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South Korea’s Gwangju District Prosecutors’ Office sold 320.8 BTC for approximately $21.5 million on March 10, 2026, transferring the proceeds to the national treasury. While the sale is routine on paper – in context, it’s a little awkward.
🇰🇷SOUTH KOREA SELLS $21.5M BITCOIN
S. Korea’s Gwangju District Prosecutors’ Office sold 320.8 BTC for about $21.5M and transferred the proceeds to the national treasury, as per to local media reports. pic.twitter.com/RghDKfwLEh
— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) March 10, 2026
President Lee Jae-Myung has been in office since June 2025, elected on the most ambitious pro-crypto platform in South Korean political history. His agenda includes:
Within a week of taking office, Lee submitted the Basic Digital Assets Act and proposed a stablecoin legalisation framework, becoming one of the fastest crypto policy moves by any incoming government globally.
Against that backdrop, a government prosecutors’ office quietly liquidating seized Bitcoin into the treasury looks like an action in direct conflict with the government’s earlier pro-bitcoin stance.
The core problem is structural. South Korea’s approach to seized crypto has never been codified at the national level. Regional prosecutors’ offices retain discretionary authority to dispose of confiscated digital assets, with no requirement to coordinate with the Financial Services Commission, or the presidential office.
In Q1 2025 alone, South Korean exchanges moved $40.6 billion in crypto abroad, nearly half in stablecoins, a capital outflow problem Lee explicitly campaigned on solving. Selling seized Bitcoin into the treasury rather than holding it as a sovereign asset does nothing to address that outflow and arguably undercuts the signal Lee has been trying to send to markets.
The 320.8 BTC, sold in the second week of March 2026, was liquidated at approximately $67,000 per coin. Bitcoin hit $125,000 in October 2025, four months after Lee took office and began signalling a pro-Bitcoin policy shift. Had the same coins been held through that peak, the treasury would have received approximately $40 million instead of $21.5 million. That’s an $18.5 million policy failure disguised as a routine asset disposal.
Lee’s Virtual Asset Committee was established specifically to fast-track crypto policy implementation and ensure legislative clarity. It hasn’t, as yet, issued guidance on what South Korean government agencies should do with seized Bitcoin, whether to hold, auction, or liquidate it, and on what timeline. That silence is increasingly hard to justify for an administration positioning South Korea as a global digital asset hub.
KOSPI, South Korea’s main equity index, has seen extreme volatility the last few days — wild swings amid US-Iran conflict & oil spike fears.
Bubble about to burst? Or just sharp consolidation after a monster run?
— Presto Research (@Presto_Research) March 11, 2026
Presto Research analyst Min Jung noted, after Lee’s election, spot ETF approval had become significantly more likely, but warned that broader initiatives would require careful deliberation around regulatory frameworks and monetary policy coordination. The seized asset question is simpler than either of those challenges, which makes the continued absence of a coherent policy harder to explain.
South Korea now boasts 16 million crypto investors and a president who explicitly campaigned on Bitcoin ETFs. Yet, a regional prosecutors’ office is still dumping sovereign Bitcoin into the national treasury with zero overarching policy framework – what’s wrong with this picture?
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