Overview
- The Ministry of Economy and Finance announced in mid‑July that South Korea will run a Q4 2026 pilot using tokenized bank deposits for selected government spending in Sejong as the next step toward tokenized public finance.
- Officials have set a 2027 target to test tokenized government bonds on wholesale CBDC infrastructure so authorities can study interoperability between the Bank of Korea’s CBDC and external blockchain networks.
- Lawmakers and regulators will push the Digital Asset Basic Act and a National Asset Basic Act in H2 2026 while amending the Capital Markets Act to let distributed ledgers serve as securities registries from February 2027.
- Regional and private experiments will feed into the public program, including an August 2026–February 2027 stablecoin proof‑of‑concept in Gyeonggi led by ZKrypto and an April 2026 near‑real‑time tokenized bond settlement reported between Ripple and Kyobo Life Insurance.
- Project Hangang and earlier BOK tests have highlighted concrete operational risks—slow settlement links, liquidity management challenges, smart contract limits, and oracle reliability—which regulators say they will address before scaling pilots.