South Korea Sets Feb. 4, 2027 Start for Three-Stage Tokenized Securities Roadmap

Overview

• The Financial Services Commission unveiled a three-stage roadmap on Sept. 4 that will begin when amendments to the Electronic Registration Act take effect on Feb. 4, 2027, legally recognising distributed ledgers as securities registries.
• Phase one will let privately pooled money market funds, bonds reserved for institutional investors, trust-based unlisted shares, and publicly offered fractional investment products be issued and recorded on blockchains.
• Regulators set retail limits to protect ordinary investors, capping individual subscriptions at the lower of 30 million won or 5% of an issuance and limiting annual net OTC purchases to 100 million won per platform.
• Operational rules let existing licensed firms use current permissions to handle tokenized securities and create a new issuer-account-management route that requires roughly 4 billion won in equity and dedicated IT and control staff.
• Technical work is under way with Samsung SDS contracted to build the Korea Securities Depository platform and the FSC plans subordinate-rule proposals by the end of September, while phases two and three depend on phase-one results and pending stablecoin legislation.