Korean bitcoin exchange Korbit and Japan bitcoin exchange Coincheck announce the addition of Ethereum to their trading markets.

Two significant bitcoin markets in the region adopted ether trading almost simultaneously within 72 hours. On 23 March the largest bitcoin exchange in Japan – Coincheck added ETH to their platform, Korbit following it on 25 March in South Korea.

Coincheck trades bitcoin, and now ether, using bank transfers or credit cards. International transfers in other currencies will be automatically converted into JPY without fees charged.

Korbit for the moment does not allow fiat currency trading option: it is only possible to trade between ether and bitcoin. However, users can convert national currency (Korean Won) to bitcoin and then convert bitcoin to ether. Besides, Korbit users will also be required to transfer funds from their KRW-BTC wallet to BTC-ETH wallet. Korbit claims that these steps are currently unavoidable and claims no additional fees for them. The Merkle blog foresees the growth of the exchange’s trading volume given the arbitrage opportunities from the two most popular virtual currencies.

The demand for ether is currently increasing resulting in the growing number of bitcoin exchanges starting to support Ethereum currency. To date, according to CoinGecko, the list includes Poloniex, Kraken, ShapeShift, Gatecoin, Bitfinex, Bleutrade, Bter and HitBTC. Poloniex is the exchange with the largest trading volume having about 56% of the whole ether trading. Kraken is the second large with about 22% of the whole volume. Besides, Kraken is the only exchange that offers ether trading in multiple pairs between ether and one of the following currencies: bitcoin, euro, US dollar, Canadian dollar, British pound and Japanese yen.

Anna Lavinskaya