Korea's Crypto Market to Embrace Stablecoins by 2030

Korea's crypto market has grown rapidly, with 11.13 million accounts eligible for trading by the end of 2025, accounting for over 20% of the population, and an average daily trading volume of 5.4 trillion won ($3.8 billion) in the second half of the year.

However, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, a key use case beyond trading, has grown slowly, with only about 640 billion won ($450 million) in cumulative token issuance, mostly in non-standard assets such as music royalties and artwork.

Overseas, tokenization has become a major financial infrastructure, driven by regulatory progress and institutional participation, with tokenized assets worldwide totaling about $37.3 billion and over 1.5 million users as of August 2026.

The US has enacted the GENIUS Act to regulate stablecoins and is moving forward with the CLARITY Act, while Europe has established a unified regulatory framework through MiCA.

The Bank of Korea's CBDC-based Project Hangang has verified interoperability between a distributed ledger payment network and the existing financial system, and major financial firms have formed consortia to research a KRW-based stablecoin jointly.

By 2030, consumers are expected to pay for coffee at convenience stores with KRW stablecoins, and KRW stablecoins are likely to take a meaningful share of business-to-business (B2B) payments, especially given Korea's high trade-to-GDP ratio.