South Korean IT giant Kakao's Digital Bank KakaoBank has advanced its stablecoin plan to the development stage.

According to a report by Newspim on Wednesday, KakaoBank, the digital bank under South Korea's leading IT company Kakao, has advanced its stablecoin project pegged to the Korean Won to the actual development stage. KakaoBank's official website has also posted job openings for blockchain service backend developers, indicating this progress. Major requirements include proficiency in smart contracts, understanding of token standards, and experience in transaction management and Full Node operations.

KakaoBank's Chief Financial Officer Kwon Tae-hoon stated in the performance report for the first half of 2025 released in August that the bank is evaluating various options for participating in digital finance, such as issuing or custodial of digital assets.

Before this announcement was made, KakaoBank and other major financial sectors under the Kakao Group established a Korean won stablecoin working group to discuss future initiatives for building a digital financial ecosystem. In early June, the group's payment subsidiary KakaoPay submitted copyright applications for six stablecoin stock codes — PKRW, KKRW, KRWP, KPKRW, KRWKP, KRWK — which seem to link Kakao or KakaoPay with the Korean won (KRW).

Shortly after South Korean tech giant Naver was reported to be launching a local stablecoin wallet service in Busan, Kakao also announced its entry into the stablecoin sector. It is reported that Naver's fintech division, Naver Financial, is merging with South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange.

Like Kakao, Naver also has its own payment platform, NaverPay, which, according to its official website, has 30 million users per month. KakaoPay has 42 million members, with an average monthly user count of 24 million. The total population of South Korea is 51.7 million. Both Kakao and Naver view stablecoins as future growth engines and are expected to leverage their respective tens of millions of user bases—Kakao's user base comes from the mainstream mobile communication services in South Korea, while Naver's user base comes from its internet search engine—to gain momentum in the digital finance sector.

The stablecoin competition began earlier this year when the newly elected South Korean President Lee Jae-myung listed the Korean won stablecoin market as one of his key development projects, aiming to protect Korean monetary sovereignty and counter the dominant US dollar stablecoin market. Although some lawmakers have proposed establishing a regulatory framework for a domestic stablecoin market in Korea, related legislative work has been slow. The Bank of Korea insists that only registered banks can issue Korean won stablecoins, a stance that has drawn strong opposition from the domestic market, complicating the development of the stablecoin market. (The Block)