Crypto prices aren’t the same everywhere. In South Korea, they’re often higher, sometimes by double digits. This pricing gap, known as the Kimchi Premium, creates real arbitrage opportunities for traders and platforms that can act fast.
Why the Kimchi Premium Matters for Arbitrage Traders
Tracking the Kimchi premium across multiple exchanges, like Binance, Upbit, Bithumb, OKX, and Bybit, requires real-time price feeds, normalized data, and affordable access to both spot and futures markets.
If you're building a site that compares crypto prices across exchanges to reveal arbitrage opportunities, especially in markets like South Korea, speed, coverage, and cost matter. The Kimchi Premium makes this especially urgent: local traders want to see BTC and ETH price gaps between Bithumb, Upbit, and global platforms like Binance or OKX in real time.
Real Customer Case: Tracking the Kimchi Premium Live
A customer in Korea wanted to show the real-time Kimchi Premium on a website comparing BTC prices from Binance, Bybit, OKX, Upbit, and Bithumb. They needed price updates per second and funding rate data. CoinAPI provided a custom plan with only the selected exchanges, enabling a fast launch with scalable pricing.
The Challenge: Building a Kimchi Premium Monitor
Traders in South Korea often pay more for BTC and ETH than those in global markets due to local demand, capital controls, and currency restrictions. This price gap, known as the Kimchi Premium, creates frequent arbitrage opportunities—but only for users who can act in real time.
Our customer needed a solution that could:
- Compare prices across Korean and global exchanges
- Update BTC and ETH prices per second
- Include funding rates to reflect futures-based arbitrage potential
- Handle both spot and derivatives data
- Stay cost-effective while scaling
How CoinAPI Helps with Tracking the Kimchi Premium
If you're building an arbitrage monitoring site, especially in regions like South Korea where the Kimchi Premium is common, CoinAPI gives you the real-time infrastructure to track price differences across global and local exchanges instantly.
Want to understand how crypto traders detect price gaps across exchanges? See our guides:
- Inter-Exchange Arbitrage: Trading With Cryptocurrencies and How Traders Find Their Price Spots.
- Find crypto arbitrage faster: How CoinAPI powers inter-exchange opportunities
CoinAPI’s Solution: Scalable, Fast, Exchange-Specific
We designed a custom plan around just what the customer needed, nothing more, nothing less:
- Real-Time Spot + Futures Data
- Per-second price updates from Binance, Bybit, OKX, Upbit, and Bithumb
- Full support for both spot and perpetual contracts
- Normalized data format across all exchanges for clean comparisons
- Funding Fee Integration
- Real-time funding rate data pulled from derivatives markets
- Helps users calculate true arbitrage profitability beyond spot prices
- Custom Exchange Package = Lower Cost
- Only the 5 selected exchanges were included in the plan
- Kept costs aligned with the customer’s budget, with room to grow
- WebSocket + REST API Ready
- Built for fast frontend integration
- Delivered everything needed to power a live, client-facing arbitrage dashboard
The Outcome
The customer launched their Kimchi Premium tracker with full visibility into BTC and ETH prices across five major exchanges, updated per second, including funding rates.
CoinAPI’s infrastructure allowed them to:
- Reduce time-to-market with normalized data feeds
- Avoid overpaying by selecting only the needed exchanges
- Provide users with real-time insights into cross-market price gaps
What Are the Common Pain Points for Tracking Kimchi Premium?
- Real-time updates are hard to source across both Korean and global exchanges
- API costs grow quickly when pulling high-frequency data
- Data formats vary, making price comparisons error-prone
- Futures markets and funding fees are often overlooked
- Developers lack ready-made tools to alert on price discrepancies
How CoinAPI Helps You Build a Kimchi Premium Tracker
If you're working on a similar tool or planning to, CoinAPI provides everything you need:
- Per-second pricing from 370+ exchanges
- Custom plans based on selected exchanges
- Real-time funding fee and futures data
- Stream-ready APIs (REST & WebSocket) for seamless frontend integration
- Historical flat files for backtesting and premium trend analysis
Need a Custom Quote?
We specialize in helping arbitrage-focused platforms in high-premium regions like Korea. If you need real-time price feeds, futures data, and scalable pricing, let’s talk.
Need both real-time pricing and currency conversion for your arbitrage tool? Combine our Market Data API with the Exchange Rates API for complete visibility.
