Korea approved a change in August 2026 that applies the travel rule to every Bitcoin transfer, whatever the size. It takes effect six months after it is promulgated.

The travel rule makes exchanges pass the sender's and receiver's details to each other on a transfer. Korea already applies it to transfers of 1 million won (about $740) or more, according to Voixa Korea. Removing the floor means the small transfers get reported too. In practice, exchanges also limit withdrawals to private wallets they cannot verify. Chambers notes the proposal as well.

The week in Seoul

Seoul hosted two Bitcoin-only events back to back. bitcoin++ Seoul ran on 5 and 6 November, the first developer conference in Korea about privacy. The Bitcoin Korea Conference runs on 7 and 8 November, at COEX in Gangnam and then in Myeong-dong, in the building of the Korea Federation of Banks.

One talk title stood out. Calvin Kim called it "Privacy is not a concept in Korea". According to the published agenda, the Korean language has no direct word for privacy, and the talk asked how that shapes Korean Bitcoiners.

What the rules say

The travel rule extension is one piece. A June 2026 revision of the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act will require businesses that move crypto across the border to register and report those transfers to the Bank of Korea, according to Voixa Korea. That includes transfers to overseas businesses and to private wallets. The data gets shared with the tax, customs and financial authorities. The duty sits on the business, so a person using an exchange ends up inside a reporting chain without filling in a form. The detailed decree was still in consultation in October.

Companies mostly cannot trade with won. The five big exchanges had 6,590 corporate accounts at the end of July, and only 29 accounts of ordinary companies did anything that month, according to the Seoul Economic Daily. 22 of those belonged to Dunamu, the company behind Upbit.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs are not allowed. The Capital Markets Act would have to change first, and law firm BKL notes there is no date for that.

The kimchi premium is the price gap that follows from all this. Korean won prices have repeatedly traded above global prices, because capital controls and the closed exchange system make arbitrage hard. The gap comes and goes.

From the room

Matthew Vuk, who does Ark research at Second and runs the Bitcoin Insider meetups, posted from the sessions all week.

Matthew Vuk posted on X from the Bitcoin in Korea panel (x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118954269885812926):

"Calvin is telling us about the 2017 developer meetup in Seoul. At the time, meetups were focused on "Bitcoin as a software project" Mineey runs the @BtcCtrSeoul in trendy Hongdae, where they run technical workshops. "Koreans love to study""

On Alex Li of the Human Rights Foundation, talking about CBDCs, Matthew Vuk posted on X (x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118966226932396297):

"A CBDC isn't just a digital dollar. It's a direct link of every transaction you make to the Central Bank of a country. Five things it can do to you: 1. Surveil 2. Freeze 3. Restrict 4. Expire 5. Penalize"

Matthew Vuk posted on X from Anmol Sharma's talk on Silent Payments (x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118236638698745997):

"Silent payments hide addresses, not amounts, sender knowledge, co-spends or opsec errors."

That one is a builder saying out loud what his own tool cannot do. The same pattern runs through the other notes. Each tool hides something worth hiding and leaks something specific, and the person building it says which is which.

Matthew Vuk posted on X on developer JIN's work (x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118541738361196571):

"Metadata in a lightning payment memo can leak info through to your service provider, such as an ecash mint, Ark server, etc. His system encrypts the plaintext note in the existing field. Gateway sees ciphertext. You stay private."

And on Fedimint, the protocol under Fedi, Matthew Vuk posted on X from the session where Eric Sirion presented (x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118519648409075866):

"Elsirion (@EricSirion) showcases the progress of "3 years of @fedimint in the wild" 🔆🌏 80 federations. 463k user transactions. 24k wallets."

A federation is still custody. You trust its guardians to stay independent, and for some people that is a better deal than an exchange that reports everything.

What this adds up to

Each rule on its own is small. Together they cover most of the path a coin takes.

Every coin bought in Korea starts on an exchange with your ID attached. With the travel rule on every transfer, each move off that exchange carries your name too. With private-wallet reporting at the border, the Bank of Korea gets a record of the coins going abroad and the tax office gets a copy.

That is the CBDC list again, minus the freeze button. Surveil is already there. Restrict is partly there, through which wallets an exchange lets you withdraw to. Freeze waits for a CBDC that does not exist yet. The rest depends on who is in charge later.

Jeff Booth's argument is that the old money system needs control to keep going, because debt and inflation only work if nobody can leave. You can read Korea's rules that way. You can also read them as ordinary anti-money-laundering work done very thoroughly. Both can be true, and the Korean market is small and tightly held and full of arbitrage gaps.

What matters for an ordinary saver is the end result. An honest person keeping their own savings ends up with a full paper trail anyway.

What you can do

Other countries tend to copy each other's exchange rules, and FATF pushes all of them the same way. The Few privacy guides cover several of these in full.

• Learn to verify an address on your device's screen before you sign anything.
• Keep your own records. Dates, amounts and the exchange, stored offline. If a tax office asks, you can answer from your own file and not from the exchange's.
• Do not mix coins. Bitcoin with your name on it and Bitcoin you got another way should sit in different wallets, because mixing them puts your ID on all of it.
• Run your wallet through your own node, or at least through Tor, and earn or spend some sats peer to peer. Lightning between people, or a meetup that takes sats, never touches an exchange.
• Withdraw to your own wallet now, while it is simple. Use one dedicated receive address and keep it apart from the rest. Coins you already hold do not get stuck behind a later form.

Sources

1. Voixa Korea, "Korea crypto regulation: VASP reporting, foreign exchanges" (voixakorea.com). voixakorea.com/insights/korea-crypto-vasp-rules-foreign-companies/
2. Chambers, "Blockchain & Crypto-Assets 2026: South Korea" (practiceguides.chambers.com). practiceguides.chambers.com/practice-guides/blockchain-crypto-assets-2026/south-korea
3. Seoul Economic Daily, "Korea has 566,000 foreign crypto accounts, but almost none trade" (en.sedaily.com), 24 August 2026. en.sedaily.com/finance/2026/08/24/korea-has-566000-foreign-crypto-accounts-but-almost-none
4. BKL, "Institutionalizing spot virtual asset ETFs in Korea" (bkl.co.kr). bkl.co.kr/en/law/insight/newsletter/6362
5. Bitcoin Korea Conference, schedule and side events (bitcoinkoreaconference.com). schedule and side events
6. 21 BTC, "Four days of Bitcoin in Seoul" (21btc.cc), bitcoin++ agenda and Calvin Kim talk note. 21btc.cc/blog/seoul-bitcoin-week-privacy
7. Matthew Vuk, post on X from the Bitcoin in Korea panel, 7 November 2026. x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118954269885812926
8. Matthew Vuk, post on X from Alex Li's talk on CBDCs, 7 November 2026. x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118966226932396297
9. Matthew Vuk, post on X from Anmol Sharma's talk on Silent Payments, 5 November 2026. x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118236638698745997
10. Matthew Vuk, post on X on developer JIN's work, 6 November 2026. x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118541738361196571
11. Matthew Vuk, post on X from the Fedimint session at bitcoin++ Seoul, 6 November 2026. x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118519648409075866
12. Few, privacy guides (few.guide). few.guide/guides/#privacy

Fedi is a Bitcoin app that carries chat. A small group of people, called guardians, hold the Bitcoin together, and every user holds a digital claim on it.

I have used a Fedi federation for several weeks, and I like it a lot. I use Fedi for private spending and as my everyday bank. It feels like what private banking used to be.

What Fedi is

Fedi runs on Fedimint, open-source software for community custody. A group of guardians each run a server and hold the coins together. That group is a federation. You send Bitcoin in and you get ecash back: digital notes that are a claim on the federation's Bitcoin. You can send those notes to other members, pay over Lightning, or sit in the app and chat.

The notes move between members without the guardians watching. Nobody outside the federation sees who paid whom, or for what.

Why money and chat belong together

A company that sees your payments and your conversations can map how a community works. Who helps whom. Who organises what.

Fedi keeps both in one place, and both are private in different ways. Blind signatures mean a guardian signs a note without seeing it, so the federation cannot follow who pays whom. Direct messages and private groups are encrypted end to end. Public groups stay public. Payments arriving or leaving over Lightning can still reveal something to the services that route them.

How a federation holds up

Moving Bitcoin out of a federation takes a threshold of guardians to agree. Fedimint is Byzantine fault tolerant, so the group keeps working when members go offline or misbehave. With 7 guardians, 5 must agree before Bitcoin moves or new ecash is issued, and the federation still runs with 2 of them out.

Theft would need 5 of the 7 guardians to collude. In practice that is very unlikely, because guardians usually do not know who the other guardians are. That is why the model works. Fedi matches them through PeerBadge and Manifold so they start as strangers, a design Jeff Booth described on 22 October 2026. It is still trust in a group of people.

Why many federations matter

Jeff Booth told Rob Wallace on the Bitcoin News YouTube channel, in an interview published on 3 November 2026 (at 32:07):

“And the more and more of those privacy federations there are around the world, it acts like Bitcoin nodes.”

The point is resilience. A Bitcoin node checks the rules for itself. A federation holds funds under a threshold of guardians, so its independence needs evidence of its own.

It is already in use

At bitcoin++ Seoul on 6 November, Fedimint developer Elsirion presented three years of the protocol in the wild. Matthew Vuk, who does Ark research at Second, posted on X from the session (x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118519648409075866):

“Elsirion (@EricSirion) showcases the progress of “3 years of @fedimint in the wild” 🔆🌏 80 federations. 463k user transactions. 24k wallets.”

Group saving is the feature Fedi's co-founder and CEO rates highest. Obi Nwosu wrote on X on 12 October 2026 (x.com/obi/status/2109687380815090037):

“Group saving with Multispend is one of the most powerful and under appreciated features within the Fedi app.”

You can look at federations from the outside before you join one. Ayush Bansal, who builds Fedimint Observer, wrote on X on 6 November 2026 (x.com/bansalayush247/status/2118753707101991228):

“what's even more interesting is that you can explore data from 18 public federations on Observer.”

The dashboard is at observer.fedimint.org.

What still depends on someone else

A threshold of guardians can move the coins. Enough of them acting together could also issue ecash with nothing behind it.

There is a smaller concentration too. Fedi is the only liquidity provider for Manifold federations at the start, according to Fedi's support page, and the page describes other providers as future work. Offline guardians or thin liquidity can block a payment or a withdrawal.

An ecash note is only as good as the Bitcoin behind it, and checking that happens outside the app.

What you can do

• Check before you join. Observer shows public federations, so look at how long one has run and how many independent guardians it has.
• Send a small amount first, then pay some of it back out to a wallet you control. Note the fee and how long it took.
• Keep savings on keys you hold and use Fedi for spending money, the way you would use a bank account.
• Read step 10 of the Few Fedi guide for the withdrawal test done properly.
• Repeat the withdrawal test after a month and after any change in the federation, because a federation that paid out once can change underneath you.

Sources

1. Fedimint, “How Federations Work” (fedimint.org). fedimint.org/guardians/how-federations-work
2. Jeff Booth and Eric Yakes, interviewed by Rob Wallace, “Super AI Will Send Every Investment To ZERO… Except One” (Bitcoin News, YouTube), 3 November 2026, quote at 32:07. youtube.com/watch?v=Y4mxXmMh128&t=1927s
3. Jeff Booth, “Private money, private conversation, and how Fedi is solving the guardian problem” (jeffbooth.ca), 22 October 2026. jeffbooth.ca/articles/private-money-private-conversation
4. Matthew Vuk, post on X from the Fedimint session at bitcoin++ Seoul, 6 November 2026. x.com/matthewvuk2/status/2118519648409075866
5. Ayush Bansal, post on X on Fedimint Observer, 6 November 2026. x.com/bansalayush247/status/2118753707101991228
6. Obi Nwosu, post on X on Multispend, 12 October 2026. x.com/obi/status/2109687380815090037
7. Fedi, “What are the roles in a Manifold federation” (Fedi Support). support.fedi.xyz/hc/en-us/articles/38834761003666-What-are-the-roles-in-a-Manifold-federation
8. Fedimint Observer (fedimint.org). observer.fedimint.org/
9. Few, “Set up Fedi” (few.guide guide). few.guide/guides/fedi-wallet.html