Korea used to have a pretty strong base of crypto builders. But ever since the Terra-Luna collapse, they’ve kind of disappeared from view. It’s not that they stopped building, more that they’ve started hiding where they’re from.
Seeing the same pattern over and over: Founders set up companies in places like Singapore or Dubai, build teams from all over, and structure things so it’s not obvious the project is Korean.
It’s easy to blame the global hit to trust after Terra-Luna. But the more interesting part is what’s happening domestically. Korean investors themselves became some of the most skeptical toward Korean projects. So now you’ve got this weird situation where one of the biggest crypto markets in the world (~11 million verified users, ~21% of the population) is actually really hard for Korean teams to break into.
It doesn’t seem to get better. A lot of devs who used to work in Web3 are starting to move toward AI, especially AI agents and on-chain AI infrastructure. So the pool of builders are now actually shrinking.
On top of that, there’s a sense of fatigue setting in. Years of recycled ideas and projects that never really delivered have worn people down. The users who stuck around through multiple cycles just aren’t responding to the same old playbooks anymore.
So Korean builders are in a tough spot. Globally, there’s still some lingering skepticism toward Korean projects. Domestically, investors are tired of being burned. It leaves them caught in the middle, trying to build in a market that doesn’t fully trust them anywhere.
Source: https://www.coingecko.com/learn/2026-korea-crypto-market-guide-tiger-research
