Busan Blockchain Special Zone Gears Up with Expert-Led Operations Committee

NFT Artists Coming to Seoul in September for The Gateway: KoreaThe Gateway: Korea, the world-renowned annual Web3 event held to celebrate the NFT community and digital artists, is set to take place next month as part of the sixth annual Korea Blockchain Week 2023. It will be held on September 7 to 8 at SFactory, a culture and arts hub in Seongsu-dong, Seoul.The Gateway has been organized by the Web3 digital media platform nft now since 2021. This year, it will be co-hosted by the blockchain community FactBlock, which is also the co-host of Korea Blockchain Week.Bringing realms togetherCentered around the theme of convergence — specifically, the convergence of man and machine, East and West, and URL and IRL — The Gateway: Korea aims to connect Web3 technology and Korean culture. It will feature activities such as interactive experiences and immersive galleries.Photo by fabio on UnsplashExploring digital art and visionary voicesThe event will also include various programs, including keynote speeches and fireside chats. Most notably, there will be an exhibition of works by famous digital artists like Beeple, who famously sold his NFT art piece titled “Everydays — The First 5000 Days” for a record-breaking $69 million two years ago at an online auction held by auction house Christie’s.Other invited artists include DeeKay, Emonee LaRussa, and Krista Kim, among others.“I am delighted that we are able to achieve global expansion through the September event in Seoul,” said Matt Medved, Co-Founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of nft now.“Korea is experiencing an unprecedented moment where cultures from around the world intersect. This event will welcome leading creators and innovators in the Web3 field.”

Andreessen Horowitz is deepening its bet on Asia’s retail crypto boom, even as trading on South Korea’s largest exchanges has cooled from last year’s peaks. The firm’s crypto arm, a16z crypto, said in a press release that it has opened its first Asia office in Seoul, citing South Korea’s high level of retail participation. Nearly one in three South Korean adults owns cryptocurrency, exceeding the share of stock investors, according to the firm. The move comes as the broader Asia-Pacific region cements its role as a hub of grassroots crypto activity, a trend highlighted in Chainalysis’ 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index.Photo by Brady Bellini on UnsplashAltcoin-heavy retail marketSouth Korea has been a major contributor to that growth. Bloomberg reported in October that digital assets have increasingly become a long-term savings vehicle for many South Koreans, particularly those trying to purchase homes. Trading on local platforms remains heavily skewed toward higher-risk altcoins, which account for more than 80% of total volume across domestic exchanges. Still, overall activity has dropped sharply over the past year. A November report from Wu Blockchain said trading on Upbit, the country’s largest exchange, is down about 80% from a year earlier. The platform averaged $1.78 billion in daily volume in November 2025, compared with roughly $9 billion in December 2024. Bithumb, the second-largest exchange, saw a similar pullback, with average daily volume falling from $2.45 billion last December to about $890 million this November. Some of that retail liquidity appears to have rotated into equities, with the benchmark KOSPI index up more than 72% year-to-date. Asia’s wealthy to increase crypto exposureEven as spot volumes recede, higher–net–worth investors across the region are signaling longer-term interest. Sygnum’s APAC HNWI Report 2025, cited by Cointelegraph, found that 60% of surveyed high-net-worth individuals plan to increase their crypto exposure over the next two to five years. The report said 87% of respondents already hold digital assets; about half allocate more than 10% of their portfolios, and the average allocation is around 17%. The survey included 270 participants with more than $1 million in investable assets or extensive professional investing experience, drawn from ten Asia-Pacific markets led by Singapore and including Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. Overall, 90% of respondents said they view digital assets as important for long-term wealth preservation and legacy planning, rather than primarily as a speculative trade. Anchored by the new Seoul office, a16z crypto said it plans to provide go-to-market support for portfolio companies seeking to expand in Asia, including help with distribution, partnerships and community building. The effort will be led by Park Sung-mo, whose previous roles include positions at Monad Foundation and Polygon Labs, as Head of APAC go-to-market. Pakistan looks to crypto for financial modernizationPolicy debates elsewhere in Asia also reflect growing interest in digital assets' economic role. At the Bitcoin MENA Conference on Dec. 9, Pakistan’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority chairman Bilal Bin Saqib said the country needs to move beyond conventional economic structures and leverage digital assets as a new source of momentum, according to Cointelegraph. He argued that digital assets and blockchain could form part of a new financial architecture for the Global South, not merely serve speculative use cases. The country’s youth-heavy population, about 70% under age 30, was central to his view that it could take a leading position in crypto adoption. Chainalysis’ 2025 index placed Pakistan third worldwide, pointing to how policymakers in emerging markets are increasingly factoring digital assets into long-term economic strategies. 

Sun Flags Unjust Token Profits of Huobi Founder’s BrotherJustin Sun, Founder of the Tron blockchain and stakeholder in Seychelles-based global crypto exchange Huobi, has stated that the younger brother of the founder of the exchange, Li Wei, has received millions of Huobi tokens ($HT) when he shouldn’t have.Taking to Twitter, Sun wrote:“Li Lin’s younger brother Li Wei has repeatedly acquired a large amount of zero-cost HT through abnormal means. He has sold it on the Huobi platform many times in history, and has withdrawn huge amounts of cash”.Negotiating a refund and token burnSun went on to outline the action that he is in favor of taking in unison with decisions taken by the Huobi Global Advisory Committee (HGAC). “In order to protect people’s interests, the [HGAC] and the HT DAO community decided to recover and destroy the HT obtained by Li Wei at zero cost,” he wrote. “The HT destruction will be announced in the HT community. Such behavior will not be condoned,” he added.Sun complained that not only were the tokens wrongly allocated to Li Wei, he had been dumping the tokens on the market, selling them off for fiat money. In addition to the tokens being burnt, Sun says that he alongside the HGAC will “negotiate a refund” by engaging directly with Li Wei relative to the fiat money that he has already extracted through selling off the token.The Tron founder added that he doesn’t think it equitable that Wei should benefit from the token allocation as he hasn’t made any contribution to the Huobi community, stating that “fairness and the importance of rewarding those who genuinely contribute to the growth and development of HT DAO” are important.Double standardsSome in the crypto community would call double standards on Sun’s claims of a lack of fairness. At the time of the collapse of the FTX exchange in November of last year, Sun offered to help, collaborating with FTX’s Sam Bankman Fried to allow assets related to Sun’s crypto projects (TRX, BTT, JST, SUN, and HT) held by FTX customers on the exchange to be traded out of the exchange into external wallets.Trading in these assets recommenced for a time, with the price within the exchange being exorbitant relative to the regular market price outside of FTX. Many FTX customers ended up buying these tokens at excessive prices, without being able to extract them from the exchange like Sun had promised. To cap it off, those customers then had the newly installed FTX Debtor under the guidance of John J. Ray III, record their loss at the time the exchange officially went bankrupt at the normal market price for these tokens.Although originally a China-based exchange, Huobi moved out of the Chinese market due to adverse regulation, re-establishing itself in the Seychelles. The firm maintains offices in South Korea, the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong, where it has had a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2018.The $HT token has proven to be very volatile both in intraday trading on Tuesday and over the course of the past seven days. In both instances, it has hit high points in excess of $3.00 and low points of $2.70. At the time of publication, the token was trading at $2.90.Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash