Hacker News Reader

You can see on a regular basis that South Korean exchanges are always paying 25-50% more than Western exchanges.

The Bitcoin pump to 20k, the entire history of Bitcoin Cash, and recently the Ripple pump to $3 were all pumped by Bithumb, Upbit, etc. Hence the controversy with Coinmarketcap removing Korean exchanges for a second resulting in the marketcap dropping 50 billion.

Even right now, almost 50% of XRP volume is in SK all paying > $2, but there's no Western exchange trading above $2. See: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ripple/#markets

That's interesting. Why would they buy it for more than $2? Is it because the exchange is selling for more or just problems with international currency.

There's a high demand in S.Korea (mostly FOMO) and it's a bit hard to transfer a large amount of money out of S.Korea for some legal reasons, which makes arbitraging hard.

Tether might be a good candidate.

People looking to hedge futures contracts