South Korea nears final stablecoin law to improve fast, low-cost payments

South Korea is on the cusp of formal stablecoin rules – and the country’s largest opposition party says the finishing line is in sight. Ahn Do-geol, a Democratic Party lawmaker leading its digital-asset task force, told a packed symposium in Seoul on Tuesday that work to merge several stablecoin-related bills into a single piece of legislation is in its “final stage.”

Speaking at Hashed Lounge in Gangnam, Ahn framed stablecoins not as a niche crypto product but as the future backbone of payments and remittances. “Stablecoins are changing future financial infrastructure beyond being simple investment products,” he said. “Money is the foundation and engine of all financial and real-economy transactions.”

The timing matters. South Korea’s foreign-worker remittance market alone totals 5 trillion won ($3.6 billion) annually. Add K-content payments (21 trillion won, or $15.2 billion) and spending by foreign tourists (31 trillion won, or $22.4 billion), and the addressable use cases for a stablecoin-based system run into the tens of billions of dollars. Ahn argued that stablecoins beat SWIFT on fees, processing speed, and accessibility for those flows.

He also pointed to artificial intelligence as a future catalyst. If agentic AI – software that acts autonomously on a user’s behalf – eventually handles round-the-clock transactions, stablecoins could become the settlement layer for machine-to-machine payments.

On regulation, Ahn said broad consensus has formed around the core framework. Stablecoins must be pegged one-to-one to the won and backed by highly liquid reserves that can be converted into cash immediately. “Stablecoins are now unavoidable,” he said. There is also agreement that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and privately issued stablecoins should develop side by side.

That sound like a green light for issuers – but not yet. Key legislative gaps remain: who can issue stablecoins, how exchanges must disperse ownership to prevent conflicts of interest, and how to balance bank safety-net roles against fintech innovation. Ahn said policymakers are reviewing institutional compromises on those points.

The Democratic Party’s digital-asset task force is now merging the outstanding bills into the proposed Digital Asset Basic Act. Once that passes, Ahn warned, follow-up legislation will still be needed to address issuer licensing, reserve audits, and redemption mechanics.

What to watch: the assembly’s schedule for the final bill merger. If the Democratic Party can reach a cross-party deal in the coming weeks, South Korea could have a formal stablecoin regime by early next year – giving the $3.6 billion remittance market a dramatically cheaper on-ramp.