The price difference between Upbit and Binance reaches as high as 150%, with the exchange darling MOVE being driven up by Koreans to a "kimchi premium."

Author: Leek, Foresight News

A noteworthy phenomenon has emerged in the exchange listing.

On the morning of December 10, the L2 project Move, which just had its TGE, experienced significant price discrepancies across major exchanges. It surged to $2.6 on Upbit, while at the same time, the price on Binance was around $1.2, with other platforms like OKX quoting $1.05. This once again played out as a "kimchi premium" event.

As of the time of publication, the price of Move on Upbit had fallen back to around $0.9, while exchanges like Binance quoted $1.05.

The incident traces back to December 9, when several exchanges, including Binance, OKX, and Upbit, announced the listing of the Movement token, mostly at 8 PM UTC+8. Initially, Binance announced the listing time as 9 PM but later changed it to 8 PM.

It is noteworthy that it has been a long time since multiple exchanges simultaneously listed the same cryptocurrency. According to CoinGecko, there are currently 39 trading pairs for Move across over 10 exchanges, with major global crypto exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, Upbit, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, and Gate all listing the Move token, which the community humorously referred to as a "grand slam."

The different listing times across exchanges set the stage for the subsequent kimchi premium.

According to data released by ai_9684xtpa, the Korean exchanges Upbit and Bithumb were originally scheduled to list MOVE simultaneously at 8 PM last night, but a smaller Korean exchange, Coinone, unexpectedly listed it at 7:30 PM, with an opening price of 998,500 KRW (approximately $700).

This unexpected move forced the two major Korean exchanges, Upbit and Bithumb, to delay their MOVE listing times, with Upbit opting to list at 09:35 on December 10, at an opening price of 2,263 KRW (approximately $1.59). This subsequently led to significant price discrepancies on-chain, on Korean exchanges, and other major trading platforms.

So, is there an arbitrage opportunity?

After the price discrepancies emerged, platforms like OKX and Bitget closed the withdrawal function for the Move token, which locked down the arbitrage channels between exchanges. Arbitrage on Korean exchanges also requires relevant account support, making it very challenging for traders from Greater China. Currently, there is no information indicating that any trader successfully profited from the Move price discrepancies.

The premium on the Move token also reflects the frenzy among Korean crypto traders.

After Upbit listed Move, according to CoinGecko data, the 24-hour trading volume of MOVE on Upbit reached $1.36 billion, accounting for 10.88% of the platform's total trading volume, making Upbit the largest CEX for this token.

Not only for this token, but the trading volume of cryptocurrencies in Korea has also begun to approach that of its stock market.

On December 10, according to Korean media koreaherald, due to the influence of the domestic political situation, local investors flocked to cryptocurrencies and other alternative assets. As of 3:30 PM on December 6, the 24-hour trading volume of the top five cryptocurrency exchanges in Korea—Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and Gopax—was $14.59 billion. This amount is equivalent to 20.72 trillion KRW, nearly double the trading volume of the Korea Composite Stock Price Index, which was 10.48 trillion KRW on the same day.

In this context, it is not surprising that the cryptocurrency market has once again seen the emergence of a "kimchi premium."

At the same time, what is the background of the Movement project? Its appeal to all exchanges can be glimpsed from its financing scale.

Movement is an Ethereum-based Move EVM Layer2 solution, fully compatible with the EVM Move virtual machine, which means it is compatible with both Ethereum and the Move ecosystem.

The Movement Labs team was founded in November 2022, and the two founders, Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon, both studied at Vanderbilt University in the United States. Most of the team members have previous work experience in the Move ecosystem.

According to its founder Rushi, similar to Solana's Solang and Neon, Movement has built Fractal, an EVM interpreter running on Move. Any Solidity code can run and be fully compiled into Move bytecode to launch the virtual machine. This gives Movement the same parallelization capabilities as Aptos and Sui, while also making it EVM compatible.

Movement Labs has also been very successful in fundraising. Its Pre-seed round in September 2023 raised $3.4 million led by Varys Capital, dao5, Blizzard Fund, Borderless Capital, among others, and its Series A round in April 2024 raised $38 million led by Polychain Capital, with participating institutions including Hack VC, OKX Ventures, Placeholder, Archetype, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, dao 5, and Aptos Labs.

In addition, in May 2024, Binance Labs announced an investment in Movement, although the specific amount was not disclosed.

Beyond the backing of VC powerhouses, the airdrop during Movement's TGE also satisfied many users.

On December 10, X user KuiGas stated that the Movement project, thanks to its airdrop mechanism and support from top exchanges, has become one of the best targets for ordinary people to make a comeback in 2024. Based on a valuation of $1.5 billion, the airdrop allocation reached $150 million. According to their calculations, Movement allocated 10% of the airdrop based on a $1.5 billion valuation, which amounts to approximately $150 for 1 million addresses.