The number that jumps out of South Korea’s National Assembly Budget Office analysis isn’t the headline savings figure. It’s the spread.
Won-denominated stablecoins could cut what South Korean merchants pay in annual payment fees by somewhere between 370 billion won ($275 million) and 5.15 trillion won, the budget office said. That’s a gap of more than an order of magnitude, and it tells you how much of this is still guesswork.
The parliamentary office built its estimate on different assumptions about how much card spending actually migrates to stablecoin rails, and what those systems end up charging. Change either variable and the answer moves enormously. Nobody knows yet which end of that range is realistic.
The dollar problem nobody in Seoul wants to talk about
Here’s the context that makes a won-backed coin more than a payments experiment. Dollar-linked stablecoins accounted for 98.8% of the $312.3 billion global stablecoin market in July, the office said.
That isn’t a market. That’s a monoculture.
Stablecoins are tokens designed to track the value of assets such as national currencies. A won-backed version would give South Korean businesses a domestic option in a category where the dollar currently owns virtually everything.
The rules aren’t written yet
South Korea is still building the framework that would govern any of this. Its first major crypto investor protection law took effect in July 2024, covering customer assets and unfair trading. That’s a starting point, not a finished regime.
And the fight over who gets to issue the tokens has been the sticking point.
Earlier negotiations split the Bank of Korea and the Financial Services Commission. The central bank favored issuers controlled by banks with at least 51% ownership. The FSC warned that restrictions could hinder innovation. Two regulators, two philosophies, one unresolved question.
What happens when everyone redeems at once
The budget office didn’t just tally up savings. It flagged what breaks.
Money moving out of bank deposits could weaken banks’ role as credit intermediaries, it said. That’s the slow-burn risk.
The fast one is uglier. A wave of redemptions might force issuers to dump reserve assets, which could break the token’s peg and crack confidence in the stablecoin. Anyone who watched a stablecoin lose its peg in the past few years knows how quickly that spiral runs.
So the office called for reserve requirements, limits on stablecoin rewards and stronger oversight of tokens that could pose risks to financial stability. Guardrails first, savings second.
Retail payments are only the first act
The Financial Services Commission has said South Korea plans to begin expanding tokenized securities in February 2027. A later stage would link blockchain-based securities markets to stablecoin payment infrastructure.
That’s the part worth watching. Merchant fee savings are a consumer-facing pitch. Wiring stablecoin settlement into securities markets is structural.
The currency market question
Policymakers are already studying how wider stablecoin use could move exchange rates. A Bank of Korea study published earlier this month found that direct trading between local currencies and dollar stablecoins on Binance can push local currencies lower.
For an export economy that watches its currency closely, that finding lands differently than it would elsewhere.
The budget office also looked at how tightly dollar stablecoins traded in South Korea are connected to other markets, including bitcoin, foreign exchange, stocks and interest rates. Its finding: those links remain limited.
With a caveat. Those connections could become stronger during periods of geopolitical stress or broad dollar strength, the office said. Limited today doesn’t mean limited when it matters.
What to actually take from this
Treat the $3.8 billion ceiling as what it is: the optimistic end of a modeling exercise, not a forecast. The floor sits at $275 million, and the difference between those two outcomes depends entirely on adoption behavior nobody has observed yet.
The more useful signal is that the same office pushing the savings number also asked for reserve requirements and reward limits in the same breath. When the body making the bullish case builds in its own brakes, read the brakes first.
