In South Korea’s capital city of Seoul, the 300 members of the country’s National Assembly are currently debating 17 separate crypto-related proposals – ranging from implementing reserve requirements at exchanges to ensuring fair trading – aimed at creating better protections for Korean crypto investors.
The culmination of this debate will be the Digital Asset Basic Act (DABA), a comprehensive legal framework that will provide regulatory guidelines for the growing Korean crypto industry.
Korean media first reported that lawmakers were working on DABA in June – one month after the swift collapse of the Korean algorithmic stablecoin issuer Terra wiped approximately $60 billion from the global crypto ecosystem.
Read more: As part of CoinDesk’s Policy Week, reporters covered the regulatory outlook in the biggest financial centers of Asia, including Hong Kong, India, Singapore and Japan.
The implosion of the once-mighty Terra was the first domino to fall in an ensuing series of other high-profile crypto collapses, including the failure of hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and a string of bankrupted exchanges and lenders including Celsius Network, Voyager Digital, Genesis and FTX.
As yet more dominoes begin to wobble, regulators around the world have urgently called for comprehensive crypto regulations to be put in place to protect investors. The European Union’s landmark Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation is set for a vote in April, lawmakers in the U.S. are weighing several proposed bills that seek to regulate the domestic industry and South Korean lawmakers have said that DABA could be ready as early as June.
Necessary global cooperation
However, regulating crypto country by country isn’t going to be enough to prevent the next FTX from happening.
As European Commissioner Mairead McGuiness recently pointed out in an interview with CoinDesk, individual jurisdictions’ attempts to regulate crypto are useless without global coordination.
