Aztec (AZTEC) surged about 82% in 24 hours to around $0.035 after South Korean exchanges Upbit and Bithumb both moved to list the token with local currency pairs, sparking a wave of KRW-denominated buying into a thinly traded market.
Korean listings still matter because they shift a token from being crypto-only to something that a huge retail base can buy directly with local currency.
South Korea consistently ranks in the top three countries by crypto trading volume to population, and Upbit alone regularly matches or surpasses Coinbase in daily spot turnover during active sessions.
A KRW pair removes the extra hop through USDT, taps into Korea’s unusually active spot trading culture, and puts the symbol on the screens that people in the region actually watch. And that kind of exposure could be transformative for smaller-cap tokens like AZTEC.
Traders often treat new Upbit and Bithumb listings as momentum events, rushing in before liquidity deepens and before the initial premium fades. The pattern has played out repeatedly – tokens like VIRTUAL have posted double-digit moves on Korean listing announcements alone, regardless of what the underlying project was doing at the time.
In thin books, this dynamic creates the kind of vertical light AZTEC printed. When prices are higher locally, arbitrage kicks in, buying at global venues and selling at the Korean bid, helping pull prices up across the board. The so-called “kimchi premium”—the persistent spread between Korean and international prices—tends to widen sharply during these episodes before narrowing as the arb flow catches up.
Aztec itself is pitched as an Ethereum-based, privacy-focused Layer 2 that uses zero-knowledge proofs to enable encrypted transactions on a public chain. It gives the token a narrative beyond the listing event.
The premium had fallen slightly in the Asian evening session as arbitrage flow caught up and the rally showed signs of exhaustion.
