South Korea’s Five Biggest Won-Market Crypto Exchanges Cut Balance Checks to Under 5 Minutes

South Korea’s five largest won-market digital-asset exchanges have all shortened the interval for reconciling actual holdings against internal ledgers to less than five minutes.

Financial News reported on October 2, citing data that Democratic Party lawmaker Kang Jun-hyun’s office received from the Financial Supervisory Service, that Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Digital X and Gopax now all compare their actual digital-asset holdings with internal ledger balances at intervals of five minutes or less.

Bithumb introduced a real-time reconciliation system operating every two minutes in May after a Bitcoin (BTC) overpayment incident in February. Coinone, Digital X and Gopax also built automated reconciliation systems that run every five minutes. Upbit has operated five-minute reconciliation checks since November 2022.

When financial authorities conducted an inspection in April, Upbit was reconciling balances every five minutes and Digital X every 10 minutes, while the other three exchanges were checking consistency once a day. Regulators later required exchanges to build always-on balance reconciliation systems with intervals of no more than five minutes so they can respond quickly to overpayments and similar incidents.