The National Assembly Budget Office says won-denominated stablecoins could cut South Korean merchants’ annual payment fees by anywhere from 370 billion won ($275 million) to 5.15 trillion won. That’s the finding. The spread between those two numbers is the actual news.
A gap that wide isn’t a forecast. It’s an admission that nobody knows how many shoppers would swap a credit card for a token at the register, or what the companies running those payment rails would charge once they had the volume.
The parliamentary budget office built its estimate on exactly those two variables: how much card spending migrates to stablecoin payments, and the fees those systems end up charging. Move both dials to the optimistic end and you get the headline number. Move them to the pessimistic end and merchants save about 5% of that.
Why a won coin at all
Stablecoins are tokens designed to track the value of assets such as national currencies. The pitch for a won-backed version is less about crypto and more about who owns the plumbing.
Dollar-linked stablecoins accounted for 98.8% of the $312.3 billion global stablecoin market in July, the office said. For a country that runs its own currency and its own card networks, that concentration is a strategic problem before it’s a financial one.
South Korea is still writing the rules that would govern any of this. Its first major crypto investor protection law took effect in July 2024, covering customer assets and unfair trading, which leaves issuance itself largely unsettled.
The fight nobody has settled
Who gets to mint the tokens has been the central dispute. Earlier negotiations split the Bank of Korea and the Financial Services Commission, with the former favoring issuers controlled by banks with at least 51% ownership, while the latter warned that restrictions could hinder innovation.
That’s a real disagreement with real consequences for the fee math above. Bank-controlled issuers behave differently from fintech issuers, and they price differently too.
The part that isn’t a savings pitch
The budget office spent as much effort on the downside as the upside, which is more than most stablecoin advocacy documents manage.
Money moving out of bank deposits could weaken banks’ role as credit intermediaries, it said. Deposits fund lending. Drain them and something has to replace that funding.
Then there’s the run scenario. A wave of redemptions might force issuers to dump reserve assets, which could break the token’s peg and crack confidence in the stablecoin, the office said. Anyone who watched a dollar stablecoin wobble in 2023 knows how fast that particular door closes.
So the office called for reserve requirements, limits on stablecoin rewards and stronger oversight of tokens that could pose risks to financial stability. The reward limits matter more than they sound. Yield is how stablecoin issuers pull deposits out of banks in the first place.
Payments are the small ambition
Retail checkout is where the savings number comes from, but it isn’t where the policy is heading.
The Financial Services Commission has said South Korea plans to begin expanding tokenized securities in February 2027, with a later stage linking blockchain-based securities markets to stablecoin payment infrastructure. Settlement, in other words, not coffee purchases.
That sequencing tells you what regulators think the technology is for. Merchant fees are the argument you make in public. Securities settlement is the argument you make in a committee room.
What the won does when dollars go on-chain
Policymakers are studying how wider stablecoin use could affect currency markets, and the early evidence isn’t reassuring.
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. That’s a mechanical pressure on the won that didn’t exist a few years ago and doesn’t show up in any merchant fee calculation.
The budget office also found that links between dollar stablecoins traded in South Korea and markets including bitcoin, foreign exchange, stocks and interest rates remain limited. Bitcoin traded at $78,327.00.
But limited today doesn’t mean limited under stress. Those connections could become stronger during periods of geopolitical stress or broad dollar strength, the office said, which is a polite way of saying the correlations show up right when you’d least want them.
How to read the $3.8 billion
Treat the top of the range as a ceiling under favorable assumptions, not a projection. The budget office didn’t present it as one.
The floor is the number worth arguing about. If won stablecoins only ever save merchants 370 billion won a year, the deposit outflow risk and the peg risk buy you very little in return.
Watch what happens to the 51% bank ownership question before you watch anything else. It determines who captures the fee savings, who holds the reserves and who’s standing there when redemptions spike.
And watch February 2027. If tokenized securities expansion starts on schedule and the stablecoin settlement layer follows, the merchant fee argument will have already served its purpose.
