Korean Blockchain Guidebook for Institutions 2026

The mood of the global digital asset market has shifted. Where the 2021-2022 market ran on new, experimental blockchain businesses, today's market is led by traditional financial institutions pulling blockchain and digital assets into the institutional framework. Major global banks are weighing stablecoin issuance. The world's largest asset managers are racing into tokenization of real-world assets. Governments and regulators are building the legal scaffolding to fold digital assets into formal systems. Cryptocurrencies, once framed as an "alternative" to traditional finance, are being repositioned as "infrastructure" for redesigning the existing financial system to be more efficient.

Korea's position in this shift stands out. It remains among the world's most active countries for digital asset trading, and with the Digital Asset Basic Act expected to pass this year, companies and financial institutions are getting serious about entering the on-chain market. Banks, securities firms, card companies, large IT firms, and retailers are all setting up dedicated teams or restructuring strategies around it.

Talking with many of these companies, though, we keep hitting the same gap. Working-level interest is strong, but understanding of how this translates into day-to-day operations is thin. Beyond general curiosity about blockchain as a technology, most organizations don't yet have a concrete picture of how to connect it to their products, services, and customer experience.

That gap is why we wrote this report. It covers onchain opportunities across sectors, organized into four areas companies and institutions should watch: stablecoins, tokenization, institutional finance, and future industries. For each, we lay out the basics, review global trends, and then turn to what's possible in Korea. We didn't want to just catalog overseas cases. We wanted to point to practical opportunities that fit Korea's regulatory environment, market structure, and the assets domestic companies already have.

Blockchain resolves inefficiencies baked into existing systems, and global trends suggest the financial system's move onto blockchain is no longer avoidable. Payments and remittance speed, asset liquidity, transaction transparency, cross-border capital flows: the scope of change here rivals what the internet did to entire industries. It's moving faster than most expected, and the gap between companies that move early and those that don't will keep widening. Now is the time for companies and financial institutions to recognize the shift and act.We hope this report, prepared jointly by Four Pillars and Pantera, is useful as you prepare for the on-chain era.