Korea’s Mirae Asset has acquired 92% of crypto exchange, Korbit, with the selling shareholders including venture investor NXC, Nexon and SK Square. The asset manager paid Won 133.5 billion ($93 million) for the acquisition. Korbit is the fourth largest of only five regulated crypto exchanges in South Korea. The remaining 8% of Korbit appears to belong to Bitstamp, the crypto exchange owned by Robinhood.
Last year Mirae Asset Group announced its “Mirae Asset 3.0” vision which included digital assets. At the time it said it wanted to develop web 3.0 businesses “in Korea and overseas with the goal of building a global digital wallet,” with global asset management as part of its business. This could explain why Bitstamp/Robinhood have retained a stake.
It’s notable that the acquisition was via Mirae Asset Consulting, which is mainly involved in real estate rather than finance. There are two potential reasons for this, one being that its future tokenization efforts will focus on tokenizing real estate assets, but this is the less likely explanation.
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