South Korea's Financial Services Commission has published a three-stage roadmap to bring stocks, bonds, and funds on-chain, starting in February 2027 when the country's amended securities law takes effect. Existing brokers won't need new licenses, and Koscom's KoSTO platform already has 12 firms signed up, while Shinhan Asset Management is building a tokenized bond fund with the Solana Foundation.
South Korea's Financial Services Commission (FSC) has published a tokenized securities infrastructure roadmap, mapping out three stages to put stocks, bonds, and funds on-chain starting in February 2027. Existing brokers and securities firms can serve the new onchain products under approvals they already hold, so the plan requires no new licenses.
Three Stages, One Ledger
Step 1 launches when the amended securities law takes effect in February 2027. It covers institutional private money market funds, private bonds, unlisted stocks digitized through a trust structure, and publicly offered small-lot fractional investment securities. Brokers must build distributed ledgers and connect them to the Korea Securities Depository.
Next, Step 2 expands the scope to publicly offered securities, though the FSC has set no fixed date — it will first assess the stability of the initial wave, private-sector technical readiness, and progress on stablecoin regulation. Step 3 introduces onchain settlement using stablecoins, so a trade and its cash leg settle on the same ledger at the same time. For fund managers and cross-border desks, that replaces T+1 and T+2 settlement with near-instant delivery-versus-payment.
The legal groundwork is already in place. On January 15, 2026, Korea's National Assembly amended the Electronic Securities Act and the Capital Markets Act, and subordinate rules along with the full roadmap will go out for public consultation by the end of September 2026.
Institutions Are Already Building
This isn't a pilot-stage story. Koscom, the Korea Exchange subsidiary, is standing up KoSTO, a shared issuance platform that 12 securities firms have already signed onto, with Hyundai Motor Securities joining on September 1. Koscom is also preparing a stablecoin settlement proof-of-concept, targeting go-live ahead of February 2027.
Separately, Shinhan Asset Management, which manages roughly $96 billion in assets, has signed a four-party memorandum of understanding with the Solana Foundation, Etherfuse, and Orca to build a won-denominated tokenized short-term bond fund for offshore institutions, explicitly modeled on BlackRock's BUIDL product. Ripple had already set the tone earlier, pioneering Korea's first tokenized government bond settlement in partnership with Kyobo Life, a pilot that proved the country's rails could handle sovereign debt onchain.
The Stablecoin Bottleneck
Step 3, however, faces a real obstacle. The won-stablecoin legal framework, the Digital Asset Basic Act, is still in draft, and the FSC and the Bank of Korea remain at odds over stablecoin governance. Korea's banking giants are moving on a won-backed stablecoin project through Project Hangang, but without clear legislation, full onchain delivery-versus-payment cannot scale.
Korea isn't building in isolation. BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs have joined the DTCC trial to tokenize stocks and Treasuries. The London Stock Exchange is set to tokenize UK equities in 2027 via its partnership with Kraken's parent, Payward. Seoul's approach ties tokenized securities to a regulated, KSD-linked framework, and Korea's Finance Ministry has confirmed that tokenized securities count as securities, not crypto assets — placing them under capital markets law rather than the 22% crypto tax that begins in January 2027.
Source: CoinGape
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