National Pension Service Fund Unit Has Crypto Trading Blind Spot, With No Rules or Reviews on Staff Holdings

Employees at the National Pension Service’s fund management arm face strict limits on trading stocks and other financial investment products. But they can trade cryptocurrencies without separate rules or oversight, according to a Money Today report published Oct. 14.

The report, citing data that Democratic Party lawmaker Heo Jong-sik obtained from the National Pension Service, said the fund management division has not set internal rules restricting employee holdings or trading of virtual assets such as Bitcoin. It also does not conduct separate inspections to determine employees’ actual crypto investment activity.

That stands in contrast to the standards applied to conventional financial products. To prevent improper gains from the use of nonpublic information obtained on the job, employees at the fund management division are barred from trading domestic and overseas single-name stocks, derivatives and equity-linked bonds in their own names. They must report exchange-traded fund holdings within 10 business days of starting work, and they are also prohibited from trading financial investment products during working hours.

The National Pension Service checks compliance with those rules every year by reviewing financial product trading records for employees at the fund management division, as well as staff at its audit office, compliance support office and National Pension Research Institute. The reviews also cover spouses and minor direct descendants. Six rounds of inspections conducted from 2020 through June 2025 found 194 violations.

Of the nine violations detected last year, seven involved purchases or sales of restricted ETFs, including those tracking specific industry indexes. One case involved a failure to report a financial product trade to a monitor in a timely manner. Another involved placing an order for a permitted financial investment product during working hours. Virtual assets, by contrast, are excluded from the inspection list, making it difficult to determine whether employees hold or trade them.

The National Pension Service does not currently buy cryptocurrencies directly. It does have indirect exposure to the market through investments in shares of related companies, including US crypto exchange Coinbase and Bitcoin treasury company Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy. That has prompted calls for standards to manage potential conflicts of interest tied to crypto-related investments.

The government revised the Public Service Ethics Act in 2023 to require officials subject to asset registration rules to disclose their virtual-asset holdings. At the National Pension Service, however, that requirement applies only to the chairman, standing directors and the standing auditor. Working-level employees who actually manage the fund are not subject to the rule, prompting calls for separate standards requiring disclosure of crypto holdings and trades as well as regular inspections.