Can the Kaia public chain become the leader of stablecoin projects in South Korea?

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become one of the highlights of the crypto market thanks to its strong token price surge. Since its launch in August 2024, Kaia has been continuously focusing on technical performance and ecological construction. Its recent actions in stablecoins and payment scenarios have become a hot topic of discussion in the industry. Senior officials of the foundation publicly stated, "Kaia's stablecoin summer is coming soon," indicating that its fiat-pegged token plan will enter the implementation stage.

With the new government coming to power, the support for the issuance of stablecoins anchored to the Korean Won has become a new policy direction. The Kaia team announced plans to launch a Korean Won stablecoin in collaboration with several super apps. This news has driven a surge in the prices of related concept stocks, and the price of Kaia tokens has risen from about $0.10 to a peak of $0.17, reflecting the market's high expectations for the prospects of local stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Borrowing the Favor of Policy, Kaia Stablecoin Project Launches

After the new South Korean government's proposal to support local stablecoin policies in 2025, Kaia quickly responded and announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin. Following the announcement, the prices of related concept stocks surged, and the market is filled with anticipation for the Korean won stablecoin.

The Korean won stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is jointly promoted by several large internet companies and is currently still in the planning stage, with no specific issuance timetable. With its digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment system, a certain payment company is also widely regarded as a potential beneficiary of the local stablecoin.

The current South Korean government is brewing the "Basic Law on Digital Assets" and actively discussing a regulatory framework that allows private institutions to issue stablecoins. The draft bill aims to permit non-bank institutions and payment service providers to issue stablecoins, while easing the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges. Under this proposed framework, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be under the Financial Services Commission. The bill also significantly lowers the regulatory threshold, reducing the capital requirement for issuers from the previously proposed 5 billion KRW to 500 million KRW (36.5 million USD ).

However, according to the South Korean Constitution, the authority to issue legal currency belongs to the central bank, and private institutions face legal obstacles in issuing fiat-backed tokens. The Bank of Korea has expressed concerns about these proposals, believing that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins denominated in Korean won could lead to "currency runs," thereby affecting the competitiveness of the Korean won.

Regarding policy orientation, the head of the Digital Asset Committee of the ruling party in South Korea stated that it would support private issuance and plans to clarify the legalization of stablecoins in the "Basic Law." The large internet group that Kaia relies on has extensive payment and financial infrastructure, which provides a convenient channel for the practical use of stablecoins in the future.

However, despite the enthusiastic feedback from the market, the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project are not clear. Issues of currency sovereignty and compliance with anti-money laundering regulations remain difficult to overcome, and the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin itself still need to be verified, while also facing multiple potential competitors. Recently, several large banks in South Korea have publicly announced plans to jointly issue stablecoins.

Therefore, while Kaia's stablecoin plan seizes the policy opportunity, there are still many uncertainties regarding whether it can obtain regulatory approval and be successfully implemented.

Social giants join forces, with 250 million potential users

Kaia public chain is a large blockchain network mainly targeting the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known public chains, officially launching in August 2024. It aims to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating with mainstream social platforms to deliver Web3 services.

The two major social platforms behind Kaia have a very high market penetration rate in South Korea and Japan, cumulatively covering over 250 million users. Based on this enormous distribution capability, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance and user-friendly public blockchain, has been regarded as one of the "potential stocks" to promote the popularization of crypto applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from several well-known investment institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before merging into Kaia, both original public chains had achieved significant development. One of them was launched in 2019 and was an important representative of the South Korean blockchain network, with a user growth of 1,100% in 2023, reaching 873,000; the other was launched in 2022 and provided an NFT platform within its ecosystem, accumulating over 5.6 million users and completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger, Kaia inherits the advantages of both chains in the fields of DeFi, gaming, NFTs, and payment to achieve technological and user complementarity.

As an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 public chain, Kaia technically adopts an optimized IBFT consensus framework. According to the official documentation, the Kaia network can handle up to 4000 transactions per second, with a block generation time of only 1 second and instant transaction finality. Unlike conventional PoW/PoS, Kaia employs a BFT consensus aimed at enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is definitively confirmed, eliminating the traditional risks of block rollback. The nodes in the Kaia network are divided into consensus nodes, proxy nodes, and endpoint nodes, with consensus nodes managed by core operators responsible for block generation and verification. The network design ensures that more than 50 nodes can participate in consensus, balancing throughput and decentralization.

In terms of technical features, Kaia supports account abstraction and fee delegation functions, significantly simplifying the user experience; it also integrates identities and payment channels from mainstream social platforms, allowing ordinary users to access on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia also maintains equivalent compatibility with EVM chains such as Ethereum and plans to support CosmWasm smart contracts; its industry-leading cross-chain bridge integration capabilities provide developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability.

Expand from the gaming field to financial services

When Kaia was first launched, user and funding metrics were still in the initial stages. By mid-2025, Kaia was ranked around the top fifty globally in DeFi TVL, reflecting the scale of its ecosystem in the early stages. In terms of on-chain activity, the Kaia team disclosed that over 40 million users have accessed the Mini DApp portal. The number of wallets and trading volume experienced rapid growth in the early stages after launch, but overall levels are still far below those of mature mainstream public chains like Ethereum, Solana, and BNB.

Ecologically, Kaia has merged the application ecosystems of two original public chains, forming a comprehensive ecosystem covering multiple fields such as DeFi, NFT, gaming finance ( GameFi ), and real-world assets ( RWA ). According to official statistics, there are already over 420 decentralized applications and gaming services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network post-merger.

In addition, the Kaia mainnet was launched alongside a builder support program called Kaia Wave. This program aims to provide multi-faceted support for promising Dapps, enabling them to reach consumer users in both Web2 and Web3, and gain additional advantages from sources such as social platforms, Web3 marketing alliances, creators, and Kaia's vertical services. According to official documents, the Kaia Wave program will offer a total value of $10 million in KAIA tokens, specifically for user acquisition and rewards.

In the DeFi space, Kaia has launched several decentralized exchanges as well as staking and lending projects, and the platform also supports infrastructure such as stablecoins and cross-chain bridges; in terms of NFTs, Kaia has inherited the user base of the original NFT platform, and its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user base and partner resources of two major social platforms, with some game developers starting to launch mobile games and NFT items on Kaia.

In terms of Mini DApp distribution and user outreach, Dapp Portal is one of the main tools for the development of the Kaia ecosystem. Dapp Portal is built on the Kaia chain and is accessible to users through the official accounts on social platforms, allowing them to access games, social interactions, trading, and other Mini DApps within the chat interface without the need to download or install any new applications. In January of this year, Kaia jointly launched the first batch of 32 Mini DApps, enabling users to create wallets, play games, claim rewards, trade NFTs, and more, all without having to install a separate client.

In its official strategy, Kaia is gradually expanding from the gaming sector to financial services and general applications: by early 2025, it has launched USD stablecoin yield products within its ecosystem, with further plans including the introduction of lending, perpetual contracts, payment, and asset tokenization DeFi protocols, as well as achieving seamless exchange functionality between the Korean won and stablecoins.

In May of this year, a well-known stablecoin project officially deployed its US dollar stablecoin on Kaia, providing stablecoin payment and cross-border transfer services to nearly 200 million users, marking further expansion of Kaia's layout in the international stablecoin ecosystem. Overall, Kaia is accelerating the construction of a platform-level ecosystem, collaborating with industry partners to promote the use case of "message as entry, on-chain as payment."