Mirae Asset takes a 97 percent stake in Korbit, a first for Korean traditional finance

A trillion-dollar financial group now owns a crypto exchange almost outright.

The deal

South Korea’s Mirae Asset Group, managing around $1 trillion in assets, has acquired a 97 percent stake in the crypto exchange Korbit. It is the first time a traditional Korean financial group has taken a controlling stake in a domestic crypto exchange.

A 97 percent stake is worth pausing on. This is not a strategic investment, a joint venture, or a toe in the water. It is effectively outright ownership, the kind of position a group takes when it intends to run the business as its own.

Why Korea makes this a milestone

The context is what turns a single acquisition into a signal. Korea is one of the world’s most active retail crypto markets, with trading volumes that regularly rival far larger economies. And for years, its regulators have kept banks and exchanges strictly separated, a wall designed to keep crypto volatility away from the traditional financial system.

A deal like this is a loud signal of where that wall is heading. A group of Mirae Asset’s size does not acquire a regulated crypto exchange almost in full without confidence that the separation regime is softening, or at least that owning an exchange will be a tenable position for a mainstream financial institution going forward.

The precedent

First-of-their-kind deals in tightly regulated markets rarely stay unique for long. Once one major financial group holds a controlling stake in an exchange, the competitive logic for its peers changes: crypto trading revenue, custody relationships, and a foothold in tokenized assets all now sit inside a rival’s tent.

The same dynamic is playing out globally, with traditional finance buying its way into crypto infrastructure rather than building from scratch. Korea’s version is notable for how decisively it arrived: not a minority position, but 97 percent of one of the country’s established exchanges, held by a trillion-dollar asset manager.

Which country’s banks go full-crypto next? Korea just moved itself to the front of that conversation.