Dual South Korean listings send Ethereum layer-2 token AZTEC surging 82%

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, triggering a wave of KRW-denominated buying into a thinly traded market.

Korean listings still matter because they flip a token from being crypto-only to something a huge retail base can buy directly with local currency.

South Korea consistently ranks among the top three countries by crypto trading volume relative to population, and Upbit alone regularly matches or exceeds Coinbase in daily spot turnover during active sessions.

A KRW pair cuts out the extra hop through USDT, plugs into Korea’s unusually active spot trading culture, and puts the token on the screens people in the region actually watch. 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, rushing in before liquidity deepens and before the initial premium fades. The pattern has played out repeatedly — tokens like VIRTUAL have printed double-digit moves on Korean listing announcements alone, regardless of what the underlying project was doing at the time.

In thin books, that dynamic creates the kind of vertical candle AZTEC printed. Once prices gap higher locally, arbitrageurs step in, buying on global venues and selling into the Korean bid, which helps drag 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 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. That gives the token a narrative beyond the listing event.

The premium had narrowed slightly by the Asian evening session as arbitrage flow caught up and the surge showed signs of exhaustion.