There is a particular kind of optimism unique to government press briefings in Seoul, where a chairman stands before the National Assembly and promises that a landmark piece of legislation—one that 10 competing bills, two political parties, and an entire financial sector cannot agree on—will be wrapped up neatly by December.

On July 29, Financial Services Commission Chairman Lee Eok-won did exactly that. He told the Political Affairs Committee that the government’s consolidated Digital Asset Basic Act—a single statute meant to govern everything from stablecoin issuance and exchange ownership to anti-money-laundering enforcement—would be completed by year’s end. He said it with the confidence of a man who has clearly not attended a subcommittee meeting lately.

The ambition is genuine. The execution is another matter entirely.

To give credit where it is due, the architecture South Korea is attempting is not trivial. The proposed act would consolidate 10 separate crypto-related bills currently languishing in the National Assembly into one integrated framework. It would define what constitutes a digital asset business, set entry requirements for exchanges, mandate disclosure systems for token issuance and distribution, impose financial-sector-level internal controls on operators, and, most consequentially, create a legal regime for won-denominated stablecoins from scratch.

On paper, this is sophisticated. It mirrors the direction in which the United States, the European Union, and Singapore are all moving: away from reactive, piecemeal regulation and toward comprehensive statutes that treat crypto as a permanent feature of the financial system rather than a speculative anomaly to be tolerated.

The FSC has organized the bill around three pillars—industry structure, market integrity, and user protection—and explicitly linked stablecoin oversight to stronger anti-money-laundering enforcement. Lee personally briefed President Lee Jae-myung on July 15, identifying crypto-based money laundering as a national priority. The message is clear: Seoul wants to be seen as a jurisdiction that welcomes innovation while keeping a firm hand on the tiller.

Yet the two most consequential provisions in the entire package remain unresolved, publicly contested, and, as of this writing, locked inside a government draft that the regulator has not released.

The first is the so-called “51 percent rule,” which would require any won-denominated stablecoin issuer to be structured as a bank-led consortium, with traditional financial institutions holding a majority stake. The second is a proposed ownership cap of 15 to 20 percent for the country’s major exchanges—Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and GOPAX—designed to prevent any single operator from accumulating dominant market power.

These are not minor technical details. They are the load-bearing walls of the entire structure. The 51 percent rule determines whether South Korea’s stablecoin ecosystem will be an extension of its banking sector or an independent fintech industry. The ownership caps determine whether the exchange landscape remains an oligopoly or opens to new entrants. Getting these provisions wrong would do more than delay the bill. It would risk creating a regime that the market simply routes around.

Meanwhile, the FSC has completed its draft but has not disclosed the details. Committee Chairman Yoo Dong-soo, to his credit, has publicly urged the commission to hurry up and bring it forward. But “hurry up” is not a legislative strategy. It is a plea.

The Geopolitical Clock is Real

If there is one reason to take the year-end deadline seriously, it is not domestic politics. It is Washington.

The U.S. GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin law signed in 2025, takes effect on January 18, 2027. Its implementation will reshape how dollar-denominated stablecoins operate globally, and every major Asian financial center is recalibrating in response. Ruling party committee liaison Park Sang-hyuk acknowledged this directly after a closed-door FSC briefing on July 20, noting that “market outlooks differ on the effects of the GENIUS Act” and that there was broad consensus on the need to move quickly.

This is the one external pressure that might actually force a compromise. South Korea does not want to become the place where local companies issue stablecoins through Singaporean or American entities because Seoul spent 18 months arguing over bank-consortium ownership ratios. In this case, the reputational and economic cost of irrelevance is a more effective whip than any parliamentary procedure.

Lurking beneath all of this is a contradiction that no amount of legislative speed can resolve. The government plans to introduce a cryptocurrency income tax in 2027, giving regulators visibility into capital gains and, by extension, a meaningful tool for monitoring how money moves through the digital asset ecosystem.

The opposition, however, has formally introduced a bill to abolish the levy before it ever takes effect, arguing that taxing crypto gains while many equity investments remain exempt would create an unfair two-tier system. It is not an unreasonable argument. But stripping the tax from the package while simultaneously constructing an elaborate compliance architecture around transparency and anti-money-laundering screening is a little like installing a state-of-the-art security system and then removing the cameras.

You cannot control what you cannot see. And right now, South Korea’s legislators are debating whether to look away.

It is worth being precise about what Seoul is and is not attempting. Despite the rhetoric of “controlling capital flows,” the Digital Asset Basic Act is not a capital-control mechanism in the traditional sense. No one is proposing restrictions on money entering or leaving the country. What the FSC is building is a gatekeeping system: determining who can issue stablecoins, who can operate exchanges, how transactions are disclosed, and whether those transactions are taxed and screened.

That is a legitimate and, in the current global environment, necessary posture. But calling it “capital-flow control” oversells the state’s reach and undersells the market’s creativity. Crypto capital is, by design, difficult to contain. A well-regulated on-ramp in Seoul does not prevent a Korean investor from using an offshore platform. A 51 percent bank-consortium rule does not prevent a technology company from issuing a stablecoin in Tokyo.

The law will matter. But it will matter most as a signal—to domestic institutions, foreign competitors, and the market itself—of whether South Korea intends to participate in the next phase of digital finance or merely spectate while writing very detailed rules for a game it declined to play.

The Digital Asset Basic Act is the right legislation at the right time, pursued by a government that has not yet decided what it actually wants the law to say. The year-end deadline is less a timeline than an aspiration. The unresolved disputes over stablecoin issuance, exchange ownership, and taxation are not speed bumps. They are the road.

Lee’s promise to the National Assembly was sincere. Sincerity, unfortunately, does not consolidate 10 bills, reconcile two parties, satisfy five exchanges, appease the banking lobby, and outpace the U.S. Congress—all before the snow falls on Yeouido.

South Korea will get a digital asset law. The question is whether it will get one that works or one that merely exists.

Source: https://intpolicydigest.org/south-korea-wants-to-tame-crypto-good-luck-with-that/

Anndy Lian

Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author. The latest book is Web4: The Age of Autonomous Intelligence.

www.anndy.com