Park pushed back against a continuing debate over whether weak share performance at Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix reflects insufficient shareholder returns.

"Saying a stock falls because the company does not pay enough dividends is a weak argument. What matters is the company's fundamentals," he said, according to Korea Herald.

He also questioned whether shareholder returns of 5 to 7 percent offer meaningful competition against current US Treasury rates, framing capital reinvestment as the more rational choice for companies with long-term growth potential. The scale of the programs he was critiquing is considerable: Samsung Electronics has announced plans for 90 to 110 trillion won (approximately $65 to $79 billion) in combined dividends and buybacks, its largest-ever shareholder return package, while SK Hynix has unveiled a 40 trillion won (approximately $28.7 billion) buyback program. The structural pressures behind Samsung's dividend-heavy mix are partly regulatory: Samsung Life Insurance and Samsung Fire and Marine together hold a combined stake of approximately 9.99 percent in Samsung Electronics, close to the 10 percent legal ceiling for affiliated ownership, making large-scale buybacks legally constrained.

The comments landed one month after Mirae Asset Securities completed its acquisition of Korbit and rebranded it as Digital X. Korbit, founded in 2013 as South Korea's first Bitcoin exchange, is the country's oldest crypto platform. Mirae Asset had first taken a strategic stake in Korbit in 2017, nearly a decade before the full acquisition, making this a deliberate and long-planned consolidation rather than an opportunistic move.

The deal closed at roughly 141.4 billion won (approximately $102 million USD), giving Mirae Asset a 97.15 percent controlling stake. South Korea's Fair Trade Commission signed off on the transaction on July 9, 2026.

The rebrand marks the first time a licensed Korean financial group affiliate has taken controlling ownership of a domestic crypto exchange, a structure without precedent in the country's regulated market.

Park's growth-over-distribution stance applies directly to Digital X. He said the exchange should reinvest earnings even if it turns profitable in the coming year. That philosophy is central to what Mirae Asset is calling its "3.0" strategy: building an institutional platform that connects traditional securities with digital assets. The roadmap includes real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, which refers to representing ownership of physical or financial assets such as bonds or real estate on a blockchain; security token offerings (STOs); and stablecoin infrastructure. Avalanche has been named as a protocol-level partner.

Compliance architecture covering anti-money laundering, KYC, fraud detection, information security protocols, and cold wallet storage sits at the center of the build-out. Park has noted that "trust takes a lifetime to build but can collapse in an instant," framing Digital X's regulatory posture as a competitive priority.

The timing matters. Korean crypto exchanges recorded a combined trading volume of roughly $367 billion in the first half of 2026, a 54 percent decline year-on-year. Upbit's operating profit fell 79.7 percent over the same period, and Bithumb swung to a net loss of 108.7 billion won from a 55 billion won profit the prior year. A partial recovery materialized on August 21, when Upbit's 24-hour volume spiked 273 percent to approximately $1.84 billion.

That rebound aside, Mirae Asset acquired infrastructure during a down cycle, consistent with Park's reinvestment philosophy and his approach of prioritizing long-term positioning over short-term market conditions.

The acquisition is not an isolated event. Across Korea's regulated market, traditional financial institutions raced in 2026 to secure equity positions in the five licensed won-denominated exchanges, the only legal channels through which Korean retail investors can convert won into crypto assets. Hana Bank acquired a 6.55 percent stake in Dunamu, the operator of market-leading Upbit, for close to 1 trillion won. Hanwha Investment Securities, Samsung Group subsidiaries holding a combined 4.0 percent stake, and a joint venture between Korea Investment and Securities and OKX Ventures, which took a position in Coinone, have each established footholds in other platforms. The Financial Supervisory Service has proposed capping any single major shareholder's ownership at 20 percent for exchanges, a measure on which agreement was reached on March 3, 2026 and which sits in notable tension with Mirae Asset's 97.15 percent controlling stake.

Tiger Research, which tracks institutional crypto activity in Korea, has mapped 150 institutions and 196 active partnerships in this space as of 2026. Its analysis frames exchange equity stakes not as bets on trading fee revenue but as something more structurally significant: owning an exchange's equity is equivalent to owning the conduit connecting Korean retail savings to digital assets.

For builders and regulators outside Korea, the Digital X model carries practical lessons. South Korea's Virtual Asset User Protection Act, which came into force in July 2024, requires exchanges to comply with the Travel Rule for qualifying virtual asset transfers. Digital X has committed to maintaining at least 80 percent of user assets in cold storage as part of its internal compliance posture, alongside AML, KYC, and information security standards. A proposed August 2026 amendment would mandate separate address storage for user assets.

That compliance stack has created a durable licensing moat: only five platforms can legally operate, and owning one means owning a structurally scarce gateway. Regulators in Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Kenya are actively designing exchange licensing frameworks, and the Korean model offers a concrete benchmark for what regulated TradFi-crypto integration looks like at institutional scale. For African markets in particular, the gap is instructive: sovereign bond and real estate tokenization projects across the continent remain largely excluded from institutional-grade infrastructure of this kind, even as those licensing frameworks begin to take shape. The Mirae Asset model illustrates both what is now possible and the distance yet to travel.

Mirae Asset's existing Indian mutual fund and asset management operations open a concrete cross-border dimension. Indian investors can access foreign tokenized asset platforms through India's Liberalised Remittance Scheme, which permits outward remittances of up to $250,000 per year, and Korea's STO regulatory framework is already being referenced in Indian securities regulator consultations. The global tokenized asset market is currently valued at roughly $36 billion, up more than 400 percent since January 2025, and a framework linking Korean exchange infrastructure to Indian distribution networks could position Mirae Asset as an early institutional bridge across that expansion.

Park has also noted that Korea's property tax overhaul could accelerate a shift of household wealth from real estate into capital markets, reinforcing the domestic macro backdrop for Digital X's target investor base and for the reinvestment thesis he outlined at Wednesday's dinner.

Digital X's next milestones will test whether that thesis translates into product. BCG has projected that the global RWA tokenization market could reach $16 trillion by 2030. For Web3 founders seeking institutional backing, the more instructive lesson from Digital X may be that compliance architecture is the product: a TradFi-controlled, fully licensed exchange operating under strict cold storage, AML, Travel Rule, and KYC requirements represents what institutional-grade crypto infrastructure looks like in practice. For regulators in emerging markets, it is also the clearest available model for how to structure a gateway between household savings and digital assets. Park's bet is that owning that gateway in Korea positions Mirae Asset to participate significantly in Asia's digital asset growth through the rest of the decade, with the 3.0 roadmap across RWA, STOs, and stablecoin infrastructure as the delivery mechanism.