Shinhan Asset Management works with three of the six blockchains courting Korean finance

Cash moves in both directions across these deals. Into the networks: Hanwha Investment & Securities, Shinhan Securities and Shinhan Venture Investment put money into Digital Asset, the U.S. company that developed Canton ^[3]. Out of them: one industry official told Seoul Economic Daily that competition among the networks has become fierce enough that some are paying grants to financial firms to win business ^[14]. A grant covers part of what a company spends building the technology or the service, and the network pays it to get more use of its own chain ^[15]. The paper did not say which projects pay grants or how much ^[14].

The customer list shows who holds the options, or rather, who is collecting them. Shinhan Asset Management is a Canton validator, verifying transaction records and helping operate the network ^[4]. It is also tokenizing a won-denominated ultra-short-term bond fund with Solana ^[7] and testing won-denominated products with Plume ^[11]. One asset manager works with half of the six networks ^[1]. Hanwha Investment & Securities owns part of Canton's developer and built its tokenized-securities platform on Avalanche ^[3]. Toss Bank works with Solana on cross-border remittances, while Toss (named separately in the report) tests won stablecoin infrastructure with Optimism ^[5][9].

In the report, banks are working on remittances and payments, and brokerages and asset managers on tokenized securities and funds ^[13]. The only test the report describes as completed from issuance through settlement is a Solana proof of concept for digital meal vouchers at Kwangju Bank ^[6]. The networks are paying in staff as well. Solana, Plume and Optimism each have a Korea head, Ava Labs vice president Kim Yong-il relays Korean firms' requirements to headquarters, and Canton is said to be interested in hiring locally ^[16][17].

Three outcomes fit this record. When the tokenized-securities framework takes effect ^[2], each Korean firm could choose one chain for issuance and let its other agreements lapse. Firms could instead run several chains side by side, keeping the grants and validator seats they already hold. Or the pilots could stay pilots. The paper treats it as an open question whether any of these efforts reach actual issuance, trading and settlement ^[19].

I think the evidence supports a narrower claim than a count of six implies. Korea is where these networks are spending on sales. Korean institutions are taking positions on several of them at once without, on this record, putting live securities issuance on any one. The strongest case against that view is Canton, where Korean money bought into the developer and a Shinhan affiliate helps run the network ^[3][4], both commitments of a kind a memorandum of understanding does not make. The view is wrong if the next round of deals looks more like Canton's, with Korean firms paying the networks, than like the grant-funded ones the industry official described ^[14].