South Korea’s “Han River Plan” Phase 2 has finally moved from a sandbox concept proof into a real account system. On July 15, the Financial Services Commission of Korea officially designated the project as “innovative financial services.” The participating banks expanded from 7 to 9, with new additions including Kyungnam Bank and iM Bank. The cap on deposit token wallets was raised from 100,000 to 500,000. The maximum amount an individual can hold in a single wallet was increased to 10,000,000 Korean won, with real trading slated to start as early as September.

The biggest change in this round is that “deposit tokens” are directly connected to commercial banks’ core account systems. LG CNS continues to serve as the main general contractor, and at the base layer it still uses the Ethereum-family Klaytn ledger. Samsung and Kakao’s Ground X had previously already moved into offline payments and the wallet layer. In the second half of the year, the government also plans a CBDC national debt tokenization pilot, and the distribution of subsidies totaling 110 trillion Korean won is the key use case.

Behind the push is the “Basic Law on Digital Assets” getting stuck: a bank-led route is used to bypass the legislative deadlock and drive the rollout, while also paving the way for the “51% bank rule” for Korean won stablecoins. Looking at the landscape, [ETH] benefits from the overflow of lower-layer infrastructure, while [USDC]’s issuer Circle([CRCL]) is the benchmark for private stablecoins. If bank-led takes shape in South Korea, whether it squeezes private stablecoin market share or leads to coexistence will be answered by the pilot data in Q4. #夏日创作营