The interview coincides with a series of concrete moves the New York-based company has already made in the country: a Korean-language website launch, Seoul-hosted events connecting banks, fintechs, and payment processors, and a signed memorandum of understanding with NH NongHyup Bank (November 2024) to run a proof-of-concept using Fireblocks' Tokenization Engine for VAT refund processing. Under the pilot, tax refund claims are represented as trackable digital tokens on a blockchain.

NH Bank serves more than 10 million customers.

Shaulov's focus on Seoul carries a personal dimension that predates the company. In 2017, before co-founding Fireblocks, he investigated the Lazarus Group's hack of a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange, an incident that directly motivated him to build institutional-grade security infrastructure for digital assets, according to a Finance Magnates interview.

Fireblocks, founded in 2019, provides custody and transaction infrastructure for institutions dealing in digital assets. Its core technology uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC), a method that distributes private key shards across multiple parties so no single point of failure can expose funds.

The company reports securing more than $14 trillion in transactions across 2,400-plus organizations, including more than 80 banks in live production, and supporting more than 150 blockchains. In the Asia-Pacific region, it counts more than 300 customers across offices in Singapore, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong. The company has no listed office in South Korea; its Korean market is currently served from those four existing APAC hubs, a gap that gives the Korean-language website launch and Seoul events added significance.

Amy Zhang, Fireblocks' APAC head, framed the NH Bank partnership in terms of timing and regional ambition. "Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore are at the forefront of innovation and therefore ideal jurisdictions for pioneering new use cases," she told the Korea Times in February 2025. On the VAT tokenization pilot specifically, she said blockchain can "significantly reduce processing times, improving transparency and minimizing fraud" in tax refund workflows.

A Regulatory Calendar That Shapes the Opportunity

South Korea's regulatory posture has shifted sharply in two years. The Virtual Asset User Protection Act (VAUPA), which took effect in July 2024, imposed strict market manipulation rules on exchanges and asset managers. The law drew its first criminal conviction on February 4, 2026, when a court sentenced an exchange executive to three years in prison and a KRW 500 million fine for running algorithmic trades to manipulate prices.

That enforcement record has cooled retail speculation while creating conditions that institutional-grade infrastructure providers view as favorable for establishing relationships with banks and securities firms ahead of a broader legal framework.

That broader framework, the Digital Asset Basic Act (DABA), remains stalled. The bill has failed to pass three times, held up by a dispute between the Bank of Korea and the Financial Services Commission over who can issue Korean won-pegged stablecoins. The Bank of Korea wants issuance restricted to bank-led consortia with at least 51% bank ownership; the FSC has pushed for a wider licensing approach.

South Korea's ruling party agreed on July 20, 2026, to reintroduce the bill in September 2026, with fortnightly subcommittee reviews, though that timeline remains subject to confirmation against the current National Assembly schedule. Lawmaker Park Sang-hyuk stated the party would "make the passage of the bill in the second half of this year a top priority."

Separately from DABA, Capital Markets Act amendments and Electronic Securities Act amendments, both passed on January 15, 2026, create a legal path for tokenized security issuance starting February 2027. The Korea Securities Depository (KSD) will operate as a blockchain node in that framework.

The government's H2 2026 roadmap also includes spot crypto ETFs, a government bond tokenization pilot connected to an institutional central bank digital currency, and a legal framework for KRW-pegged stablecoins. A virtual asset capital gains tax is also scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027, a deadline that adds urgency to institutional market entry planning across the sector.

Market Context: Retail Out, Institutions In

South Korea's retail crypto market has contracted sharply. Daily trading volume peaked near 17 trillion KRW per day in mid-2025 and had fallen to roughly 2.7 trillion KRW (approximately $2 billion) by June 2026, a drop of about 89% year-on-year as of mid-2026. That figure is drawn from May and June 2026 data and should be read as a directional indicator rather than a definitive current-state measure.

The so-called Kimchi premium, historically the gap between Korean crypto prices and global benchmarks that can reach 5 to 10 percentage points, sat at just 0.57% for Bitcoin and 0.58% for Ethereum in April 2026, the most recent data available at time of publication.

According to a16z Crypto, roughly $115 billion in retail capital has flowed offshore into dollar-denominated stablecoins, a dynamic Seoul is actively trying to reverse.

Fireblocks is not the only firm angling for institutional business in Seoul. BitGo has established a dedicated Korean entity backed by Hana Financial Group and SK Telecom. The Solana Foundation has partnered with Shinhan Card, which processes 200 trillion KRW (approximately $145 billion) annually across 28 million cardholders. LayerZero has integrated with the Korea Gold Exchange, and Avalanche is involved in the KRW1 initiative, reflecting broad interest from both infrastructure providers and blockchain protocols in the Korean institutional market. Shaulov's public positioning should be read alongside that competitive context.

For markets outside South Korea, the NH Bank VAT tokenization pilot carries practical relevance. Kenya's Kenya Revenue Authority and Nigeria's Federal Inland Revenue Service have each explored blockchain and distributed-ledger tools for tax administration, and Fireblocks' model requires neither a central bank digital currency nor a complete regulatory framework to run a limited pilot.

South Korea's phased approach to institutional onboarding under VAUPA also provides a usable template for regulators in other markets navigating similar tensions between retail oversight and institutional access. VAUPA structured corporate account access in distinct phases, a model that offers a meaningful parallel to markets such as India, where the Financial Intelligence Unit has imposed mandatory reporting requirements on offshore exchanges as an early step toward sequenced institutional access.

The immediate test for all parties is September. If DABA clears the National Assembly, it would set capital requirements for stablecoin issuers at KRW 500 million (roughly $360,000) and establish the legal framework for stablecoin issuance and digital asset classification that market participants have been waiting for. Until then, the pilot and partnership phase continues.