SOUTH KOREA TELLS EXCHANGES TO RAISE COLD WALLET SHARE AFTER BINANCE — NO NEW NUMBER — THE LAW’S FLOOR STAYS 80% AND GOPAX SITS AT 80.54%

On November 2, 2026, South Korea’s Financial Services Commission held an emergency meeting on the Binance theft with the Financial Supervisory Service, the Financial Security Institute, the exchange group DAXA and major crypto firms. Its release calls for an urgent check of cold wallet holdings, insurance and reserves, and for raising the cold wallet share. It sets no percentage. It is a push, not a new rule.

The law already has a number. Exchanges must keep at least 80% of user assets, by economic value, in offline wallets. Korean outlet etnews, citing Financial Supervisory Service data given to Rep. Min Byeong-deok, lists the end of September shares: Upbit 99.17%, Bithumb 94.76%, Coinone 85%, Digital X 82.79%, GoPax 80.54%. GoPax has 0.54 points of room. Bitcoin is why this matters here: the theft that set off the meeting put 18,270 bitcoin into 19 addresses after a hot wallet was emptied, and no regulator can pull them back.

Those shares are by value across a whole book. Neither the release nor the etnews table breaks out bitcoin, and the release never names it. So a customer can’t read from them how much of the bitcoin held for him is offline, or who can sign for it.

Start from first principles. A state can tell a custodian where to keep a key. It can’t change whose key it is. Raise the ratio from 80% to 99% and the customer still holds a claim on a firm that holds the coin. That is a real safety gain, and it is still a promise. The only bitcoin no exchange’s hot wallet can lose is bitcoin that was never on the exchange. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $77,507.