From Reddit (r/cryptocurrency) - a friend messaged me this today:
I'm a South Korean citizen. Let me just tell you what
just happened. About 4 hours ago, Ministry of Justice
issued a statement that the SK government is seeking
to ban all crypto exchanges. They explicitly stated
that this was a decision that was well communicated
between various branches of the government. This
caused the market to crash, and really caused a media
firestorm among Koreans.
And then 2 hours ago, the Ministry of Finance and the
Blue House issued a statement that this decision to
ban all exchanges wasn't something that was
unilaterally agreed upon, and that the statement made
by the MoJ was not their stance on this matter. Now
here is my speculation on what happened.
There was a unilateral agreement to shut all exchanges,
but as you all would know, this is a very anti-democratic
and anti-capitalistic thing to do. So they decided to send
out a trial balloon.
When the statement was made it caused an outrage, as
there are approximately 2 million crypto investors
in SK. National elections are held on April, so to
control the damage I think the Blue House changed
its mind and decided to throw the MoJ under the bus.
A lot of Koreans are speculating that this is what
happened under the hood, which is very amateurish. I
just feel bad for all the guys who cut losses today.