Seoul Economic Daily urges Korea to set stablecoin standards before handing out issuance licences

Reserve composition and how fast a holder gets face value back do not follow from the sector a licence sits in. Those are the terms the Seoul Economic Daily wants attached to an issuer: one-to-one reserve assets, safe assets held in segregated custody, prompt redemption at face value, regular disclosure with external verification ^[4]. Then anti-money-laundering controls, internal controls and recovery and resolution plans ^[5]. Eight obligations in total ^[6]. The editorial sets no capital floor, cap size or redemption deadline in days ^[18].

That is why one sentence in the piece supports two quite different statutes. It asks for legal entry routes opened on a sector-neutral basis, and for licensing premised on rigorous review and initial issuance caps. Capital, liquidity and disclosure obligations get heavier the greater a firm's impact on the financial system ^[7]. Read one way, a published threshold admits anyone who clears it and the caps keep early failures small. Read the other way, the review is the gate, the cap is the quota, and the first two or three licensees build distribution while the reserve rules are still in draft.

On allocation the paper is blunt. "The government should not pick winners," it wrote ^[16]. It argues that the government cannot know in advance who will implement this most safely and usefully. Firms that meet the standards, it says, should be tested in the market and chosen by users under rigorous licensing and continuous supervision ^[20].

One version of this: entry is opened to any qualifying firm, the initial caps become the binding constraint, and the argument moves from who gets in to who gets headroom. A second: issuance goes to banks, which the editorial credits with reserve asset management, anti-money-laundering capacity and customer trust. Korea then trades away the programmable payments, platform integration and user experience it credits to technology firms ^[10]. A third: the standards are written strictly and examined loosely, which is the version that looks safest in statute and leaves the most run risk in the reserve pool.

In my view the licence fight persists because allocating entry is a decision a legislature makes once. Reserve composition, custody arrangements and redemption deadlines have to be set, measured and revised for as long as the instrument exists. Allocation is itself a prudential standard, and a supervisor with the capacity to examine five issuers properly may hold down run risk better than one publishing thresholds for fifty. What would settle it is the statutory text. Does the Act carry one-to-one reserves, segregated custody, external verification and a redemption deadline as obligations, or are they pushed into subordinate rules written after the first licences exist ^[4][17]? The paper points to cheaper and faster trade settlement in an economy where trade is a large share of output, payments between AI agents, small-value real-time settlement ^[15]. All of it is downstream of whether the reserve holds.