UpBit Exchange Gets Cleared From Fraud Charges

The South Korean UpBit Exchange gets cleared from all the fraud charges as per the Seoul Southern District Court’s decision which we have today here at DC Forecasts and the cryptocurrency news.

The Deputy Judge Oh Sang-Yong dismissed the 30-count criminal fraud and market manipulation decision leveled against the UpBit directors for lack of evidence. According to the media outlet Newsis, the court decided that the activities of the exchange were not enough to materially impact the spot price of Bitcoin. Prosecutors even argued that Upbit was trading against its customers and set up fake accounts that could have manipulated the market prices.

According to the prosecutors, UpBit was creating fake buy orders to artificially inflate trading activity for the tokens. A lot of the reports have revealed a lot of spoofing and wash trading within the crypto market but the analysts believe that a lot of the trading volume data displayed by crypto exchanges was in fact, inflated. South Korean authorities also raided UpBit’s headquarters in 2018 because they believed the exchange was insolvent.

The Upbit exchange gets cleared from its charges and it is still one of the first exchanges that got a license in the country while the other major platforms posted huge losses in 2018, UpBit declared a profit of $123 million during the year-long bear market. BitHumb also recorded a loss of $180 million which was more than the losses incurred by Coinone and Korbit together.

Crypto exchanges and other crypto-businesses in South Korea are shutting down. The 2018 bear market and the increasingly harsh regulatory climate in the country seem to be dampening the enthusiasm that was once one of the better climate countries for crypto. BitBerry which is also a popular crypto wallet platform announced to be shutting down. The smaller volume on crypto exchanges is one of the reasons that many of the exchanges are closing and reporting losses. About 96 percent of crypto trading services in South Korea is getting close to bankruptcy.

The compliance costs are reportedly on the rise and several commercial banks are getting fresh hurdles for offering services for the exchanges. The crypto stakeholders in the country believe that the current regulatory climate is choking on the digital innovation and many startups are choosing to list their tokens on exchange platforms based across the world during the shrinking trading activity in the country.