Kakao Pay Securities, Ondo Finance to Expand Global On-Chain Distribution of Korean Stocks

Kakao Pay Securities is partnering with Ondo Finance, a global real-world asset tokenization platform, to pursue the global on-chain distribution of Korean stocks.

Jeong In-young, a vice president at Kakao Pay Securities, said at the “Burning With Ondo” event held at Seoul’s Cheongdam Lion Club on September 29 that the company is reviewing ways to supply Korean stocks to global markets and distribute Korean assets on blockchain.

Earlier that day, Kakao Pay Securities and Ondo Finance announced a partnership aimed at linking South Korea’s capital market with the global on-chain financial market.

The two companies are looking beyond simply offering overseas tokenized stocks to domestic investors. They are exploring a two-way business model that would tokenize Korean stocks and other Korean assets for global investors. The move would go a step beyond the traditional model of bringing global financial products into South Korea by widening the distribution of domestic financial products into global on-chain markets.

Jeong said tokenization is not just about extending stock trading to 24 hours a day. More importantly, he said, it can make the economic rights embedded in stocks programmable.

In the traditional stock market, securities firms, exchanges, and clearing and settlement institutions each perform separate roles. By contrast, if financial assets are implemented in programmable form on blockchain, not only trading and settlement but also the various financial rights attached to those assets can be handled within a single environment, Jeong said.

Jeong also highlighted composability as a key advantage of on-chain finance. “If stablecoins made money programmable, stock tokenization is now beginning to make financial rights programmable as well,” he said. Through Ondo, investors can access more than 200 tokenized assets. In that process, the economic exposure of the underlying assets can be implemented on-chain, he added.

Still, regulatory innovation will be needed for the business to succeed. Jeong said future global expansion will depend on legal and regulatory reviews. The goal is to work with multiple global partners to open a regulated gateway for Korean stocks to enter global markets.

Kakao Pay Securities plans to use that structure to broaden the overseas investor base for domestic stocks. Until now, the global business of Korean securities firms has focused on giving domestic investors access to overseas stocks such as U.S. shares. Going forward, on-chain finance could also serve as a channel to offer Korean financial products to global investors. Jeong said the company will explore ways to share Korean assets on blockchain and create new use cases.

Even so, hurdles including regulation remain before Korean stocks can be tokenized and distributed globally in practice. Jeong said the initiative is being pursued on the premise of legal and regulatory review. He added that rules and investor protection measures applied in traditional capital markets should not disappear simply because assets move onto blockchain, but should instead be implemented in ways suited to a new technological environment.