ICX loses its last Korean won market on October 19: the dates to watch before Upbit's trading close

Anyone holding ICX has until 19 October 2026 to sell the token on its largest remaining venue. At 15:00 Korean time, 8:00 in the morning in Germany, the South Korean exchange Upbit halts trading in the ICX against won pair and deletes every open order in the process. A balance held there can still be withdrawn until 18 November 2026. After that, Upbit ends all support for the token, including support for airdrops, wallet upgrades, migrations and hard forks.

Upbit is not a trading address for investors in Germany, as the exchange serves the Korean market and requires a Korean bank account. The date nonetheless helps determine the price at which a remaining European holding can still be sold at all. The won pair on Upbit is the last large market ICX has anywhere, and it disappears around ten weeks before the day the ICON blockchain is shut down for good.

What happens to ICX at Upbit on 19 October

A delisting is the removal of a crypto asset from an exchange's trading: the pair vanishes from the offering, and buy and sell orders are no longer possible afterwards. Upbit is carrying out this step for ICX in two stages, and only the first falls on 19 October.

At the close of trading that day, the exchange will cancel every order still sitting in the order book, uniformly and by its own announcement. A sell limit parked well above the market price therefore comes back rather than filling. Only in the second stage, four weeks later, does the withdrawal window close as well. That sequence is customary and carries the more important information for holders: between 19 October and 18 November a balance can no longer be sold, but it can still be moved out. The date was first reported by a Korean trade publication, in the report of 18 September.

Why Upbit is halting trading: replay attack and warning list

Upbit justifies the removal with security risks that remain unresolved in the exchange's view. The background is an incident on the ICON chain at the end of August. In a replay attack, a transaction that has already been validly signed is submitted again, so the same instruction is executed several times although it was authorised only once.

According to the available reports, two such signed withdrawal messages were reused 1,492 times on 27 August. That released 119.9 million ICX and 531,600 bnUSD, and the chain then stood still for around 25 hours. On 28 August, Upbit put the token on its warning list and, after further review, decided to end trading support. Upbit's own notice page is not freely accessible from outside Korea; the date and the reasoning therefore rest on reporting by Korean and international trade media, not on the exchange's page itself.

Only one market left: 18 of 865 Upbit pairs carry the warning flag

How seriously Upbit takes the case can be read from the exchange's own market list. Of 865 trading pairs, exactly 18 carry the warning flag on 9 October, and those 18 are practically identical with the current removal and review cohort: alongside ICX there are BLAST, EGLD, MANTRA, RVN, SOPH and ZIL.

Within that group, ICX is the only asset left with just a single pair at Upbit. Its earlier pairs against Bitcoin and against USDT no longer exist there. EGLD, MANTRA, RVN and BLAST each still have two or three pairs affected; for ICX, the won pair takes the entire venue with it. How the same mechanism runs for another token was described in early October in our piece on the Upbit delisting of Ravencoin.

Almost half of worldwide ICX turnover runs through Upbit

Liquidity describes a market's ability to absorb an order without a large price concession; the thinner it is, the more expensive a sale becomes. On ICX it is small, and it hangs on a single place.

The won pair at Upbit turned over around 501 million won on Thursday, at a price of 19.6 won and a volume of 25.8 million ICX. Converted, that is $348,000 to $373,000, depending on whether the official exchange rate or the token's world market price is applied. Worldwide daily turnover across all venues combined came to about $776,000 over the same period. Upbit alone therefore carries 45 to 48 percent of all ICX trading. The token's market value stands at around $14.9 million.

That order of magnitude is the real heart of the date. When close to half of turnover falls away on a single day, the remainder barely redistributes to the other venues; the remaining market becomes noticeably thinner as a result. Selling a larger position after that means moving the price with your own order. Which venues remain an option for a move, and what to weigh when choosing, is set out in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges with MiCA authorisation.

Around eight percent premium: ICX costs more in Korea than on the world market

A second effect comes into play, and it is easily missed when looking at a single price. On Upbit, one ICX cost 19.6 won on Thursday. At the official exchange rate that is about 1.46 US cents, while the token traded at around 1.35 US cents on the world market. The Korean market therefore pays a good eight percent more for the same token.

Premiums of this kind have been known in Korea for years and arise because capital moves between Korean and international venues less easily than the price difference suggests. For assessing the date, the consequence is this: the average price that price pages show for ICX today contains a share of Korean purchases at higher prices. If that market falls away, so does the part of demand that carried the premium.

Withdrawals until 18 November: the second Upbit deadline

Four weeks lie between the trading close and the withdrawal close at Upbit. Whoever still has ICX sitting in a Korean account can send the balance to their own address or to another exchange during that period, but can no longer sell it. After 18 November 2026, Upbit also explicitly stops handling airdrops, wallet upgrades, migrations and hard forks for the token.

That last point is no footnote in the case of ICX. The exchange of ICX into SODA, on which the entire remaining supply depends, is technically exactly such a migration process. An exchange that ends migration support thereby takes away holders' option of having the swap handled through the account.

The deadline calendar for ICX up to 31 December

The Upbit date does not stand alone. For a European ICX holder, several dated cut-offs line up before the end of the year, and most of them are already behind us or immediately ahead:

• 2 October 2026: Bitvavo closed deposits, trading and withdrawals for ICX. Whatever remained in the account after that is automatically converted into euros by the exchange on 12 October at the latest, according to its schedule. The details are in our report on the Bitvavo forced conversion.
• 30 September and 3 October 2026: At OKX, trading ended first in the euro pairs, then in the USDT pairs. The exchange accepts withdrawals until 23 December 2026, according to the details in our article on the OKX delisting.
• 19 October and 18 November 2026: trading close and withdrawal close at Upbit.
• 31 December 2026: The ICON blockchain is shut down, and at the same moment the option of swapping ICX into SODA ends.

Binance had already taken ICX out of spot trading earlier, in September. Anyone who suspects a balance is still there will find the sequence of the dates at the time in our article on the Binance delisting; the November withdrawal dates named there, however, come from a single secondary source and should be treated with corresponding caution. If in doubt, check the withdrawal window directly in the account.

A one-way street since 30 September: the road back to ICX is closed

The migration is the swap of the old token for the new one: ICX is withdrawn, SODA is issued. The ICON Foundation set the dates for it back in May and published them on its own project page. What the two cut-offs mean for holders was sorted out in August in our overview of the two deadlines before the ICON blockchain shuts down. Since 30 September the swap has run in one direction only; converting SODA back into ICX has been ruled out since then. On 31 December 2026 the chain will be halted permanently, with only an archive remaining reachable for looking up old transactions.

That leaves exactly two states for an ICX balance at year-end: swapped, or worthless on a shut-down chain. How large the unswapped portion is was established by cryptoticker.io in early September through its own count of both chains: at the time, 1.109 billion ICX still sat on the ICON chain, and there is no public progress indicator for the migration. No more recent reliable figure is available.

Exchange or your own wallet: who carries out the migration

Self-custody means the keys to the coins lie with the holder and not with an exchange. For the ICX migration, that difference determines who has to act.

If the balance sits on an exchange that carries out the migration itself, the house handles the swap and credits SODA. Several venues have already completed this and automatically converted customer balances in the process. If the balance sits in a private wallet, by contrast, it does not migrate on its own: there the holder has to start the swap through the project's official portal, and the 31 December deadline applies without leniency. What decides the timetable is not 31 December but the day your own exchange ends its support.

Copycat portals asking for keys tend to multiply around migrations like this one. Open the swap page only through the official project address and never enter a seed phrase; a genuine migration portal asks for a signature from the wallet, not a word list.

Holding period and tax: what separates a sale, a forced conversion and a migration

The holding period is the span after which a gain from a private sale of crypto assets stays tax-free in Germany; under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act it is one year. Within that year the gain is taxable, with a threshold applying to the sum of all private disposals in a year.

Three routes now run in parallel for ICX, and they are not treated alike for tax. Selling yourself on an exchange is a clear disposal with a date and proceeds. A forced conversion, in which the exchange turns the residual balance into euros without an order, is economically a sale as well, merely without your own decision on timing; it too triggers the event. The swap of ICX into SODA, by contrast, is legally contested: whether a swap in the course of a project migration counts as a disposal of the old token or as the continuation of the same investment has not been conclusively settled, and the answer determines whether the holding period starts afresh.

In practical terms: record for each of these events when it took place, how many tokens were involved and what value arose. On a holding that has been sitting since 2021 or longer, the question of a restarted holding period can decide more than the price does. With larger holdings or an unclear acquisition history, the case belongs with a tax adviser rather than a rule of thumb.

What argues against a quick sale, and what argues for it

Market mechanics argue for a prompt exit. With the won pair, close to half of trading disappears, and the Korean premium of a good eight percent disappears with it. Anyone who intends to sell anyway sells into a thinner market the longer they wait. Added to that, at a market value of just under $15 million even a medium-sized order leaves visible traces in the price.

Against a rushed sale stand the tax question and the size of the amounts. At 1.35 US cents per token, a holding of 10,000 ICX is worth around $135; trading and withdrawal fees can eat up a noticeable share of that. Whoever migrates instead of selling keeps a position in the successor project, but carries its risk. And that risk is real: a project that shuts down its own blockchain, and a token whose largest venue removes it over unresolved security questions, are both warning signs. A total loss is possible at a value of this size, and on both routes.

This text cannot give a recommendation, because the right answer depends on the purchase price, the holding period, the size of the position and your own assessment of the successor project. What it can give is the calendar: after 19 October, every one of these decisions becomes more expensive to carry out, and after 31 December one of them is no longer possible at all.

ICX: 19 October decides the four later deadlines

Three steps sort out the situation, and the first costs only a few minutes:

1. Establish the balance and its location. Look in every account and every wallet for where ICX is still sitting, and note the deadline that applies at each place. If the balance is at an exchange that has already removed it, the withdrawal deadline is the date that counts. Which venues are suitable for a move is shown in our comparison of crypto exchanges.
2. Decide before 19 October, not after. Selling or migrating are the two routes; both are cheaper to carry out before the trading close than after it. Migrating out of self-custody requires access to the keys and a small reserve for network fees. Which device suits that is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document every event. The date, the number of tokens and the value of every sale, forced conversion and swap belong in your own records while the exchange still displays them. After an account closure, the evidence is laborious to obtain. The tools in our overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers help with the collecting.

(As of October 9, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)