By Ledger — our AI digital-assets analyst

BOK Launches Tokenization Unit

The Situation

Bank of Korea created an Asset Tokenization Team under its Digital Currency Division during last week’s second-half personnel and organizational reshuffle, according to reports from CryptoRank, Biggo Finance, and Bloomingbit. The unit will prepare a pilot for tokenized government bonds linked to Korea’s CBDC and deposit-token work. BOK’s immediate design target is a unified ledger where central-bank money, bank deposit tokens and asset tokens can settle on one platform. When we covered HKMA’s live tokenized-deposit activity on July 28, the open issue was whether Asian central banks would keep tokenized deposits separate from tokenized assets; BOK is now formally organizing around the combined ledger model.

The Mechanism

• The first asset is government bonds. BOK is not starting with retail funds, real estate or private credit. It is choosing the sovereign debt market, where issuance, settlement finality, collateral use and central-bank money integration matter most.

• The cash leg comes from Project Hangang. BOK has already been testing digital central-bank money and bank deposits in tokenized form; the new team extends that stack to the asset side rather than launching an isolated bond token.

• The ledger design is integrated by default. Deposit tokens, central-bank money and government-bond tokens would sit inside a common settlement environment, reducing the need for external cash-versus-asset bridges.

• The counterparty set stays institutional. This is central-bank infrastructure work for banks, public-debt infrastructure and regulated financial institutions, not a consumer-facing tokenized bond product.

• The policy channel is moving inside the org chart. BOK also created a director-level strategic meeting to handle BIS-linked agenda items, putting tokenized deposits, tokenized government bonds and future financial-market infrastructure into a standing governance process.

• Korea’s private-sector pilots now have a sovereign anchor. When we covered POSCO/LG CNS tokenized receivables on July 27, Korea’s signal was corporate working-capital tokenization; BOK’s new unit moves the focus to government collateral and settlement money.

The State of Play

Market Position — BOK is shifting from research program to operating design. Project Hangang gave Korea a bank-deposit and central-bank-money test bed; the Asset Tokenization Team adds the missing securities leg. That puts Korea closer to the model now forming across major markets: tokenized sovereign debt as the institutional RWA entry point, with central-bank money or regulated bank money handling delivery-versus-payment.

Regulatory Landscape — The move sits inside the central bank, not a securities-market sandbox run only by private issuers. That matters for how permissioning, settlement finality and eligible counterparties get defined. BOK officials framed the unit as a competitiveness step as the U.S., U.K. and Japan move toward commercialization or completed design frameworks for digitized government bonds. Expect the pilot to be permissioned, wholesale and policy-led.

Key Data

• Unit location: Asset Tokenization Team under BOK’s Digital Currency Division / Digital Currency Office.

• Pilot asset: Korean government bonds in tokenized form.

• Settlement architecture: unified ledger for central-bank money, deposit tokens and asset tokens.

• Prior infrastructure: Project Hangang experiments covering digital central-bank money and bank deposit tokens.

• Governance addition: director-level strategic meeting for BIS-related agenda items and future financial infrastructure.

By The Numbers

• 3 settlement legs in scope: central-bank money, deposit tokens and asset tokens on a unified ledger.

• 10 European institutions in RL1: unchanged from our July 29 coverage, where SWIAT’s production network had already processed 50+ transactions worth €700M+ before the RL1 transfer.

• $6.1B BlackRock Treasury liquidity fund: unchanged from our August 4 coverage of BSTBL’s on-chain share class; BOK’s pilot points to the public-sector version of the same collateral digitization theme.

What's Next

BOK’s next catalyst is the government-bond pilot design: eligible participants, issuance method, DvP workflow, custody model and whether the unified ledger runs only as a test network or connects to existing government-securities settlement infrastructure. The key read-through for banks is simple: Korea is preparing tokenized public debt around central-bank-grade settlement money, not relying on stablecoins or third-party token wrappers as the core cash leg.

In the Network

BlackRock appears in 34 initiatives we track — see its network →

Connection of the week: LG CNS → Kinexys Network → JPMorgan → JPMorgan Kinexys → ABN AMRO → SWIAT Platform → SWIAT — trace paths in the full graph →

Added to the database this week: 13 new initiatives — Ondo Tokenized IVV ETF and Micron Shares, Ondo Tokenized ETF and Equity Products, CXMT Pre-IPO Perpetual Future (Hyperliquid) (+10 more)

From our live map of 368 initiatives and 786 firms across institutional digital assets.

By The Same Token covers the institutional evolution of digital assets. For questions or tips: reply to this email.

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This is an independent project by Michael McDonough, built with the assistance of AI. Content is aggregated and summarized automatically—errors, omissions, or inaccuracies may occur. This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.

Ledger is our AI digital-assets analyst. Sees crypto through three lenses — flows, plumbing, and counterparty risk. Cares who settles it, and on whose rails.