South Korea’s financial regulatory authority, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), has intensified its surveillance of the digital asset market through increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover and stop crypto market manipulation.

The FSS has upgraded its Virtual Assets Intelligence System for Trading Analysis (VISTA) by adding an automated detection algorithm that can identify potential price manipulation scenarios even without human involvement.

Automated Detection and Analysis

The recently developed algorithm incorporates a sliding window grid search technique in order to identify all possible sub-periods of a trading dataset, thus allowing for a complete investigation of potential manipulation windows.

The technique is highly efficient since it detected the entire previously identified times of manipulation and marked suspicious periods that were very hard to detect by usual analysis.

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Extensive Enhancements

The FSS has received a budget of 170 million won ($116,000) for the year 2026 to upgrade VISTA’s functionalities by including state-of-the-art tools for the automated detection of coordinated trading account networks, abnormal trading pattern analysis, text analysis of thousands of crypto assets, and fund source tracing.

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Summary

An expansion of the AI-based surveillance by the FSS marks a significant shift from human to automated, data-driven, legal enforcement in South Korea’s digital asset markets. As trading becomes ever more complex, this update will enable regulators to anticipate the tactics of potential manipulators, which in turn will result in a safer and more transparent crypto ecosystem.

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