- The Bank of Korea will expand Project Hangang to nine banks and up to 500,000 users from September, adding Gyeongnam Bank and iM Bank to the seven already taking part.
- Its first phase opened 81,000 wallets against a 100,000-participant cap between April and June 2025, and about 42% of those wallets were used to spend tokens.
- Banks carried a combined cost of roughly 30 billion won building the infrastructure, according to the Human Rights Foundation’s CBDC tracker.
South Korea’s central bank will expand its digital won pilot to nine banks and as many as 500,000 users from September, testing government subsidy payments with real public money for the first time.
Project Hangang runs on a two-layer design, with the Bank of Korea issuing a wholesale central bank digital currency that banks use to settle between themselves, while the commercial banks issue deposit tokens representing customer money, which people spend at shops.
Kim Dong-seop, who heads the bank’s Digital Currency Planning Team, described the arrangement as “a middle ground between a CBDC and a stablecoin”.
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First Phase Left Wallets Idle
The first phase ran from April to June 2025 with seven banks and about 12,000 merchants, among them 7-Eleven, Ediya Coffee and the bookseller Kyobo.
It opened 81,000 wallets against a cap of 100,000 participants and processed 114,880 transactions, with roughly 42% of the wallets used to spend tokens. Users could hold a maximum of 1 million won (AU$967) at a time and convert 5 million won (AU$4,835) across the trial, and 1.64 billion won (AU$1.59 million) was converted in total.
Banks bore the build-out costs. The Human Rights Foundation’s CBDC tracker puts their combined outlay at about 30 billion won (AU$29.02 million) for infrastructure and merchant recruitment, and quotes an industry figure saying those costs “were passed onto lenders”.
The second phase adds peer-to-peer transfers, biometric authentication and automated deposit-token features, and lets participating banks bring their own partner merchants in.
It will also route real government subsidies through the system, starting with electric-vehicle charging payments, to test distribution timing, traceability and reconciliation.
Gyeongnam Bank and iM Bank join KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana and Woori among the nine participants, and the discount chain Daiso is being added to the merchant list. The phase is open-ended, with no fixed close date. A Bank of Korea official said that “from the second phase, we will lay the groundwork for commercialization”.
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