After discussing this with some users recently it seems to have passed by many, so I decided to post some more info on this.
What is upbit?
Upbit is a new Korean exchange collaborating with Bittrex. It is launched by Korea's biggest messaging app developer, Kakao. The exchange was announced around the same time Korea passed China in trading volume so this makes it a pretty big deal.
The Kakao Corporation is pretty big in Korea as its messaging app, Kakao Talk, is the most popular messaging app there and they have the second most popular search engine, Daum. Not only can people use the app as a payment system and buy stocks via the Kakao Stock platform, but it also offers other services similar to Uber, music streaming, video sharing and a popular mobile gaming network.
What does this mean for Steem?
Not only can users now buy cryptocurrencies through their mobile app, but Upbit is now one of the first to allow direct purchase of Steem through fiat currency.
It was not such big news when they added STEEM-BTC and SBD-BTC at first, since they collaborate with Bittrex, it meant that all orders executed on Bittrex were exactly the same as on Upbit. Now that they allow for fiat trades with only a few clicks on your phone, this is the results so far.
Remember the recent SBD and Steem pump? Check out what the mini charts on Upbit look like for SBD and Steem:
As you can clearly tell, the same day SBD and STEEM started trading for the fiat currency KRW, the volume and prices spiked on both.
The goal of upbit is to become the largest exchange in South Korea, this would mean they would have to surpass exchanges such as Bithumb which lately has been in top 3 worldwide in volume and others such as Coinone and Korbit.
With the rising activity of South Korean users here on Steemit lately, proven by these traffic stats from steemittraffic:
I am glad that they have an easy way to purchase and sell Steem into fiat and I hope more exchanges will add Steem in 2018 to make it easier for the rest of us.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks for reading!
