s BTC/KRW spot market volumes have increased by 13.2% today and a single bitcoin is swapping for prices between $56,345 to $56,727 or between 625,970,000 to 663,040,431 won. That’s a gap of 4.56% with the ‘kimchi premium’ and on Bithumb a number of other popular crypto assets are seeing premiums as well. ETH, for instance, is swapping for $100 more per ether on domestic exchanges. While XRP only has a $0.10 premium on Bithumb at the time of writing.
The South Korean crypto trading platform Korbit has similar premiums, but BTC prices are a touch lower than Bithumb’s current BTC prices. ETH prices and XRP prices on Korbit are relatively the same, showing a much smaller ‘kimchi premium’ on those crypto assets than BTC’s higher premium. Korbit’s collective trade volume for today for every trading pair is well over $100 million but Bithumb, on the other hand, has $2.3 billion in reported trade volume today.