OKX Ventures and Korean brokerage Korea Investment & Securities will each invest KRW 80 billion ($53 million) for a 19.6% stake in South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinone, the companies announced Friday, May 29, 2026, at 6:07 a.m. The combined KRW 160 billion ($106 million) transaction is one of the largest foreign investments in Korea's digital asset sector in recent memory — and a signal that global crypto players are moving aggressively to secure footholds in one of the world's most active retail crypto markets.
The deal structure
The investment runs through two parallel tracks: secondary share purchases from existing shareholders and subscriptions for newly issued shares. Both OKX Ventures and KIS invest the identical amount, take the identical stake, and arrive at an identical position on the cap table — unusual symmetry for a transaction of this size, and one that gives neither outside investor structural dominance over the other.
Post-close, Coinone CEO Cha Myunghun retains the largest individual shareholding at 27.8%, preserving management continuity. Com2uS Holdings and its affiliates — the mobile game developer that has been Coinone's primary backer — will hold 25%. OKX Ventures and KIS step in as joint third-largest shareholders. The deal still requires regulatory approval from South Korean authorities before it closes.
The transaction formalizes discussions first reported by Yonhap on May 15, 2026, which indicated OKX and KIS were considering acquiring roughly 20% stakes in the exchange. The final terms match that reporting closely.
What OKX Ventures is buying into
Coinone is not Korea's largest exchange — that title belongs to Upbit, which commands the dominant share of domestic spot volume. But Coinone is an established, licensed platform with a retail user base in a country where crypto trading has been woven into mainstream financial behavior since at least 2017.
Korea's retail crypto market is structurally distinct from most. The country runs on a won-denominated pair ecosystem dominated by a handful of regulated domestic exchanges, each required to maintain real-name bank account verification partnerships with local financial institutions. Foreign exchanges cannot operate directly in that ecosystem without a Korean entity — which makes acquiring a stake in an existing licensed operator a more direct path to the market than building from scratch or applying for a fresh license.
For OKX Ventures, the investment arm of OKX exchange, Coinone provides a licensed Korean presence without the regulatory runway of a greenfield application. For KIS, one of South Korea's largest brokerages and a firm that has been expanding into digital assets alongside the country's crypto-friendly regulatory shift, the stake represents a direct equity position in a platform that could become a distribution node for the financial products KIS already sells.
The stablecoin and tokenized securities play
Both Coinone and OKX Ventures tied the deal explicitly to Coinone's strategic pivot toward stablecoins and tokenized securities — the segment the industry now calls real-world assets (RWA). This is not decorative language. Korea's financial regulator has been moving toward a framework that would allow regulated issuance and trading of tokenized securities, and Korean brokerages including KIS have been positioning for that market.
Stablecoins are a complementary piece: won-denominated stablecoins, or stablecoins issued by Korean-licensed entities, could become settlement rails for tokenized securities trading. A crypto exchange with both a stablecoin presence and a tokenized securities capability would occupy a structurally different position than a pure spot trading venue.
The pivot also tracks with where OKX's global strategy has been heading. OKX has spent the past year aggressively expanding its institutional and regulatory surface — obtaining licenses in several jurisdictions, relaunching in the U.S. market, and now planting a flag in Korea through this equity stake. Tokenized assets and stablecoins are where regulated institutional demand is concentrating; Coinone's pivot aligns with that direction.
Context: Korea as a strategic market
Korea consistently ranks among the top five global crypto markets by retail trading volume. In peak cycles, Korean won-denominated pairs have represented a disproportionate share of global spot activity — a phenomenon sometimes called the "kimchi premium," which reflects the tight supply-demand dynamics of a walled retail market. Korean retail traders are active, sophisticated, and willing to pay for platform reliability and liquidity.
That retail intensity makes Coinone's user base genuinely valuable even if the exchange is not the market-share leader. Access to a licensed Korean entity with an existing retail customer base, established bank partnerships, and a clear strategic roadmap is worth more to a global exchange operator than the raw platform revenue implies.
The Samsung Electronics affiliate Samsung Life Insurance made a $408 million investment in Upbit operator Dunamu earlier this month, a deal that moved through South Korea's Financial Services Commission approval process. The OKX-KIS investment in Coinone follows the same pattern: established Korean financial institutions and global crypto firms converging on licensed domestic exchanges as the market professionalizes.
What happens next
The transaction closes only after South Korean regulatory approval — a process that, given Coinone's existing licensed status and the institutional profile of both investors, is expected to be procedural rather than contentious. Neither company disclosed a timeline.
Once closed, the deal gives OKX Ventures a board-level presence in a licensed Korean exchange and gives KIS a direct equity stake in a crypto platform it can cross-sell alongside its existing retail brokerage products. Coinone's leadership, with Cha Myunghun retaining majority control at 27.8%, keeps the exchange independent in practice even as it gains two significant new backers.
The $106 million total is a concrete bet that Korea's digital asset market — stablecoins, tokenized securities, and retail trading combined — is large enough and durable enough to justify the investment. The cap table that results from this deal puts a Korean brokerage and a global crypto exchange investment arm in the same chair, which is a structural combination the Korean market has not seen before.