The Bank of Korea on 24 Jun warned that crypto markets transmit shocks to traditional finance through three reinforcing channels: US spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows; concentrated buying by digital asset treasury (DAT) firms led by Strategy; and stablecoin issuers' holdings of US Treasury bills.
Bank of Korea Names Strategy, Stablecoin Issuers in Rare Contagion Warning
24 June 2026 - 08:00 CEST
By Oihyun Kim
Equity correlation stays elevated
The central bank used a dynamic correlation model to estimate evolving asset relationships and concluded that Bitcoin's co-movement with US equities has been structurally elevated since institutional ETF adoption in 2024. ETF flows, futures leverage and corporate positioning have displaced Bitcoin's four-year halving cycle as the dominant volatility driver, the report said.
Bitcoin's correlation with the Nasdaq, on a scale of -1 to 1 where 1 indicates a perfect positive correlation and -1 indicates a perfect inverse correlation, sat below 0.10 in early 2024, climbed to 0.57 in November 2024 and stood at 0.40 on 9 Jun. Correlation with gold reached 0.17 while the dollar index showed -0.07.
Concentration triggers DAT spiral
The Bank of Korea warned that when a DAT firm's market cap falls below the value of its crypto holdings, a market-cap-to-net-asset-value (mNAV) ratio below one, the firm cannot easily raise equity, creating an incentive to sell Bitcoin and triggering further declines.
Strategy, the US-listed corporate Bitcoin treasury company formerly known as MicroStrategy, accounted for around 70% of year-to-date buying when ETF, futures and stablecoin flows are counted, according to 10X Research.
Stablecoin redemption asymmetry
The Bank of Korea called Tether and Circle's $141.9bn in US Treasury bills, as of end-March 2026, a structural risk to short-term funding markets, citing a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) finding that stablecoin redemptions push yields up two to three times as much as issuance lowers them.
A separate paper in FEDS Notes, a Federal Reserve Board research series, warned that a loss of confidence in a stablecoin issuer could trigger mass redemptions, forcing reserve sales that would ripple through traditional financial systems.
Naming firms breaks convention
The level of detail is notable in itself, since financial stability reports typically avoid naming individual firms. The Bank of Korea, however, identified Strategy for its 845,000 BTC position. To assess DAT vulnerability, the central bank also adopted the mNAV framework, a metric originally developed for closed-end fund analysis.
The report arrives as Korean regulators finalize guidelines for corporate crypto participation and consider legislation for won-denominated stablecoins, both areas the central bank has flagged for monitoring.
