South Korea’s Democratic Party used its February 23, 2026 unified draft of the Digital Assets Basic Act to do something more consequential than propose another crypto bill: it tried to pull major segments of the digital-asset market back inside existing financial law. The draft treated won-pegged stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets as structures that should be supervised through familiar statutory channels, not through a newly built parallel regime.
That choice would reshape how on-chain assets are issued, held and connected to the legal system. Won-denominated stablecoins were placed under the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act, while tokenized real-world assets were required to keep their underlying assets in managed trusts under the Capital Markets Act. The result was a framework that favored legal continuity and supervisory reuse over regulatory novelty.
Existing law, repurposed for digital assets
The proposal’s architecture was clear. Stablecoins were classified as payment instruments under foreign exchange law, bringing issuers into FX supervision without creating a separate registration track. RWA tokens, meanwhile, would have to anchor their claims in managed trusts, binding tokenized representations to off-chain custody and trust administration. That structure made legal enforceability the organizing principle of the draft.
The bill also drew a firm line against stablecoins becoming quasi-bank products. It explicitly barred interest or yield payments on stablecoin balances, cutting off a design path that could have made them resemble unregulated deposit substitutes. In practical terms, the draft narrowed the stablecoin model to payments and settlement utility rather than balance-sheet competition with traditional finance.
That legal design carries direct consequences for infrastructure. A token balance on a distributed ledger would no longer stand alone as the operative expression of ownership; it would be tied to a trust layer and to the custodial systems supporting it. Some of the trustlessness associated with protocol-native design would be traded for a model built around custodians, auditability and legal recourse.
Interoperability becomes a regulatory requirement
The draft also pushed beyond classification and custody into technical architecture. It assigned the Financial Services Commission responsibility for setting interoperability standards across distributed ledgers used by stablecoin issuers, with the stated aim of avoiding liquidity fragmentation if multiple chains hosted won-based tokens. That turned interoperability from a market preference into a potential regulatory mandate.
For node operators, exchange engineers and protocol designers, that direction matters. Standardized token interfaces, cross-chain messaging expectations and unified disclosure formats would influence settlement paths, relay design and the way distributed systems communicate across chains. The proposal also envisioned centralizing disclosures through a Digital Asset Industry Association, reducing variation in the information available to investors and to node-level data consumers. The bill was therefore not only about legal status, but about shaping the behavior of the infrastructure itself.
Yet some of the most politically sensitive questions were left unresolved. The draft did not include rules on exchange shareholder stake limits or specific bank-equity requirements for stablecoin issuers, despite the Bank of Korea’s preference for bank participation in issuance consortia. That unresolved split helped push the legislation beyond an earlier 2025 target and into 2026. Issuer eligibility remained the fault line that could ultimately decide how centralized the market becomes.
That matters because the makeup of future issuing consortia will influence more than licensing. It will affect governance design, custody architecture, operational service levels and the pressure placed on consensus-layer resilience. The draft clearly favored a system where legal structure and supervised custody shape protocol design, but the FSC’s technical standards and later presidential decrees will determine how tightly that preference constrains ledger choice and cross-chain flexibility.
