The figure worth pausing on in the National Assembly Budget Office’s analysis of South Korea isn’t the top-line savings number at all. It’s how wide the range is.
According to the budget office, stablecoins denominated in won could reduce the annual payment fees borne by South Korean merchants by anywhere from 370 billion won ($275 million) to 5.15 trillion won. A spread of more than a factor of ten says a great deal about how much of this remains estimation rather than measurement.
The parliamentary body arrived at those figures by varying its assumptions about how much card spending genuinely shifts onto stablecoin rails and what fees those systems would ultimately levy. Adjust either input and the result swings dramatically. Which end of the band is plausible is still an open question.
The dollar problem nobody in Seoul wants to talk about
This is the backdrop that turns a won-backed token into something bigger than a payments trial. In July, the office noted, dollar-pegged stablecoins made up 98.8% of a global stablecoin market worth $312.3 billion.
Call that what it is: a monoculture, not a market.
Stablecoins are tokens built to mirror the value of assets like national currencies. A version backed by the won would hand South Korean businesses a homegrown alternative in a segment the dollar has almost entirely to itself.
The rules aren’t written yet
The regulatory scaffolding for any of this is still under construction in South Korea. The country’s first significant crypto investor protection law came into force in July 2024, addressing customer assets and unfair trading practices. Call it a foundation rather than a completed regime.
The unresolved friction has been over who should be permitted to issue the tokens.
Talks earlier on divided the Bank of Korea from the Financial Services Commission. The central bank wanted issuers to be bank-controlled, with banks holding at least 51% ownership. The FSC countered that such limits risked hindering innovation. Two supervisors, two worldviews, and no settled answer.
What happens when everyone redeems at once
Savings weren’t the only thing the budget office counted. It also mapped out the failure points.
Deposits draining out of banks could erode their function as credit intermediaries, the office warned. That’s the risk that accumulates gradually.
The other one arrives fast and looks worse. A surge of redemptions could compel issuers to offload reserve assets, potentially breaking the token’s peg and shattering confidence in the stablecoin. Anyone who has watched a stablecoin slip off its peg over the past few years understands how fast that unravels.
Hence the office’s call for reserve requirements, caps on stablecoin rewards and tighter supervision of tokens capable of threatening financial stability. Guardrails come first; savings come second.
Retail payments are only the first act
The Financial Services Commission has indicated that South Korea intends to start scaling up tokenized securities in February 2027. A subsequent phase would connect blockchain-based securities markets with stablecoin payment infrastructure.
That second phase is the one to keep an eye on. Cutting merchant fees is a pitch aimed at consumers. Embedding stablecoin settlement inside securities markets changes the plumbing.
The currency market question
How broader stablecoin adoption might affect exchange rates is already on policymakers’ desks. Research from the Bank of Korea released earlier this month concluded that direct trading between local currencies and dollar stablecoins on Binance can drag local currencies down.
In an export-driven economy that keeps a close eye on its currency, a conclusion like that carries more weight than it would elsewhere.
The budget office additionally examined how closely dollar stablecoins traded within South Korea are tied to other markets — bitcoin, foreign exchange, equities and interest rates among them. The conclusion was that those linkages are still limited.
There’s a qualifier attached. During bouts of geopolitical stress or widespread dollar strength, the office said, those connections could tighten. Limited under calm conditions is not the same as limited when it counts.
What to actually take from this
The $3.8 billion ceiling deserves to be read for what it is — the rosy edge of a modeling exercise rather than a projection. The floor is $275 million, and everything separating those two figures hinges on adoption behavior that nobody has yet witnessed.
The sharper signal is that the very office advancing the savings estimate simultaneously requested reserve requirements and limits on rewards. When the institution making the optimistic case installs its own brakes in the same breath, look at the brakes first.