South Korea's Financial Services Commission: Will soon make sanctions decisions on CEX review

On February 18th, Kim Byung-hwan, Chairman of the Financial Services Commission (FSC) of South Korea, announced that sanctions will soon be imposed on CEX for violating customer verification obligations. He stated, “Compared with other sanctions, I have expressed the intention to resolve this issue as soon as possible to prevent a significant impact on the market. The Financial Services Commission of South Korea has held several meetings to hear opinions from relevant parties.” BlockBeats previously reported that on January 16th, South Korea’s largest domestic cryptocurrency exchange platform, CEX, received a notice of business suspension from financial regulators for violating the customer verification system (KYC) and failing to fulfill Anti-Money Laundering obligations. The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of the Financial Services Commission issued a pre-notification of sanctions related to the violation of the Specific Financial Transaction Information Act to CEX on January 9th, with the core content being business suspension. If this punishment is confirmed, CEX will be restricted from conducting new customer-related business during the business suspension period (up to 6 months). However, existing user transactions can still proceed as normal. Currently, CEX accounts for over 70% of the volume in the South Korean virtual asset trading market.