The Bank of Korea (BOK) and France’s central bank, the Banque de France, sat down together on April 7, 2026, to examine what digital assets mean for the global monetary system. The bilateral meeting, reported by South Korean newswire Yonhap, comes at a moment when both nations face some of the most consequential financial policy decisions in a generation.
From stablecoin governance battles in Seoul to wholesale CBDC experiments in Paris, the two central banks are wrestling with the same core tension: how do you harness the potential of digital assets without surrendering the monetary sovereignty your institution was built to protect?
The joint seminar had no public agenda released at time of writing. But its significance is difficult to overstate. Digital assets are no longer a fringe technology that central banks can monitor from a safe distance. They are now assembling task forces, hiring crypto analysts, designing CBDCs, and, as this meeting makes clear, comparing frameworks across borders. What South Korea and France discuss in private today will likely influence the regulatory templates that dozens of other countries adopt in the years ahead.
What Brought Seoul and Paris to the Same Table
Both nations are active, high-stakes participants in the global digital asset policy conversation, but they approach the same challenge from sharply different angles, which is precisely what makes their collaboration valuable.
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South Korea is navigating a protracted legislative stalemate over its Digital Asset Basic Act (DABA), a comprehensive framework intended to govern stablecoin issuance, crypto exchange licensing, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), and investor protection across one of Asia’s most active retail crypto markets.
As per data obtained, 27% of South Koreans aged 20–50 own crypto, while 70% intend to increase exposure. Such a level of retail engagement results in immense pressure on lawmakers to make the rules explicit before a market incident forces them to act.
A disagreement between parties over stablecoin governance caused the DABA deadlock. According to the Bank of Korea, won-pegged stablecoins can only be issued by bank-led consortia with commercial banks’ ownership of at least 51% in them. According to the BOK, the commercial banks are subjected to strict money laundering (AML) and solvency controls, which are not the case for most fintech.
The Financial Services Commission (FSC), however, has resisted the fixed ownership threshold, arguing that entrenching banks as permanent gatekeepers would drive digital innovation offshore. Regulators have also disagreed on whether a dedicated licensing committee is needed at all for stablecoin oversight, a meta-dispute that has slowed every other element of the bill. The Digital Asset Basic Act, which was expected to be finalized in late 2025, is now unlikely to see full implementation before late 2026 at the earliest.
France arrives at this meeting with a very different set of advantages and constraints. The Banque de France operates within the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation, which entered into full force in December 2024 and represents the world’s most comprehensive crypto regulatory framework. MiCA classifies digital assets clearly, defines reserve requirements for stablecoin issuers, and sets licensing standards for crypto service providers.
It offers South Korea a live reference point for what regulated digital asset markets can look like. The Banque de France has also been one of the world’s most technically ambitious wholesale CBDC experimenters, running distributed ledger settlement trials under its DL3S platform since 2020.
Banque de France: “Our common goal should be to expand the current monetary system based on the coexistence and complementarity of central bank and commercial bank money to the digital economy, in order to ensure financial stability, security, and trust.”, Governor François Villeroy de Galhau
Central Banks Are No Longer Watching From the Sidelines
The BOK–Banque de France seminar reflects a structural shift that has been accelerating across major economies. Central banks that once published cautious discussion papers on digital assets are now building hard infrastructure, staffing up, and making binding institutional commitments.
The Bank of Korea has moved quickly. In the middle of 2025, it renamed its Digital Currency Research Team as the Digital Currency Team, updating the department from theoretical research to an operational one. Two new units were launched simultaneously. One the Digital Currency Technology Team, which focuses on research and development. And the other the Digital Currency Infrastructure Team will build a digital voucher management platform using deposit token technology.
The BOK also launched a formal Virtual Asset Committee to coordinate with the government on regulatory initiatives related to stablecoins and CBDCs and began recruiting dedicated digital asset market analysts to monitor the impact of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and tokenized assets on monetary policy and financial stability.
The most tangible evidence of the BOK’s direction is its CBDC subsidy payment pilot. A BOK official confirmed to South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo that the government intends to begin distributing state subsidies via the digital won, also known as Project Hangang, in the first half of 2026, with an ambition to channel 25% of all government subsidy payments through the CBDC by 2030. Kim Dong-sub, head of the BOK’s Digital Currency Planning Team, framed the CBDC not as a rival to private stablecoins but as a complementary layer: “The services developed through Project Hangang could serve as a preview for the future introduction of won-pegged stablecoins. Rather than competing with one another, they will be synergetic.”
Meanwhile, the Eurosystem, the network of euro area central banks, of which the Banque de France is a key member, announced that the ‘Pontes’ wholesale CBDC project will go live by the end of 2026. Unlike a retail CBDC aimed at consumers, Pontes is designed for interbank settlement: it provides a secure, interoperable digital settlement layer for tokenized financial assets, allowing commercial banks to issue tokenized deposits and euro stablecoins on top of a trusted central bank foundation. Exploratory work in 2024 successfully tested three different settlement solutions for tokenized assets, paving the way for the Pontes commitment.
What Comes Next for South Korea
The domestic pressure in South Korea is building from multiple directions simultaneously. Korea Exchange chairman Jeong Eun-bo committed publicly in January 2026 to launching crypto ETFs and 24/7 trading hours as part of the exchange’s efforts to resolve the “Korea Discount”, the valuation gap between Korean-listed companies and their international peers, partly attributed to restrictive capital market rules. President Lee Jae Myung, a vocal proponent of cryptocurrency during his campaign, has been advocating for legalization of digital assets into his larger plan for economic revitalization.
Eight major South Korean commercial banks, including members of the country’s largest banking groups, have announced a joint plan to launch a won-pegged stablecoin consortium targeting 2026. Separately, BC Card has already completed a stablecoin payment pilot for foreign visitors to South Korea, demonstrating that the private sector infrastructure is advancing regardless of the legislative clock. Brokerage and asset management firms are also building crypto product pipelines in anticipation of regulatory clearance from DABA.
The joint seminar with the Banque de France equips the BOK with something it urgently needs in this environment: external validation and a practical peer model. If the Banque de France’s approach, anchoring private tokenized finance to wholesale central bank money rather than attempting to eliminate it, represents a workable template, the BOK can point to France as evidence that a stability-first, innovation-compatible framework is achievable. That could prove useful in breaking the FSC–BOK stalemate that has stalled DABA for over a year.
