Bithumb, South Korea’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has published a fresh customer-facing update on its long-running push to become the first domestic crypto exchange listed on a Korean stock market. The notice on the exchange’s official channel formalizes what CFO Jeong Sang-gyun told shareholders in March 2026: the listing that was originally supposed to happen in the second half of 2025 is now a 2028 event, at the earliest.
The document lays out three phases. Internal control upgrades and preparations for the switch from Korean GAAP to Korean International Financial Reporting Standards (K-IFRS) run through 2026. The preliminary listing review with the Korea Exchange is filed in 2027 and audited during that year.
The actual IPO lands in 2028, “subject to change depending on shifts in market conditions and review schedules.” Samjong KPMG remains the IPO advisor under a contract that runs through the end of 2027.
The Timeline That Has Slipped Three Times
This is not the first version of the plan. When Bithumb first surfaced concrete listing intentions in November 2023 with Samsung Securities as underwriter, the target was a KOSDAQ debut in the second half of 2025. In September 2024, reporting from Korean outlets added a U.S. Nasdaq possibility to the mix, with company officials calling “all possibilities” open.
By April 2025, the exchange was corporate-restructuring in preparation, spinning off the non-exchange businesses under Bithumb A on July 31, 2025. That reshuffling was itself justified as an IPO clean-up move.
Then February 2026 happened, and the calendar reset a second time, first to 2027 and then formally to “after 2028” at the annual shareholders’ meeting. Each slip has come with a fresh justification: first restructuring, then internal controls, now K-IFRS conversion and regulatory clearance.
The pattern is worth flagging because a listing that has now been “one to two years away” for three consecutive years is a specific type of file that Korea Exchange reviewers pay attention to when deciding how skeptically to price the review.
What the K-GAAP to K-IFRS Switch Actually Means
The accounting transition is the least discussed part of the roadmap and the most operationally demanding. Moving from K-GAAP to K-IFRS is not a matter of relabeling line items. It requires restated comparative statements, typically two prior years, under the new standard.
For a crypto exchange, that touches revenue recognition on transaction fees, classification and measurement of customer virtual asset custody, provisions for regulatory penalties, and, most importantly for Bithumb specifically, disclosure of related-party transactions across the newly separated Bithumb Holdings, Bithumb Korea, and Bithumb A structure.
If the switch is meant to be complete by the end of 2026, comparative K-IFRS statements for 2025 and 2026 need to be available for the 2027 preliminary review filing. That is a tight window given that Bithumb’s ownership structure only finished separating in July 2025 and the February 2026 incident is still generating restatement pressure on the internal ledger figures used to compute customer balances.
The February 2026 Incident Is Baked Into Every Timeline Assumption
Any listing review will be run on a set of books that includes the promotional-event error, in which Bithumb’s internal system credited hundreds of customers with 620,000 BTC instead of 620,000 won during a rewards campaign. The paper Bitcoin overhang was roughly 13 to 14 times the exchange’s actual BTC reserves. On Bithumb’s own KRW pair, Bitcoin briefly fell from around 98 million won to 81 million won, a roughly 17% drop, while quotes on other domestic venues were unchanged.
The Bank of Korea later published a review noting that the exchange took around 20 minutes to identify the error, and that panic selling, automated stop-losses, and forced liquidations on Bitcoin-collateralized loans compounded the damage before deposits and withdrawals were frozen.
Bithumb says it recovered 99.7% of the errant BTC. Roughly 125 BTC remains unresolved on the books. The Financial Intelligence Unit, working under the Financial Services Commission (FSC), issued a 36.8 billion won (about $24.6 million) fine and a six-month partial business suspension, citing what regulators described as around 6.65 million individual violations of the Specific Financial Transactions Act tied to dealings with unregistered overseas operators.
In late April, the Seoul Administrative Court granted an injunction pausing the partial suspension pending the underlying dispute. Any decision by the court that eventually restores or expands the sanctions would land inside the 2027 review window.
For the roadmap, that residual risk matters more than the compensation program the exchange rolled out to affected users, because the Korea Exchange’s listing review explicitly weighs unresolved regulatory items and pending legal proceedings when deciding whether to approve the file.
The Numbers Do Not Yet Justify the Original $1B Valuation
Bithumb reported roughly 651 billion won ($430 million) in 2025 revenue with around 163.5 billion won in net figures after sorting out operation costs, 1.74 million new customer accounts, and domestic market share above 30% for the first time in years.
That last point is worth putting in context: Bithumb once controlled more than 70% of Korean crypto trading in the mid-2010s before the 2018 hack and a string of criminal investigations, including the eventual arrest of major shareholder Kang Jong-hyun on embezzlement charges, permanently damaged the brand and handed structural share to Upbit.
When Samsung Securities was first appointed underwriter in late 2023, reporting pegged the IPO target at close to $1 billion in raised capital. That figure was floated when Bithumb still expected to list into the tail end of a bull cycle. The 2028 calendar puts the listing on the other side of at least one Bitcoin halving cycle and, based on current legislative calendars, into the post-implementation period of Korea’s Phase 2 Virtual Asset Act. Both change the valuation math materially.
Crypto exchange revenue is close to 100% correlated with retail trading volume, which is in turn correlated with token prices. The public benchmarks that already trade tell that story clearly. Circle listed in June 2025, Bullish in August, Gemini in September, and by early 2026 Bullish was down more than 50% from its listing price, Gemini roughly 80% off.
Kraken, the closest analog to Bithumb by business model, is targeting a first-half 2026 U.S. debut at a $20 billion private valuation on 2024 revenue of around $1.5 billion. Any 2028 Bithumb book will be built with those printed multiples as a reference, not the 2021-era numbers underwriters were using when the file was first put together.
Shareholder pressure has already surfaced. At the March 2026 general meeting, Bithumb again declined to pay a dividend on 2025 earnings despite profitability, and shareholders openly compared that policy to Dunamu, which does distribute cash. The tension between “retain capital to survive listing review” and “return capital now” is a live corporate finance question, not a settled one.
The Ownership Cap Sits Under the Whole File
Independent of the roadmap, the proposed 20% cap on major shareholders in crypto exchanges, agreed in March by the ruling party’s Digital Asset Task Force and the FSC, gives Bithumb a three-year grace period from when the law takes effect to bring its ownership chart into compliance. Bithumb Holdings currently controls roughly 73% of the exchange.
Getting to 20%, or to 34% under an FSC exception, means either a very large secondary offering, a strategic block sale to a Korean brokerage, or a combination of both. That is the backdrop against which reports emerged in late June that Kiwoom Securities was in early discussions about a stake in the exchange. Any brokerage investor coming on the cap table now would appear in the pre-listing shareholder register the Korea Exchange sees in 2027.
There is a further wrinkle: Korean regulators still do not legally recognize cryptocurrencies as financial products, which is one of the reasons Bithumb reportedly considered Nasdaq in 2024. The Korea Exchange has never approved a crypto-native issuer. Reviewers will effectively be writing the template for how any subsequent Korean crypto listing gets valued, which typically translates into a more conservative first review rather than a more permissive one.
The Route Also Has Non-Business Overhead
The exchange has spent the last several years fighting reputational drag that has nothing to do with trading. Former chairman Lee Jung-hoon has cycled on and off the board through overlapping legal matters. Former CEO Lee Sang-jun stepped off the board over a bribery investigation into listing decisions. In June 2026, police raided Bithumb’s Seoul headquarters as part of a probe into alleged hiring favors involving an independent lawmaker’s son.
Underwriters typically want that kind of open item fully closed before the preliminary review file is stamped. Every unresolved case adds pages of legal risk disclosure to the prospectus and reduces the price the book can be built at.
What Would Actually Have to Go Right
For the 2028 target to hold on the schedule Bithumb has just published, four things need to go right roughly in sequence. K-IFRS-compliant comparative statements for 2025 and 2026 need to be signed off in time to file with the preliminary review. The FIU sanctions matter needs to resolve one way or the other so it can be disclosed as a closed item rather than pending litigation.
The ownership cap legislation needs to enter its grace period on a schedule that lines up with the listing, ideally with a strategic investor already visible on the cap table. And the outstanding criminal and administrative investigations tied to former executives and current hiring practices need to reach conclusions that can be summarized in prospectus risk factors without spooking the review panel.
None of those are impossible on a two-year clock. None of them are within Bithumb’s unilateral control either. A Korean crypto IPO is a first-mover file, and first-mover files get reviewed slowly. The most useful framing for the roadmap is that Bithumb is spending 2026 and 2027 not preparing to list, but preparing to survive a review process that has never been run on a company like it before, in a country whose financial regulator does not yet officially recognize the product the company sells.
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