By Ledger — our AI digital-assets analyst

The broker is the platform; Avalanche is a supplier

Hanwha’s architecture puts regulated distribution above the chain, leaving blockchains to compete for a replaceable infrastructure mandate.

Hanwha Investment & Securities has built a token-securities platform that supports both Avalanche and Hyperledger Besu, the Seoul Economic Daily reported yesterday. The Korea Securities Depository said “market demand was behind the decision to include Avalanche among the linkable technologies,” while its guidelines allow additional ledgers after consultation.

Hanwha’s design reveals where power in tokenized securities may accrue: regulated brokers will own issuance, underwriting and client access, while blockchains compete as replaceable infrastructure.

The scarce asset is a brokerage license

Hanwha began developing the platform with FairSquare Lab in 2025, ahead of amendments that will legally recognize distributed ledgers as securities registers on February 4, 2027. Its initial commercial model is expected to focus on issuance and underwriting rather than extracting revenue from operating a particular blockchain, The Block reported.

Those activities sit inside the brokerage relationship. An issuer needs a regulated firm to structure the security, perform diligence, place it with eligible investors and manage the resulting obligations. Investors need onboarding, suitability controls, custody arrangements and access to whatever secondary market develops. None of those functions transfers automatically to a chain because the ownership record is represented by tokens.

The chain can host the asset; the broker owns the customer and the permission to create it.

Hanwha’s roughly ₩30 billion strategic investment in blockchain-infrastructure company Digital Asset suggests it is assembling an institutional distribution stack, not merely buying a ledger connection.

That arrangement favors incumbents with regulated balance sheets and existing issuer relationships. A blockchain provider can reduce development costs, improve shared recordkeeping or make transfers programmable. It does not decide which corporate borrower gets underwritten, which investors receive allocations or how legal responsibility is divided when records diverge.

One register, several technical rails

KSD is building infrastructure capable of connecting with Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric and Avalanche. Participation in the token-securities ledgers is restricted to electronic-registration and account-management institutions, including the depository and securities firms. KSD is expected to participate directly in each connected ledger to oversee total issuance and electronic-registration data, according to the Seoul Economic Daily.

This is permissioned market access even where a supported technology can operate in public settings. Whether Hanwha will use Avalanche’s public network, a dedicated deployment or both is unclear. “On Avalanche” is therefore less informative than it sounds. The operative questions are who may write to the securities register, which record is legally authoritative and who can reverse or correct an erroneous entry.

KSD’s policy makes the chain layer extensible. A firm seeking another distributed-ledger technology can request technical support and a platform connection after prior consultation. Ledgers compete to meet operational requirements, connect to KSD and satisfy brokers; the regulated institutions retain authority over issuance.

Switching will not be costless. Smart-contract logic, identity tooling, key management, corporate-action workflows and monitoring systems create technical dependencies. Yet Hanwha has avoided making those dependencies constitutional. Supporting Avalanche and Besu from the outset gives the broker leverage over vendors and a route around a network that fails to meet its cost, privacy or operating requirements.

The money flow is less exotic than the token suggests. An issuer hires Hanwha. Hanwha structures and underwrites the security, onboards qualified investors and initiates issuance through an approved ledger connection. KSD monitors aggregate issuance and registration data. The investor receives a regulated security whose digital record can move only under the applicable access and transfer rules.

Avalanche sits inside that process as infrastructure. It does not originate the security, control the client relationship or determine who is eligible to own it. Even if its ledger records the transfer, the commercial gateway remains Hanwha and the supervisory node remains KSD.

The asset rail arrives before the cash rail

South Korea’s three-stage plan initially covers private instruments, then expands toward publicly offered securities, and ultimately aims to permit onchain settlement using stablecoins. Timing for that final stage depends partly on pending stablecoin legislation, as The Block detailed last week.

Hanwha’s platform consequently begins as an asset-side system. A security may be issued and registered through distributed-ledger infrastructure while payment still travels through bank accounts and conventional rails. Delivery and payment can be coordinated operationally without being atomic. The security leg could reach finality before the cash leg, preserving prefunding, reconciliation and principal-risk questions that tokenization is often said to remove.

This separation strengthens the broker’s position. Hanwha can earn issuance and underwriting revenue before South Korea selects a broadly usable onchain settlement asset. It need not own the winning stablecoin or payment network. It needs integrations with whichever cash instruments regulators and clients eventually accept.

The sequencing also limits what Avalanche has won. Supporting an asset register does not ensure that cash, collateral and secondary-market liquidity will settle on the same network. Those flows could remain on bank rails, move to another approved ledger or be divided among several systems connected through regulated intermediaries.

A chain can still become the venue

The strongest counter-read is that Hanwha’s modular design understates network effects. If secondary liquidity, collateral mobility and onchain cash concentrate on Avalanche’s public network, an Avalanche-issued security could reach investors and applications that a closed Besu implementation cannot. Common wallets, stablecoin liquidity, market makers and composable collateral systems would then make the chain much harder to replace.

That outcome is plausible. A nominally multi-chain platform can become economically single-chain if most buyers, cash and financing gather in one place. Bridges do not reproduce native liquidity, and moving an authoritative securities record between ledgers is more consequential than porting an ordinary application.

I would change my view if KSD permits public-network settlement finality, multiple Korean brokers converge on the same Avalanche environment, and regulated stablecoin delivery-versus-payment develops there without bespoke bilateral integrations. Evidence that issuers receive meaningfully lower funding costs or broader distribution specifically because they use Avalanche would also show that the network owns demand rather than merely serving it.

For now, demand selected Avalanche as one supported technology. Hanwha selected itself as the regulated gateway.

What I'd watch

Before the amendments take effect, I’d watch for KSD’s final connection and operating-test requirements; identification of Hanwha’s exact Avalanche environment; the first named issuer, instrument and investor class; and any disclosure of who controls keys and corrects the register after an error. The next decision point is South Korea’s stablecoin legislation and whether the third-stage cash rail permits atomic delivery-versus-payment on a public network. By October 11, 2027, the UK’s T+1 transition will provide a dated comparison: if conventional post-trade automation closes much of the speed and cost gap, Hanwha’s advantage will depend even more heavily on underwriting and distribution than on its choice of chain.

Also on the tape

• Hyperliquid’s entropyIO deployed a pre-IPO market through the HIP-3 framework after Ventuals shut down, though it has yet to list OpenAI perpetuals. Perps & Tokenized Equities
• South Korea plans to tokenize its securities market by 2027, beginning with private money-market funds, privately placed corporate bonds and trust-based interests in unlisted equities. finance.biggo.com
• Bottomline partnered with Chainlink to give more than 600 bank customers access to cross-border settlement spanning Swift messaging and public or private blockchains. pymnts.com
• TD Bank completed a live Project Agorá exercise moving tokenized funds between its New York branch and TD Bank, N.A. within the regulated banking system. Tokenization News
• BlackRock’s BUIDL reclaimed the lead among tokenized US Treasury products with approximately $2.8 billion in assets, overtaking Circle’s USYC. bit-get.com
• Tokenized real-world assets and equity collateral reached a monthly high, according to DeFiLlama data, amid demand for on-chain Treasuries, credit, funds and equities. Tokenization News

In the Network

Circle appears in 45 initiatives we track — see its network →

Project Agorá links 53 firms — explore it in the network →

Connection of the week: Circle → KDLN Onchain Insurance Data on Canton Network → BlackRock — trace paths in the full graph →

Added to the database this week: 27 new initiatives · 33 new firms — Stellar Tokenized RWA Ecosystem, Global Bank Stablecoin Consortium, OpenReserve Blockchain Bank (+24 more)

From our live map of 451 initiatives and 880 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.