Korean Business Forum Puts Stablecoins at the Center of AI's Next Phase
Seoul executives say autonomous AI agents cannot scale without programmable payment rails. South Korea's regulatory deadlock is making the gap visible.
Seoul, June 25, 2026. At the 11th Global Business Forum hosted by the Korea Herald and Herald Business, two executives told an audience of business leaders that artificial intelligence adoption in Korea will ultimately be constrained not by the sophistication of AI models, but by two more mundane problems: messy enterprise data and a missing payment layer for autonomous software agents.
Park Min-jun, who heads the enterprise AI division at Wrtn Technologies, and Ha Tae-kyung, president of the Korea Insurance Institute and a former three-term National Assembly lawmaker who assumed the KII role in September 2024, each described a version of the same bottleneck from their respective industries. Taken together, their arguments frame Korea's AI push as a race between technical ambition and infrastructure readiness.
From Chatbots to Action
Park described a clear shift in what Korean companies are now asking AI to do. "Last year, companies wanted AI to answer questions or generate documents," he said. "This year, they want it to extract and analyze data, automate finance work, cancel subscriptions, process refunds, and issue coupons."
Wrtn has already deployed a live customer-service AI agent in production for over a year that handles subscription cancellations and refunds. The company serves 6.5 million monthly active users, counts Korea's Ministry of Culture and Amorepacific among its clients, and is on track to surpass $100 million in annual recurring revenue. It has raised approximately 130 billion won (roughly $84 million USD) and is weighing a US market entry by mid-2026 and a potential IPO by 2028.
But the path from proof-of-concept to enterprise deployment is longer than it appears. Park said the AI agent itself takes about two weeks to build, while full enterprise deployment, including data preparation, takes approximately three months. "When companies actually try AI transformation, most reach the same conclusion," he said. "Preparing the data is the hardest part."
That diagnosis reflects a structural issue across Korean industry. Manufacturing data sits locked in factory equipment, paper records, or siloed legacy systems. The same product is sometimes labeled differently across affiliated companies, which prevents AI agents from reading consistently across databases.
Why Stablecoins Enter the Conversation
Ha Tae-kyung brought the payment layer question into focus with a specific insurance use case. He described a scenario where an AI agent detects a qualifying flight delay and automatically triggers a payout to the affected traveler, with no human approval required in between. The mechanism depends on a stablecoin (a digital currency pegged to a fiat currency and settled on a blockchain) that an AI agent can control directly. "AI agents and stablecoins are a pair," Ha said. "They move together."
Ha's comments carry institutional weight beyond his legislative background. The Korea Insurance Institute established a Digital Asset Review Committee in March 2026 and is actively exploring holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet, according to reporting by Asia Business Daily and Bloomingbit. Those moves signal that his forum remarks reflect institutional conviction rather than conference speculation.
The broader data supports this framing. A Keyrock report covering May 2025 through April 2026 found that AI agents executed approximately 176 million blockchain transactions, settling around $73 million in total value. About 98.6 percent of those transactions settled in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle. Notably, 76 percent of agent payments fell below $0.30 per transaction, a threshold the report identifies as the point at which traditional card payment fees make processing uneconomical. Stablecoins sidestep that cost floor. For additional scale: Coinbase's x402 protocol alone recorded approximately $600 million in annual transaction volume, and the stablecoin market as a whole posted roughly $33 trillion in 2025 annual volume, exceeding Visa and Mastercard combined.
Korea's Regulatory Impasse
South Korea does not yet have a legal framework that allows won-backed stablecoins to operate with clear compliance structures. The Digital Asset Basic Act has been stalled in the National Assembly since late 2025. It was left off the agenda during the May 2026 parliamentary session, and meaningful legislative review is expected in the second half of 2026.
The core dispute is between the Financial Services Commission, which is open to non-bank stablecoin issuers, and the Bank of Korea, which wants any stablecoin issuer to be a bank with at least 51 percent ownership. The proposed law would require a minimum capital of 50 billion won (roughly $35 million) for stablecoin issuers and would establish a Digital Asset Committee to coordinate oversight across regulators.
Meanwhile, the Bank of Korea is advancing its own digital currency pilot. Phase 2 of Project Hangang, launched in March 2026, now involves nine commercial banks and includes real government subsidy disbursements, with electric vehicle charging infrastructure subsidies as one of the first live use cases. The new central bank governor, Shin Hyun-song, made no mention of stablecoins in his inaugural address, signaling the institution's preference for a bank-led digital money architecture. That silence marks a notable shift: at his confirmation hearing, Shin had described stablecoins as potentially playing a "supplementary and competitive" role alongside central bank digital currencies. His inaugural address appears to have moved that position toward formal de-prioritization.
What This Means Outside Korea
Korea's regulatory stalemate is not unique. The same tension between central bank digital currencies and privately issued stablecoins is playing out across South Asia and Africa, where the practical stakes may be even higher.
Stablecoins are already functioning as working financial infrastructure in several of those markets. Kenya processes an estimated $500 million per month in stablecoin transactions. Crypto transaction volume across South Asia grew roughly 80 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2025, driven largely by stablecoin use. Ha Tae-kyung's flight delay insurance example has a direct regional analog in parametric crop insurance and weather-triggered payouts, sectors that are active across East and West Africa but currently unviable at scale because human-approval requirements make them too slow and expensive to administer.
The infrastructure protocols being built to serve AI agents are also taking shape now. Coinbase's x402 protocol has processed approximately 165 million transactions across roughly 480,000 active AI wallets. Competitors are building parallel systems: Google's AP2, Stripe's MPP, and Mastercard's Agent Pay. Countries and developers that engage with these rails during the standardization period will have structural advantages when agentic commerce scales. Gartner projects AI agents could facilitate $15 trillion in purchases by 2028, a figure that encompasses autonomous procurement and supply-chain transactions across industries.
Korea's debate illustrates the design choice every government faces: sovereignty-preserving CBDC architectures offer monetary control but slower innovation cycles, while stablecoin-based approaches enable faster deployment but require legislators to settle jurisdictional questions that remain politically contested. The outcome of Korea's Digital Asset Basic Act, expected to move in the second half of 2026, will offer an early read on how one technically capable government resolves that tradeoff.
Sources: Korea Herald (primary reporting), CoinDesk, Fortune, Blockhead.co, Keyrock AI Payments Report, KoreaTechDesk, Asia Business Daily, Bloomingbit, Stablecoin Insider.