This report by Tiger Research examines Korean users' onchain activities in the Ethereum ecosystem during Q1 2025.

The Korean cryptocurrency market continues its expansion from centralized exchanges to onchain environments. Multiple factors drive this shift, including limited investment opportunities in the domestic market.

This report by Tiger Research examines Korean users' onchain activities in the Ethereum ecosystem during Q1 2025.

The Korean cryptocurrency market continues its expansion from centralized exchanges to onchain environments. Multiple factors drive this shift. Former President Yoon Suk-yeol's declaration of martial law in December significantly impacted the cryptocurrency market. Domestic exchange servers crashed as investors panicked to withdraw their assets during price volatility.

Many investors lost trust in centralized systems when they couldn't access trading accounts at critical moments. Political uncertainty also devalued KRW-based assets significantly, increasing demand for cryptocurrencies and stablecoins on global exchanges rather than Korean platforms.

Korea's strict regulatory environment accelerates this market transformation. Domestic exchanges offer limited investment opportunities, while global exchanges and onchain environments unlock new possibilities for investors. These expanded environments enable more diverse investment strategies, such as arbitrage opportunities between global exchanges, leveraged derivative trading, onchain meme coin launchpads, and decentralized finance (DeFi).

This report analyzes the activity patterns and characteristics of Korean users expanding into onchain environments. We based our analysis on data from approximately 60,000 Korean user wallets in the Ethereum ecosystem to provide meaningful insights into the Korean market.

Ethereum transactions represent all trades and interactions on the blockchain. These include various activities, such as simple asset transfers, DeFi protocol interactions, and dApp usage.

Onchain data shows that Korean users' Ethereum transactions have maintained steady growth since 2016. Transaction numbers reached their peak in December, with tokens issued through launchpads gaining explosive popularity. Investors moved heavily to onchain environments to build positions on decentralized platforms rather than waiting for centralized listings.

During this period, funds flowing from Korean crypto trading platforms to external wallets hit all-time highs. This clearly indicates investors actively venturing beyond domestic boundaries to find alpha.

However, the number of active wallet addresses showed a decline in Q1 2025, with a notable decrease in new user acquisition. Cryptocurrency market downturn combined with various macroeconomic factors led investors to exhibit more conservative investment behaviors.

Despite this overall downward trend, a noteworthy pattern emerges. When analyzed by transaction size, both high-value transactions (over $1,000) and their volumes decreased. In contrast, small-value transactions (under $1,000) and their volumes actually increased.

This indicates that while large investors reduced their activity to avoid risk, smaller retail investors continued their onchain activities regardless of market conditions. These retail investors are establishing a stable presence within the ecosystem.

Our research on Korean users active in the Ethereum ecosystem during Q1 2025 compiled data from approximately 10,000 users who showed substantial onchain activity among all monitored subjects.

Korean users primarily engaged in "asset transfers" during this period. Ethereum and ERC20-based token transfers (excluding USDT, USDC) dominated activity, primarily representing fund movements for investments in global trading platforms or DeFi ecosystems.

Metamask leads in cryptocurrency swap and bridge-related activities. Most Korean users employ Metamask as their primary wallet and prefer its built-in swap and bridge functionalities for convenience. Uniswap, 1inch, and OKX Swap follow as the next most utilized services.

NFT market participation numbers remain significant considering global NFT market stagnation and infrequent trading due to low liquidity of NFT assets. Approximately 6% of all active users engaged in NFT-related activities. Major NFT projects such as Opensea and Azuki significantly boosted this participation with their token airdrop announcements. Users likely pursued additional rewards like airdrops rather than pure collection purposes or long-term investments, driving this relatively high participation rate.

In terms of stablecoin usage, USDT shows overwhelming preference among Korean users. USDT user numbers exceed USDC by approximately 1.8 times. This preference persists despite USDT facing delisting movements in certain regions and controversies regarding MiCA regulation non-compliance. USDT maintains this advantage due to its high market share, abundant liquidity, and support for more trading pairs across exchanges (both CEX and DEX).

This analysis provides objective information about Korean cryptocurrency users' actual activity patterns and preferences using onchain data. We performed this analysis using approximately 60,000 Korean user wallets. However, more sophisticated analysis requires continuous improvements in advanced filtering models and enriched labeling data.

Nevertheless, this analysis offers valuable baseline information for understanding Korean users' onchain activity flows. Korea's largest crypto Telegram channel has 50,000 users, indicating that our analysis scope represents a significant portion of domestic cryptocurrency active users.

In the future, we will expand our analysis beyond Ethereum to include various ecosystems such as Base and Solana. This comprehensive study will track Korean users' onchain activities across platforms. Through these efforts, we will continuously monitor changes in the domestic cryptocurrency market and provide more accurate insights.

Korean cryptocurrency wallet address filtering primarily focuses on interactions with domestic major exchanges Upbit and Bithumb. Exchange wallets divide into deposit wallets,