One of South Korea’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges called Bithumb is renewing its contract with the nation’s Nonghyup Bank. This move will allow the company to receive new account registrations once again.
According to a Korean news agency report on 29 August, Nonghyup and Bithumb will sign the contract on the 30th of August to allow the exchange to allocate new so-called real-name virtual accounts to cryptocurrency agents.
Depositor management was a key issue in the contract renewal. The issue ended with Bithumb not accepting the interest and the Nonghyup Bank not accepting the deposit.
An official of the Nonghyup Bank stated: “We decided to keep the investor assets separate, and we will not accept interest or deposit.”
At present, South Korean banks can offer account services for crypto exchanges to deposit customer’s assets on their behalf. However, each virtual account allotted to a particular customer within the firm’s deposit account must be paired with the customer’s verified identity so that banks can observe the flow of grants for anti-money laundering purposes.
As per the country’s rules, customer’s accounts must be separated from business accounts, for example, store a company’s operating funds.
Bithumb declared the halt of its new account registration service on 31 of July, laying it down to a “service development process.” News reports at that time said the suspension was forced upon the company because the bank was demanding changes as a result of the company’s 31 million dollars hacking scandal back in June.
After the July halt notice, 24-hour exchanging volume on Bithumb took a spike and plunged by forty percent within three days from about $350 million on 31st July to 200 million dollars on the 3rd August.
The daily trading volume additionally dropped to around $71.7 million by the 23rd of August. Data from CoinMarketCap indicates that however, it had bounced back to over $344 million.
