Looks like North Korea's crypto-stealing spree is giving its Supreme Leader a Supreme Headache. After swiping over $5 billion in digital dollars since 2017 — including $1.5 billion snatch-and-grab from Bybit last month — the Hermit Kingdom finds itself with the saddest of first-world dictator problems: too much stolen money to launder.
As reported in CoinDesk, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea needs to convert about $51 million of crypto into actual spending money every month, but their network of money-launderers just can't keep up.
"Think about Pablo Escobar — he had this huge problem with storing cash. He didn't know where to put it all," says Ari Redbord from TRM Labs. "That's what North Korea has with crypto right now."
See, Chubby Cheeks can't just pop over to Coinbase like regular folks because major crypto exchanges haven't had decades to perfect the fine art of paying tiny fines for massive money laundering operations like certain banking giants we could name (cough DeutscheBankHSBCWachoviaGoldmanSachsUBS cough). Those old-school banks pay their $200 million oopsie-fines and keep right on banking, but crypto exchanges still have to pretend they care about silly things like "sanctions" and "international law" and "not helping dictators cash out their stolen digital money.
Instead, Dear Leader is stuck feeding tiny amounts through crypto mixing services that can only handle about $10 million per day. At this rate, he'll be hodling against their will for years.
"You're inevitably seeing these funds sit in wallets over long periods of time. I don't think that's them setting up a strategic reserve of some kind; they're just not being able to off-ramp the funds," Redbord said. "In every world, North Korea wants to get those funds off-chain as fast as they can."
Maybe next time steal less money, genius! (Just kidding, we know you won't.)
Previously:
• North Korea just yoinked $1.5 billion from crypto bros to fund more missiles
