OKX Eyes 20% Coinone Stake as Binance Gopax Wait Drags On

Three years ago, Binance bought a controlling stake in South Korean exchange Gopax and waited. The deal is still waiting for a final regulatory blessing in Seoul. That memory now sits underneath OKX’s reported move on Coinone, and it explains why the new transaction is being structured around a single number: 20 percent.

OKX and Korea Investment & Securities are in talks to each take roughly 20 percent of the Seoul-based exchange through a fresh share issuance, according to local reporting that surfaced on May 14. The figure is not coincidental. South Korean regulators have spent the past three months settling a 20 percent individual ownership cap and a 34 percent corporate ceiling for virtual asset platforms, and the proposed structure lines up exactly with where the rules want to land.

Coinone’s Cap Table Gets a Foreign Coat of Paint

The proposed structure injects fresh capital rather than buying out current holders. New shares for OKX and the Korean brokerage would dilute existing owners proportionally while leaving operational control with founder Cha Myung-hoon, who holds a combined 53.44 percent through his personal shareholding and his vehicle The One Group, according to recent corporate disclosures.

Mobile gaming holding firm Com2uS Holdings sits second at 38.42 percent, a position built between 2021 and 2022. The remaining minority spreads across smaller institutional holders. A 40 percent new issuance, split evenly between the two incoming investors, would push the founder’s combined holding below the 34 percent corporate ceiling Seoul has agreed to write into law.

The Korean platform has publicly batted away earlier merger rumours. When local outlets reported Coinbase was weighing a stake in January, a company spokesperson dismissed the chatter.

The circulating reports about a stake sale are completely groundless.

The same statement noted the firm had received various overseas partnership proposals but had no concrete deal in place. The global exchange and the brokerage have not publicly commented on the new discussions either.

Why the Number Stops at Twenty Percent

The 20 percent figure has a regulatory ceiling printed on it. South Korea’s ruling party Digital Asset Task Force and the Financial Services Commission (FSC, the country’s main securities regulator) agreed in March to cap individual shareholders at 20 percent of any virtual asset exchange. Corporate stakes can reach 34 percent only with explicit FSC sign-off, a higher threshold that lines up with the one-third veto block written into Korea’s Commercial Act.

The cap is heading into the Digital Asset Basic Act (DABA, Seoul’s planned comprehensive crypto framework), the bill that has slipped twice on stablecoin disputes and is now expected to move only after the June 3 local elections. The new rules treat the market in two speed tiers:

• Upbit and Bithumb, which together control roughly 96 percent of domestic trading volume, get a three-year grace period to dilute dominant holders down to the new threshold.
• The three smaller fiat-on-ramps in the licensed market get an additional three years on top of that, giving them six years to comply.
• Foreign exchanges entering through equity deals fall under the same caps from day one, with no transitional cushion.

For a global platform negotiating its first real foothold in the Korean won market, structuring at the 20 percent line through new shares is the cleanest path under the new framework. Anything larger would trigger an additional review whose outcome is harder to forecast.

The Binance-Gopax Wait Hangs Over the Filing

Binance announced a controlling stake in Gopax parent Streami in February 2023, taking roughly 67.26 percent of the equity as part of its Industry Recovery Initiative acquisition disclosure. Three years and three months on, the transaction still has not cleared a final executive-change review at South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU, the unit that vets exchange operators).

The original filing landed at the FIU in March 2023. Approval stalled within months over anti-money-laundering concerns linked to the parent’s then-open enforcement matters in the United States. In late 2025, after US authorities dropped the remaining cases, the FIU resumed its review. Local press has described approval as imminent for nearly six months without resolution.

The takeaway for any new foreign entrant is mechanical. A 20 percent structure with a domestic brokerage as co-anchor was designed at least partly to avoid the perception problems that froze the earlier filing. A locally regulated co-lead changes the political optics inside the regulator’s review room.

Approval timelines, however, remain a Korean specialty. Even an unobjectionable structure waited 33 months for clearance the first time the regulator looked at it, and the new deal will be benchmarked against that elapsed time before anyone in Seoul circles a target closing month.

Coinone Sits Third in a Two-Player Market

The Seoul-based platform is the third-largest of the country’s five licensed fiat-on-ramps, but the gap to the top two is steep. Upbit and Bithumb together account for roughly 96 percent of domestic spot volume. The remaining three exchanges share what is left.

That share has moved this year. South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service confirmed Upbit held 71.6 percent in the first half of 2025. By the fourth quarter, Upbit’s slice had slipped while Bithumb climbed to a multi-year high, according to Tiger Research’s Korea crypto industry guide.

• 65.0% Upbit’s market share in Q4 2025, down from nearly 80 percent a year earlier.
• 31.1% Bithumb’s share over the same period, the highest in three years.
• ~10% the Korean platform’s recent share, after briefly peaking at 20 percent during a March 2025 zero-fee event.
• 318.3 trillion won Q1 2026 combined spot volume across the five licensed exchanges.

Sitting third in a duopoly is an awkward position. The platform has the licenses, the real-name banking partnership, and the operating history. What it has not had is the marketing and liquidity firepower to close the gap on the top two. A 40 percent capital injection from two well-funded partners would change that arithmetic.

Korea Investment & Securities Brings the Local Half

The Korean co-investor is not a generic financial partner. The brokerage is the country’s largest by retail account count, a Korea Investment Holdings subsidiary, and has been openly searching for digital-asset exposure since exiting contracts-for-difference (CFDs, leveraged derivative contracts) earlier this year.

Its presence alongside a global exchange ties two threads in Korean finance into one transaction. The first is the slow normalization of crypto inside regulated brokerage rails. Seoul’s economic strategy now treats spot crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as a 2026 priority, and Samsung SDS recently won the build-and-operate contract for the central securities depository’s tokenized securities platform, with completion scheduled for February 2027.

The second thread is institutional appetite for any platform that already holds a Korean won banking partnership. Real-name verification rules, in force since 2018, make those banking ties scarce and slow to obtain. Buying into one is faster than building one.

For the global exchange, the brokerage’s involvement also matters as a political shield. The platform already holds a Markets in Crypto-Assets license passported across the EEA and onshore licenses in Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia. None of those approvals shorten the timetable in Seoul, but a Korean co-investor with FSC familiarity might.

The Calendar Around the Deal

Three near-term dates shape the transaction’s path. The first is the June 3 local elections. Substantive negotiations on DABA, including the formal write-up of the ownership cap, are widely expected to resume only after that vote.

The second is the expected closing of the older Gopax executive-change filing. Local press has tipped approval as close for months. Whenever it lands, it will set the practical template for how foreign-anchored Korean exchanges get cleared and how long that clearance takes from initial filing to final stamp.

The third is the broader stablecoin debate inside the parliament. The Bank of Korea wants stablecoin issuance limited to bank-led consortia holding at least 51 percent equity. The FSC has not agreed. That fight, layered on top of Seoul’s tightened cross-border crypto transfer registration rules, will define how foreign capital can move through Korean crypto rails for years.

If the earlier filing clears in the next quarter and the ownership cap is signed into law before the year ends, the structure now being floated will look like a model for the next foreign entrant Korea attracts. If either piece slips again, the deal sits where it is, with the share certificates already drafted, waiting on a regulator that has been the most predictable bottleneck in the entire transaction.