Won Stablecoin Could Cut Korean Merchant Fees by Up to $3.8B a Year

South Korea's National Assembly Budget Office has put a price on a currency that does not exist. A won-denominated stablecoin could cut merchant payment fees by 370 billion to 5.15 trillion won a year, the office said in an analysis released on Tuesday. What separates the two ends of that range is adoption, meaning how much card spending actually moves onto the new rails. Card transactions in Korea carry merchant fees of 1.3% to 1.5%. The report models stablecoin payments at 0.1% to 0.3%.

Two dollar figures for one won range

The won range is identical in every account. The dollar conversion is not. CoinDesk, Crypto Briefing and PANews all give $275 million to $3.8 billion. bloomingbit's English edition gives $270 million to $3.76 billion for the same won figures. No account states the exchange rate it applied, and the two conversions do not reconcile. bloomingbit also splits the estimate into adoption scenarios, but the version we retrieved labels two different results as 30% adoption, which cannot both be right. Only the endpoints of the range are usable.

Where the savings would come from

The mechanism the office describes is disintermediation: fewer parties taking a cut between the shopper and the shop. Card payments in Korea route through an acquirer, a network and an issuer before the merchant is paid, and each step prices itself in.

"transactions processed on the same blockchain network could reduce intermediate steps and related costs," the report said, in bloomingbit's rendering of it.

The stated aim is competitive rather than technical. Lower transaction costs would raise "the competitiveness of won-based payment infrastructure", the office said in the passage crypto-economy carries. Dollar-pegged tokens were 98.8% of a $312.3 billion global stablecoin market as of July 2026, on figures PANews and Crypto Briefing both print. The Bank of Korea has already argued that demand for dollar stablecoins tracks currency weakness at home.

The deposits question

The office attached risks to its own numbers. Money leaving bank deposits for stablecoin balances would weaken credit intermediation, the process by which banks turn deposits into loans. A large wave of redemptions would force an issuer to sell reserves quickly, and a forced sale is how a peg breaks. Currency swings could pull the whole arrangement into wider financial markets. Against that it proposed reserves matched one for one to issuance and held in cash and short-term government bonds, a designation for systemically important stablecoins carrying stricter supervision, and a limit on paying holders anything for holding. Two accounts word that last item differently. bloomingbit calls it restricting direct interest payments and PANews calls it capping stablecoin yields. Same instrument, two renderings.

Nothing to issue it under yet

No won-denominated stablecoin has launched, and no law authorises one. The Digital Asset Basic Act is still unresolved in the legislature, which leaves the whole estimate as policy arithmetic. Crypto Briefing, alone in this sweep, reports that the two agencies with a claim on the rules disagree about who could own an issuer: the Bank of Korea wants a minimum 50%-plus-one ownership structure keeping banks in control, while the Financial Services Commission argues for broader participation. Neither position has been settled in text. A provincial government has run the country's first state-led stablecoin pilot, and that remains the closest thing to a live won-denominated instrument.

What is scheduled is next door. PANews reports the tokenized securities expansion is targeted for February 2027, with a later link between blockchain securities markets and stablecoin payment rails. The savings estimate has no date on it at all. It measures a market that legislation has not yet made possible, and the number it produces depends entirely on a share of card spending nobody has had the chance to move.