Kakao Seeks to Bring Won Stablecoins to Everyday Payments, Proposes Industry Partnership

Kakao Group is pushing a joint business initiative with financial institutions and companies to enable the use of won-denominated stablecoins in everyday activities such as remittances and payments.

Kakao Group said on Sept. 29 that it unveiled its won stablecoin business plan at the Next Finance Korea event held a day earlier at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas in Seoul's Gangnam district. It also proposed creating an open cooperative framework involving domestic and overseas financial institutions and companies.

At the center of the plan is broader distribution of won stablecoins and the buildout of a digital-asset-based payment and settlement system. Yoon Ho-young, chief executive of KakaoBank and co-head of Kakao Group's stablecoin task force, said the digital transformation of finance requires cooperation between financial institutions and platform companies, beyond technology development by individual firms.

Kakao Group said it has been reviewing the new business since last year and has now moved into a stage of securing stablecoin issuance and distribution technology and testing whether the services can be applied in practice. It said the business structure has been designed around four areas: issuance, distribution infrastructure, user channels and real-world use cases.

The event introduced remittance and payment services using digital asset wallets, payment and settlement services in South Korea for foreign users, and agentic payment technology that allows artificial intelligence to make payments on users' behalf. Kakao Group said it has been reviewing domestic applications and conducting technology demonstrations with global stablecoin issuer Circle, digital asset security company Fireblocks and the x402 Foundation.

Kakao also proposed forming a roundtable that would include not only banks and securities firms, but also fintech companies, platform operators, virtual asset businesses and e-commerce companies. The idea is to move away from a structure in which a single company monopolizes issuance and distribution, and instead build an ecosystem in which multiple participants develop real-world use cases and share the results with participating companies and users.

Son Kyung-hee, executive vice president and head of Kakao Pay's Digital Asset Group, said the goal of Kakao Group's digital asset business is to make won stablecoins easy to use in everyday services. Shin Won-keun, chief executive of Kakao Pay and co-head of the joint task force, said cooperation across issuance, distribution, regulation and security is needed to build next-generation financial infrastructure combining AI and blockchain.