The Bank of Korea (BOK) and France's Banque de France convened a joint seminar on Monday covering digital assets, including stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), alongside climate change risks to financial systems. The meeting brings together two central banks that are each deep into live digital currency pilots at a moment when South Korea's broader crypto legislation remains stalled and France holds the G7 presidency.

The seminar comes at a moment when South Korea's Digital Asset Basic Act, a comprehensive regulatory framework intended to govern crypto markets and stablecoin issuance, has been held up since late 2025 by an unresolved dispute between the BOK and the Financial Services Commission (FSC). The central bank insists that only bank-led consortia holding at least a 51% ownership stake should be permitted to issue Korean won-backed stablecoins, citing existing solvency and anti-money-laundering oversight requirements. The FSC favors a broader approach, arguing that under Europe's MiCA regulation (Markets in Crypto-Assets), 14 of 15 licensed stablecoin issuers are electronic money institutions rather than banks. Critics of the BOK's position argue the bank-exclusive model would create, in the words of one industry expert cited by KoreaTechDesk, "a closed ecosystem that benefits incumbents."

The Banque de France's presence in Monday's seminar could subtly influence the BOK's calculus or provide political cover for the FSC's more permissive position, according to analysts tracking the bilateral dialogue. France's PSAN licensing regime, introduced under the 2019 PACTE law, directly influenced MiCA's design. Banque de France Deputy Governor Denis Beau has argued publicly that "the digital and green transition will require huge investment and innovation," while also warning that the rise of private stablecoins "could lead to fragmentation of financial and payment services." The French central bank's position is that CBDCs should be built "with banks, not against them," a stance that shares some common ground with the BOK's instinct toward institutional control, even if the two banks diverge on how permissive licensing should be.

Both institutions are running active digital currency programs. The BOK is in Phase 2 of Project Han River, its retail CBDC pilot, now expanded to nine commercial banks including Kyongnam Bank and iM Bank. The system uses won-pegged deposit tokens built on a wholesale CBDC layer and is being tested for government subsidy payments, with longer-horizon exploration of AI-agent transactions, meaning autonomous software systems that can execute payments using digital won. Phase 1 reached 100,000 individual users, with wallet balances capped at 1 million KRW (approximately $680) per person. Meanwhile, Tether and Circle have filed Korean trademark applications for KRWT, WON TETHER, and USDC, signaling that private stablecoin operators are not waiting for the regulatory framework to settle. On the French side, the Banque de France ran 19 distributed ledger technology experiments in 2024 alone. Its Pontes project is targeting the first live wholesale CBDC settlement within the Eurosystem by the end of 2026.

The climate component of the seminar reflects both institutions' deepening focus on financial risks from environmental transition. The BOK established an Office of Sustainable Growth in January 2024, staffed by an 11-person team, to embed climate risk into monetary policy. The bank is running joint climate stress tests with 15 Korean banks and insurers alongside the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), and has separately partnered with the Korea Exchange to explore distributing carbon credits via CBDC infrastructure. BOK Director Nah Seung-ho has described the office's mandate as building "systematic response strategies" to effectively achieve the bank's primary mandates of price stability and financial stability. The Banque de France has flagged similarly concrete stakes: a delayed or disorderly climate transition, according to a speech by Deputy Governor Beau, could cost France up to 5.5% of French GDP by 2050.

For the roughly 13.26 million cumulative registered accounts on Upbit as of December 2025, South Korea's dominant exchange, and for stablecoin operators eyeing KRW markets, the outcome of the BOK-FSC standoff has direct practical consequences. South Korea's proposed framework prohibits stablecoins from paying yield to holders, a significant constraint for decentralized finance protocols targeting Korean users. Bithumb, the country's second-largest exchange, has also been navigating a partial six-month regulatory suspension, underscoring how consequential the current regulatory environment is for market participants. Any shift in the BOK's stance toward a more MiCA-compatible approach, even a subtle one, would reshape what products are permissible in a market where two exchanges capture approximately 96% of national trading volume, according to data cited by KuCoin research and Bitget News.

The seminar also sits within a broader French diplomatic push ahead of the G7 summit later this year. President Macron is scheduled to address Paris Blockchain Week on April 15, making him the first sitting G7 leader to appear at an institutional digital assets conference. The BOK-BdF dialogue, held just days before that event, is consistent with a French diplomatic posture of building multilateral consensus on digital asset governance before those conversations reach the leaders' table.

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Verse Press was unable to obtain the full seminar programme at time of publication; agenda details in this article reflect Yonhap reporting and institutional context. Verse Press will update this story if the BOK publishes a full English-language readout of the seminar at bok.or.kr.