Imagine that you’re the Bank of Korea, sitting in a nicely air-conditioned office with enough blinking monitors and coffee cups to put NASA’s mission control to shame. Suddenly, someone bursts in clutching reports about—wait for it—cryptocurrencies. Yes, those mysterious internet coins beloved by tech bros, investment gurus, and possibly your cousin who won’t stop trying to explain “blockchain” at family dinners.
Anyway, the BOK, painfully aware that South Korea might let stablecoins (that’s cryptocurrency pegged to the Korean won, not the stuff you win at the arcade) run wild, has demanded that it should have first dibs on approving, disapproving or at least grumbling loudly about any of these coins. The reason? Apparently, if people start swapping stablecoins like they’re Monopoly money, it could throw a spanner into the delicate works of monetary policy. And heaven knows, central bankers love their policy levers just as they are. 🏦
According to an unnamed (but probably bespectacled) BOK official quoted by BusinessKorea, monetary authorities must be in the mix right from the start. No sneaking stablecoins into circulation like some cryptographic ninja. If stablecoins are used as real money, they could turn the BOK’s carefully laid interest rate plans into a game of whack-a-mole. Not that anyone actually understands monetary policy, but still, it’s the principle of the thing.
In a move that will shock nobody who’s ever met a central banker, Mr. Koh Kyung-chul, who leads the electronic finance team (think less James Bond, more spreadsheet superhero), echoed that they’d simply have to be given “substantial legal authority”—the sort of phrase that fills lawyers with glee and everyone else with existential dread. One can picture bureaucrats rubbing their hands and cackling, “At last, more forms to fill out!”
Meanwhile, across town, lawmaker Min Byung-duk pointed out in early May that Koreans were sending massive piles of crypto offshore. The numbers are so big you’d need a calculator, a stiff drink, and possibly an abacus to comprehend them. In just three months, 56.8 trillion won (that’s about $40.6 billion, or twenty minutes’ worth of Elon Musk tweets) vanished into cyberspace. Nearly half of it was in stablecoins like Tether and USD Coin, which, for some reason, don’t come with their own frequent flyer miles. ✈️💸
The exchanges making all this possible? Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Cobbit, and Gopax—names that sound like rejected Pokémon but are apparently legitimate crypto platforms. As for the won-based stablecoin dream, the BOK would rather you check with them first, just to be sure you’re not about to crash the economy. Or, worse, make things… interesting.
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2025-05-12 16:06