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Story: Bank of Korea Adds 2 Regional Banks to CBDC Pilot as Tokenized Deposits Enter Testing

By Jean-Luc Maracon

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Regional Banks Take Center Stage. Bringing regional banks into the mix is a meaningful shift.

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Tokenized Deposits and the Subsidy Question. Tokenized bank deposits are probably the most technically interesting piece of what's coming.

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What the Data Will Actually Show. The Bank of Korea's stated goal for this phase is data collection.

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South Korea's central bank is pushing its digital currency experiment into new territory. The Bank of Korea plans to expand its CBDC pilot in September, pulling two regional…

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The headline addition is tokenized bank deposits. The pilot will use them to test how government subsidy payments move through a digital currency framework — basically asking…

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Bringing regional banks into the mix is a meaningful shift. The first phase of the pilot leaned on larger, more technically equipped institutions.

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The Bank of Korea hasn't named which two regional banks will participate. That's a notable gap.

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The banks will apparently run the digital currency tools inside their existing systems rather than build parallel infrastructure.

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The idea is pretty straightforward. A citizen's subsidy entitlement gets encoded as a digital token backed by a bank deposit.

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More context: Tokenized Asset Market Crosses $2.3 Billion as Utility Beats Speculation

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What's less clear is how the pilot handles the security side. Tokenized payments introduce new attack surfaces, and government subsidy flows are a target.

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The Bank of Korea's stated goal for this phase is data collection. Operational data from the regional banks, user experience feedback, efficiency metrics on the subsidy payment…

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That's a slower process than it sounds. Central banks don't move fast, and they shouldn't. A CBDC that fails at scale is worse than no CBDC at all.

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South Korea is probably somewhere in the middle of that curve. The September expansion won't answer the big questions about national adoption.

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Related: North Korea-Linked Contractor Had MetaMask Code Access for Over a Month

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