Won-denominated stablecoins could shave somewhere between 370 billion won ($275 million) and 5.15 trillion won off what South Korean merchants pay in annual payment fees each year, according to the National Assembly Budget Office. That is the conclusion. The real story sits in the distance between those two figures.
A range that wide is not a forecast. It is a confession that no one can say how many shoppers would reach for a token instead of a credit card at checkout, or what the firms operating those payment rails would decide to charge once the volume arrived.
Those are precisely the two variables the parliamentary budget office used to build its estimate: the share of card spending that shifts to stablecoin payments, and the fees such systems eventually levy. Turn both dials toward optimism and the headline figure appears. Turn them the other way and merchants keep roughly 5% of that amount.
Why a won coin at all
Stablecoins are tokens built to track the value of assets such as national currencies. The case for a won-backed one has less to do with crypto than with who controls the plumbing.
In July, dollar-linked stablecoins made up 98.8% of the $312.3 billion global stablecoin market, the office noted. For a nation with its own currency and its own card networks, that degree of concentration registers as a strategic problem long before it becomes a financial one.
The rulebook for any of this is still being drafted in Seoul. South Korea’s first significant crypto investor protection law came into force in July 2024, addressing customer assets and unfair trading — which leaves the question of issuance largely open.
The fight nobody has settled
The core dispute has been over who is allowed to mint the tokens. Earlier rounds of negotiation put the Bank of Korea and the Financial Services Commission on opposite sides: the central bank preferred issuers controlled by banks holding at least 51% ownership, while the FSC cautioned that such restrictions could hold innovation back.
It is a genuine disagreement, and it feeds directly into the fee arithmetic above. Bank-controlled issuers behave differently from fintech issuers, and their pricing differs as well.
The part that isn’t a savings pitch
The budget office devoted as much attention to the risks as to the benefits — more than most documents making the case for stablecoins bother to do.
Deposits leaving the banking system could erode banks’ function as credit intermediaries, it warned. Lending is funded by deposits. Drain them and the funding has to come from somewhere else.
Then comes the run scenario. A surge of redemptions could push issuers to offload reserve assets, potentially breaking the token’s peg and shattering confidence in the stablecoin, the office said. Anyone who watched a dollar stablecoin lose its footing in 2023 understands how quickly that door swings shut.
Hence the office’s call for reserve requirements, caps on stablecoin rewards and tighter supervision of tokens capable of threatening financial stability. Those reward limits carry more weight than they appear to. Yield is the mechanism by which stablecoin issuers pry deposits away from banks to begin with.
Payments are the small ambition
The savings figure originates at the retail till, but that is not where the policy is ultimately pointed.
According to the Financial Services Commission, South Korea intends to start expanding tokenized securities in February 2027, followed by a stage that connects blockchain-based securities markets with stablecoin payment infrastructure. Settlement, in short — not coffee purchases.
That ordering reveals what regulators believe the technology is actually for. Merchant fees are the argument for public consumption. Securities settlement is the argument made behind committee doors.
What the won does when dollars go on-chain
Officials are examining how broader stablecoin adoption might ripple through currency markets, and the early readings are not comforting.
A Bank of Korea study released earlier this month determined that direct trading between local currencies and dollar stablecoins on Binance can drive local currencies down. That is a mechanical drag on the won that did not exist a handful of years ago — and one that appears nowhere in any merchant fee calculation.
The budget office additionally concluded that the ties between dollar stablecoins traded in South Korea and markets such as bitcoin, foreign exchange, stocks and interest rates are still limited. Bitcoin traded at $78,327.00.
Limited now, though, says nothing about limited under strain. Periods of geopolitical stress or broad dollar strength could tighten those connections, the office said — a diplomatic way of noting that the correlations tend to surface exactly when you would least want them to.
How to read the $3.8 billion
The upper bound belongs in the ceiling-under-favorable-assumptions category, not the projection category. The budget office never framed it as the latter.
It is the floor that deserves the argument. Should won stablecoins deliver merchants no more than 370 billion won in savings a year, the deposit outflow risk and the peg risk are purchased at a steep price.
Before anything else, keep an eye on how the 51% bank ownership question resolves. It decides who captures the fee savings, who holds the reserves, and who is left holding the bag when redemptions spike.
And keep an eye on February 2027. If the tokenized securities rollout begins on time and the stablecoin settlement layer follows behind it, the merchant fee argument will have already done its job.