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Kakao Pay Securities and Dinari test one-to-one tokens backed by Korea Exchange shares
Kakao Pay Securities and Dinari are testing whether Korea Exchange shares can reach overseas buyers, chiefly in the U.S., as one-to-one backed tokens. Each token needs a real Korean share behind it in custody, so the trial mostly tests how those shares are sourced and held.
The Investor · Invest desk
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What happened
- The project is still at a trial stage, and no tokenized Korean shares are available to buy.
- Foreign investors have limited ways to buy Korea-listed shares directly, and most of the Korean market has no depositary receipts.
- Dinari said in August that eligible U.S. investors could trade 724 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, with companies able to use its system through an API.
- Korea's Financial Services Commission will treat security tokens, including stocks, bonds and funds, as securities in digital form from February 4, 2027.
- The SEC's Innovation Exemption, introduced September 17, gives temporary, conditional relief to venues trading tokenized NMS stocks through regulated automated market makers.
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Why it matters
- exposure An overseas buyer's claim would run through a custodian and two legal systems, the kind of token-to-asset link the IMF warns can carry legal risk.
- constraint The only U.S. relief on the record covers tokenized NMS stocks, so the U.S. route for Korea Exchange listings remains open legal work for the partners.
- capability If sourcing and custody work, one framework could reach the large share of Korean listings that no depositary receipt covers, without a receipt programme for each issuer.
A one-to-one backed token still starts with a share bought on the Korea Exchange. Dinari's dShares use a custodial structure with one security behind each token [4]. So every Korean token sold abroad needs a real share bought on the exchange and held for the buyer. The first item in the partners' scope is a framework for sourcing Korean equities. It comes before the proof of concept and before the legal, technical and operational work on overseas distribution [1].
The token model moves the foreign-access problem from the end buyer to whoever does the sourcing [3]. That party buys the shares in Korea, and the overseas investor holds a claim on them. The companies did not disclose fees or say who would hold the underlying shares of record.
Dinari's current catalogue is all U.S. paper [5]. According to the company, dShares keep dividends, voting rights, corporate actions and NBBO execution for the holder [6]. Doing the same for a Korean issuer's dividend and a Korean shareholder vote is part of the operational work the partners say they still have to settle [1].
The demand case rests on fast growth from a small base. Cryptopolitan reported that monthly on-chain volume in tokenized stocks rose from $1 billion in January to $9 billion in July [7], ninefold in six months [1]. Binance Research put real-world-asset AUM at $34.18 billion on September 15, up 85.2% year to date [11]. Back out that gain and the total was near $18.5 billion at the start of the year [2]. Binance Research also had tokenized equities up 390.4% [11]. Citi's base case of a $5.5 trillion tokenized-asset market by 2030 is about 161 times the Binance total [12][3], though the two may not count the same assets. Citi names regulation, liquidity and interoperability as the hurdles [12].
The two regulators are on different clocks. Korea's date is fixed [8], and the Korea Capital Market Institute regards the amendments, promulgated in February 2026, as a milestone for the capital market [9]. The U.S. relief the source cites is temporary, conditional and written for tokenized NMS stocks [10]. Whether any of it reaches a Korea Exchange listing is one of the legal steps the partners have yet to work out [1].
The trial could stall in three places. The first is the legal risk the IMF sees in the link between a token and the asset it represents [13], and that risk is sharper when the claim crosses two jurisdictions. The second is timing: Korea's own rules do not apply until February 2027 [8], and the partners may wait for them. The third is a U.S. leg that needs a structure the September exemption was not built for [10].
I'd expect the U.S. leg to be the slow one. Korea has a start date, and the only U.S. relief on the record is a temporary exemption aimed at NMS stocks [8][10]. The counter-case is that Dinari already serves investors in more than 85 countries [6]. The first buyers of a Korean token could sit outside the U.S. while the SEC question gets settled. A U.S. launch date announced before Korea's rules take effect would prove that view wrong.
What to watch
- Proof-of-concept findings that name who holds the Korean shares of record and how dividends and votes reach token holders abroad.
- Any SEC action extending the Innovation Exemption, or separate relief, to tokenized shares listed outside the U.S.
- Whether a launch date for U.S. buyers lands before or after February 4, 2027, when Korea's amended rules take effect.