On April 12, Yuga Labs’ ERC-20 token ApeCoin (APE) briefly surged to $90.00 from round $4.20 apiece on the South Korean cryptocurrency change Upbit earlier than most positive aspects had been worn out in a pointy sell-off. Nevertheless, the token remains to be buying and selling at $10.90 apiece on the time of publication, representing a major premium of round $4.50 in comparison with different exchanges.
At present, the one APE buying and selling pair listed on Upbit is BTC/APE; it represents solely a tiny portion of the coin’s buying and selling quantity, with round 4 million tokens altering arms through the day in comparison with APE’s general circulation of 369 million tokens. It seems the spike was attributed to an general retail frenzy and constriction of accessible buying and selling routes on the change. On the identical day, Upbit suspended the deposits and withdrawals of Ether (ETH) and ERC-20 tokens, pending the completion of the Ethereum community’s Shanghai improve.
Consequently, APE, an ERC-20 token regarded by some as a memecoin, couldn’t be bought nor bought into different ERC-20 tokens similar to Tether (USDT) and ETH by Upbit’s customers, leaving the Bitcoin (BTC)-to-APE (BTC/USD) buying and selling pair the one out there possibility. Because the rally, crypto worth aggregators similar to CoinMarketCap have flagged Upbit’s APE pricing as an “outlier” when computing mixture costs.
Cointelegraph reported final yr that Upbit had achieved a close to monopoly in South Korea’s crypto change panorama, with whole belongings of $8 billion and 80% of the home buying and selling quantity. Nevertheless, authorities are reportedly contemplating regulatory restrictions to tame the dimensions of the agency’s operations.
Journal: South Korea’s distinctive and wonderful crypto universe
