South Korea is moving toward a more institutional digital-finance system, with reforms covering corporate crypto access, tokenized securities and bank-issued deposit tokens. Under the Financial Services Commission’s roadmap, around 2,500 listed companies and 1,000 professional-investor corporations could gain access to real-name accounts for crypto trading under a controlled pilot.
The country is also preparing a legal framework for tokenized securities. Amendments to the Electronic Securities Act and Capital Markets Act passed in January 2026 and are scheduled to take effect in February 2027. The framework will allow distributed-ledger technology to be used for securities records while keeping tokenized assets within the existing regulated securities system.
Meanwhile, the Bank of Korea is expanding Project Hangang, its deposit-token initiative. Phase II now involves nine commercial banks and is testing person-to-person payments, biometric approvals, automatic conversion between deposits and deposit tokens, and programmable government payments. Deposit tokens are also being explored for settling tokenized bonds and shares.
The program could eventually extend to AI-driven payments. LG CNS has already demonstrated a system in which an AI agent can identify a product or service, check predefined conditions and complete payment using a tokenized bank deposit.
Together, these initiatives show South Korea building several layers of digital finance at the same time: regulated corporate crypto investment, legally recognized tokenized securities and programmable bank-based digital payments. The government and central bank appear to be focusing less on retail speculation and more on institutional custody, settlement, tokenization and financial infrastructure.
