The brokerage's platform runs on Avalanche and Hyperledger Besu, and targets the private-market assets that South Korea's first tokenisation phase will legalise on 4 February 2027.
Hanwha Investment & Securities has finished building a tokenised securities platform on Avalanche, five months before the South Korean law that would make such a platform legal comes into force.
The Seoul Economic Daily reported the completion on Sunday. Hanwha, one of the country's larger brokerages, began the work in 2025 with FairSquare Lab, a domestic blockchain developer, and designed the system to run across more than one network. Avalanche's public chain carries settlement; Hyperledger Besu, the permissioned Ethereum-compatible ledger banks reach for when they want a blockchain nobody outside the consortium can read, carries the workflows that have to stay private. Neither firm has published technical documentation, and no launch date has been announced.
The calendar explains the hurry. On 4 February 2027, amendments to South Korea's Act on Electronic Registration of Stocks and Bonds take effect, recognising distributed ledgers as legitimate securities registers and folding security tokens into the same capital markets framework that already governs everything else Hanwha sells. Until that date, a Korean brokerage running securities on a public blockchain is operating in a legal vacuum. After it, the same activity is ordinary securities business.
On 4 September the Financial Services Commission, South Korea's top financial regulator, set out how that will happen. The first phase begins the day the amendments land and covers privately placed money market funds and bonds sold to institutions, unlisted stocks held through a trust wrapper, and publicly offered fractional investment securities. The second would open tokenisation to all publicly offered securities, and carries no date at all: the FSC has tied it to how the first phase performs, how far the technology matures among market participants, and what happens to stablecoin legislation. The third would let securities and cash settle together on-chain, with stablecoins as the cash leg.
Phase three is where the regulator's ambition sits and where it is most exposed. Settling the cash leg in stablecoins means the FSC has to decide what a won-denominated stablecoin is, who may issue one, and whether it may pay interest. That last question is the one the Monetary Authority of Singapore answered by proposing to bar interest on every stablecoin it licenses. Korea has not answered it. Until it does, phase three is a diagram.
Hanwha has been buying its way into this market for years rather than building alone. The group assembled a 9.6% stake in Securitize across three affiliates, making it the largest shareholder in a company that now trades on the New York Stock Exchange under SECZ. In July the investment and securities arm put 30 billion won, roughly $22.3 million, into Digital Asset, the firm behind the Canton Network. A platform built on Avalanche is not an innovation-team pilot bolted onto the side of a brokerage. It is the third leg of a position.
The reported target market is narrow: high-net-worth individuals and family offices, offered access to hedge funds, private credit, real estate, intellectual property and unlisted shares. These assets already exist and already change hands, badly. Settlement runs to weeks, minimum tickets run to millions, and secondary liquidity means telephoning whoever sold you the position. Tokenisation creates none of it. What it changes is who can hold a fraction of one and how fast that fraction can move.
Avalanche's pitch to institutions has always been that a public chain can carry regulated assets if the permissioning is configurable enough. Hanwha is a real test of that claim, in a jurisdiction where the regulator is watching, the reporting obligations are statutory, and the penalty for getting settlement wrong is not a governance forum post. Korea also gives the argument an unusually clean run: the amendments recognise the ledger itself as the register, so there is no paper record sitting behind the token waiting to disagree with it.
Whether any of this produces volume is a separate question from whether it produces announcements. Bernstein's analysts have argued that tokenisation is entering a supercycle, and large managers are behaving as though they believe it — a $230 billion Neuberger Berman fund was pitched as collateral on Aave's institutional market last month. Building the rails has never been the hard part. Persuading a family office to buy a private credit position as a token rather than as a subscription agreement is.
The rules Hanwha's platform will have to satisfy have not been written yet. The FSC says it will propose revisions to the subordinate rules under the Financial Services and Electronic Registration Acts by the end of September.
