Bank of Korea insists on bank-led model as won stablecoin bill stalls

The Bank of Korea has restated its insistence that any won-denominated stablecoin should first be issued through bank-led consortiums, deepening a policy standoff that continues to delay South Korea’s Digital Asset Basic Act. The central bank’s position, submitted to the National Assembly’s finance committee on Thursday, comes even as it presses ahead with pilots for deposit tokens, a rival digital-cash format that banks themselves control.

According to local reports from Digital Asset and EDaily, the BOK’s submission called for structural safeguards on any future stablecoin regime, including priority issuance rights for bank-led consortiums and the creation of a statutory policy body drawing on relevant government agencies. The comments reinforce months of central bank lobbying to keep stablecoin issuance anchored within the banking sector rather than open to non-bank fintech or exchange-linked entities.

Deposit tokens advance while stablecoin rules remain contested

Alongside its stablecoin stance, the BOK said it intends to keep expanding deposit-token use cases through the second half of the year. Planned applications include government subsidy disbursement, voucher schemes, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and broader real-world retail transactions.

Deposit tokens differ from stablecoins in that they represent tokenised claims on existing commercial bank deposits rather than assets backed by reserves held outside the banking system. BOK Governor Hyun-Song Shin voiced support for both deposit tokens and central bank digital currencies in his first public address in April, the same month South Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance announced a pilot using tokenised deposits for government operational spending.

Digital asset bill continues to slip

The BOK’s renewed intervention adds pressure to a legislative process that has already missed its own target. The government told President Lee Jae-myung in January that it aimed to have the Digital Asset Basic Act finalised by the first quarter of 2026, but the timeline has slipped amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran that began in late February, local elections, and delays in restructuring the National Assembly’s committee arrangements.

Disagreement over issuer eligibility has proved the most persistent obstacle. In April, the ruling Democratic Party proposed folding stablecoins and tokenised real-world assets into existing financial law, but lawmakers have yet to resolve whether issuers must be majority bank-owned, as the BOK insists, or whether the market should be opened more widely to non-bank participants.

The impasse illustrates a tension familiar to regulators across Asia and Europe: central banks wary of ceding monetary control to privately issued digital currencies are increasingly promoting bank-controlled alternatives such as deposit tokens, even as legislatures weigh broader access for the wider digital asset industry.

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