Today’s hot topic #韩国单股杠杆ETF交易下降 : everyone is watching South Korea’s regulators squeeze the leverage out of the market!! On the surface, it looks like retail investors have been completely subdued. Financial regulators have directly raised the baseline margin requirement for single-stock leveraged ETFs from 10 million won to 30 million won, and added thresholds for simulated trading. In August, the average daily trading value of the related products collapsed from 116.8 trillion won to 10.1 trillion won.
Samsung Electronics $SAMSUNG and SK Hynix’s leveraged ETFs were net-sold by retail investors to the tune of 1.773 trillion won within a month.
Many people think this is just a traditional stock-market deleveraging. Even some believe that once this high-leverage “chip” is fully wiped out, the stock market can once again move forward based on spot capital.
But you might have missed another data point: after South Korean regulators clamped down on single-stock leverage for domestic brokers, this pool of retail money that had grown used to high volatility and was extremely hungry for high leverage didn’t disappear out of thin air—it simply shifted directly into the on-chain perpetual futures market. Throughout August, the perpetual futures trading volume tracking $KORU (3x long on South Korea ETFs) on offshore exchanges has already reached 2.69 times the trading volume of the original U.S.-listed ETFs, with monthly trading value breaking $24 billion.
Those on-chain perpetual contracts that can be opened with just “5U” and come with high leverage have become the fallbacks after South Korean equities were deleveraged.
That’s why today’s crypto market is increasingly resembling a shadowy casino that absorbs the overflow risk from global regulation. The tighter traditional finance squeezes leverage, the more those die-hard leverage players will flow to the chain. The result is that on-chain there’s a lack of real industry application—everything is just betting on all kinds of volatility, derivatives, and “shitcoin” meme culture.
For large-cap spot markets, forcibly cleaning out high-leverage chips is indeed part of removing the poison, but as long as the chain keeps creating game tools with lower entry barriers and higher multipliers, the “slow bull run driven by spot” from a traditional perspective is hard to come by. Before spot capital truly reprices, the market will likely grind through quite a long period in the morass of liquidity discounts and image breakdown.
Samsung Electronics $SAMSUNG and SK Hynix’s leveraged ETFs were net-sold by retail investors to the tune of 1.773 trillion won within a month.
Many people think this is just a traditional stock-market deleveraging. Even some believe that once this high-leverage “chip” is fully wiped out, the stock market can once again move forward based on spot capital.
But you might have missed another data point: after South Korean regulators clamped down on single-stock leverage for domestic brokers, this pool of retail money that had grown used to high volatility and was extremely hungry for high leverage didn’t disappear out of thin air—it simply shifted directly into the on-chain perpetual futures market. Throughout August, the perpetual futures trading volume tracking $KORU (3x long on South Korea ETFs) on offshore exchanges has already reached 2.69 times the trading volume of the original U.S.-listed ETFs, with monthly trading value breaking $24 billion.
Those on-chain perpetual contracts that can be opened with just “5U” and come with high leverage have become the fallbacks after South Korean equities were deleveraged.
That’s why today’s crypto market is increasingly resembling a shadowy casino that absorbs the overflow risk from global regulation. The tighter traditional finance squeezes leverage, the more those die-hard leverage players will flow to the chain. The result is that on-chain there’s a lack of real industry application—everything is just betting on all kinds of volatility, derivatives, and “shitcoin” meme culture.
For large-cap spot markets, forcibly cleaning out high-leverage chips is indeed part of removing the poison, but as long as the chain keeps creating game tools with lower entry barriers and higher multipliers, the “slow bull run driven by spot” from a traditional perspective is hard to come by. Before spot capital truly reprices, the market will likely grind through quite a long period in the morass of liquidity discounts and image breakdown.
