An amendment to the Virtual Asset User Protection Act moved from committee referral to committee review on 26 August 2026. The bill would revise Article 7 to require a virtual asset business operator to hold user assets in a separate virtual-asset address, distinct from the operator's own assets — closing what the drafters describe as a gap that let an operator treat internal ledger entries as sufficient "separation" even without a distinct on-chain address. The amendment was prompted by an incident in which an operator over-disbursed virtual assets to users beyond what it actually held, triggering a large sell-off and sharp price movement. No effective date or penalty has been set, and the bill has not been enacted — it is at the committee-review stage, not law.
What this means for you
- If you operate as a virtual asset business serving Korean users, review your current segregation method now. If user assets are separated only by internal bookkeeping rather than held in a distinct on-chain address, this bill — if enacted as drafted — would require you to change that.
- No threshold gates this duty. As drafted, the requirement applies to virtual asset business operators generally; there is no revenue or user-count floor to check against.
- Track the bill's progress rather than acting on it as final. It is still in committee review, and no effective date or penalty has been fixed. Enactment, amendment-stage changes, or a distinct transition period could all still occur before this becomes binding.
- Prepare operationally in parallel. Moving from ledger-based to address-based segregation is an infrastructure change; if the bill advances, treat the committee-review stage as your lead time to plan the migration rather than waiting for a final effective date.
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