Major South Korean Exchanges Delist Litecoin Following Privacy Upgrade

Litecoin Privacy Upgrade And Delisting

On June 8, major South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges such as Upbit and Bithumb decided to stop supporting Litecoin (LTC), due to the activation of its upgrade called MimbleWimble Extension Block (MWEB) on the main Litecoin network, a protocol with extensive scaling and increased privacy capabilities. Based on Upbit's statement, the decision to delist Litecoin (LTC) was guided by South Korea's Specific Financial Information Act, which requires exchanges to be able to check transactions for transparency in order to prevent illegal money laundering or illicit financing. In addition to Bithumb and Upbit, other cryptocurrency exchanges such as Gopax, Korbit, and Coinone too followed suit, each in line with the existent anti-money laundering laws and regulations in South Korea.

The decision doesn’t come as a surprise concerning South Korea requires strict compliance with know-your-customer KYC and anti-money laundering AML guidelines. Litecoin’s MimbleWimble upgrade was implemented to increase privacy on the Litecoin (LTC) network. It uses several technologies, including confidential transactions and CoinJoin, which hides sender and receiver inputs and outputs, and combines multiple transactions into one. At the time of writing, Litecoin (LTC) is trading at $61.58 and is down 1.8% in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko.