Hyun Song Shin said private firms should operate stablecoin businesses while the central bank sticks to Project Hangang, which pairs an institutional CBDC with deposit tokens issued by commercial banks. He also said the bank has not studied a general-purpose retail CBDC since 2023.
Bank of Korea Governor Hyun Song Shin told lawmakers on Monday that stablecoin businesses belong to private companies and that the central bank will not operate one itself. He was answering the independent lawmaker Lee Jun-seok at a parliamentary audit held by the National Assembly's Finance, Economy and Planning Committee at the bank's Seoul headquarters. TokenPost, the Seoul Economic Daily, Analytics Insight and crypto.news all carry his answers in translation from Korean, and two describe their text as translated or as a supplied account rather than an official transcript, so his positions are paraphrased here rather than quoted.
The position stops at running a stablecoin, not at issuing digital money. Shin separated privately issued stablecoins, which sit on open blockchains and settle independently of central bank money, from Project Hangang, the bank's own program pairing an institutional central bank digital currency with deposit tokens issued by commercial banks. TokenPost reported that he put the bank's remaining interest in stablecoins at maintaining order across the wider monetary system. Under Hangang the central bank settles transactions between banks while the lenders hold customer deposits and the personal data attached to them, and Shin cited that split in rejecting the suggestion that the project would let the central bank watch individual payments.
He also said the bank has not studied a general-purpose retail central bank digital currency since 2023. The retail version is the one that would have placed central bank money directly in the public's hands. Setting it aside leaves the existing two-tier structure intact, with the central bank's own token confined to settlement between institutions.
The parts of Hangang with numbers attached are incremental. Analytics Insight reported that the next phase raises the participating banks from seven to nine and the pool of eligible users from 100,000 to 500,000, and that a separate test would route 30 billion won of electric-vehicle charging subsidies through deposit tokens. The 2025 pilot ran with seven banks.
The same report sets out the more consequential plan. It said materials submitted to the committee describe a 2027 pilot to settle tokenized government bond transactions using wholesale central bank money rather than private stablecoins, on the reasoning that central bank money ties the transfer of the bond to its payment and so cuts "the risk of failed settlement." It added that the bank formed an asset tokenization team in August and has discussed the pilot with the Ministry of Economy and Finance. No other outlet reviewed for this report carried that detail, and the bank's own published explanation of Hangang was not reachable, so the pilot rests on that single account of the submitted materials.
What Shin ruled out and what he kept divide along the same line. The instrument the public would hold is being left to private issuers and commercial banks, while the layer where institutions settle with each other stays denominated in central bank money. On that reading the bank is not withdrawing from digital money so much as choosing which end of it to occupy.
What the remarks did not settle is who may issue. The bank backed bank-led consortiums for won-denominated stablecoins in July, and Analytics Insight reported that Shin neither withdrew that preference nor announced licensing rules, so the question of which private firms can operate sits where it already sat. The status of South Korea's pending stablecoin legislation was not addressed.
A second exchange concerned instruments already in use. Representative Kim Nam-joon pressed Shin on crypto cards, which let a holder spend bitcoin or a stablecoin by having the asset converted into conventional currency at the point of sale. Shin said the operators behind those cards are all based overseas and rely mainly on dollar stablecoins, that the conversion inserts an extra intermediary between the payer and the merchant, and that the fees are generally considerably higher than those of other payment methods.
Kim's objection was about coverage rather than cost. Payment volumes and fund flows moving through overseas card operators may not be captured in regulators' statistics, which would let them bypass domestic rules and make foreign currency movements harder to trace, and would leave Korean users with little recourse if an operator were hacked, froze accounts or went bankrupt. Analytics Insight reported Kim citing average daily stablecoin trading in South Korea of about 200 billion won as of July, alongside an overseas estimate of $10 billion in cumulative card payments; the same report said how much of that came from Korean users is unclear. Shin acknowledged the risks and said the bank would improve the information it holds, monitor the activity closely and consult the relevant agencies, which commits it to watching rather than to a rule.
The gap he was describing is the one Korean financial firms keep working inside. Hanwha Investment & Securities finished a tokenized securities platform months before the law legalizing one takes effect, and Jeonbuk Bank lent won against pledged bitcoin it cannot seize directly on a default. Nor is the cross-border piece a Korean problem alone: the Financial Stability Board told the G20 this month that the mechanisms for handling a stablecoin in crisis remain immature.
For now the testimony produces one firm commitment and one open question. The central bank has said what it will not do, and the next phase of its own pilot would widen it from seven banks to nine. Who gets to issue a won stablecoin, and under what rules, remains with the legislature.
