Aztec (AZTEC) rose around 82% in 24 hours to around $0.035 after South Korean exchanges Upbit and Bithumb moved to list the token on local currency pairs, triggering a wave of KRW-denominated buying in a thinly traded market.
Korean listings remain important because they elevate a token from just being crypto to something that a large retail base can purchase directly with the local currency.
South Korea consistently ranks among the top three countries for cryptocurrency trading volume relative to population, and Upbit alone regularly matches or surpasses Coinbase in daily spot turnover during active sessions.
A KRW pair eliminates the extra hop through USDT, plugs into Korea’s unusually active spot trading culture, and puts the token on screens that people in the region actually look at. And that kind of exposure can be transformative for smaller cap tokens like AZTEC.
Traders often treat new Upbit and Bithumb listings as momentum events, arriving before liquidity deepens and before the initial premium fades. The pattern has been repeated repeatedly: tokens like VIRTUAL have printed double-digit moves in Korean listing announcements alone, regardless of what the underlying project was doing at the time.
In the thin books, that dynamic creates the type of vertical sail printed in AZTEC. Once prices rise locally, arbitrageurs step in, buying globally and selling into Korean supply, helping to push prices up across the board. The so-called “kimchi premium” – the persistent difference between Korean and international prices – tends to widen markedly during these episodes before narrowing as arbitrage flow recovers.
Aztec itself presents itself as an Ethereum-based, privacy-focused Layer 2 that uses zero-knowledge proofs to enable encrypted transactions on a public chain. That gives the token a narrative beyond the listing event.
The premium had narrowed slightly in the Asian afternoon session as arbitrage flow recovered and the rally showed signs of exhausting.
