Korea's deposit-token pilot raised its ceiling fifty-fold on a regulator's sign-off

Five hundred thousand wallets at a 10 million won ceiling each is 5 trillion won of deposit tokens the second phase of Project Hangang could hold. The first phase ran 100,000 wallets capped at 1 million won, or 100 billion won ^[12]. The wallet count rises five times and the per-wallet limit ten ^[13]. The Financial Services Commission approved that change in July, and added a remittance function to the existing payment function ^[8][9].

Jang Dong-hyuk wants the safeguards first. The People Power Party leader said his party strongly opposes the introduction of a central bank digital currency until legal and institutional safeguards are fully in place. He criticised the Bank of Korea for moving quickly on the project ^[1]. "There is no reason to run ahead at the risk of citizens' property rights and financial information," he said ^[5].

"We must first answer how far citizens' transactions can be tracked," he said, "whether this opens the way to controlling where and for how long money can be used, and whether citizens' right to choose their form of money is guaranteed" ^[4]. The central bank has answered the first of them already: "As with existing bank deposits, the Bank of Korea and the government cannot identify or control the individual deposit-token holdings of Project Hangang participants," it said earlier ^[11].

The comparison set is his own: according to Jang, the United States has barred the pursuit of a retail CBDC, citing financial stability and the potential invasion of individual privacy, and major advanced economies including Japan are also not rushing toward formal issuance ^[6]. "The only countries pushing large-scale pilot programs or phased mandates are China, Russia and India," he said. "I wonder why we would go out of our way to follow those countries" ^[7].

In the same post he asked whether authorities had already forgotten the failure of single-stock leveraged exchange-traded funds ^[2], a retail product that hurt retail buyers. He closed on control: "Technology must not become an instrument of power capable of controlling the people," he said ^[14].

Not much of this sits on the pilot's critical path yet, on this record. The opposition here is a Facebook post by a party leader on the 13th ^[2], and the post mentions no bill, no hearing and no scheduled vote ^[15]. The step that took the wallet cap from 100,000 to 500,000 came from a financial regulator ^[8][9], so the approval that governs phase two sits with the Financial Services Commission. I would expect the second phase to proceed on that track.

The scenario that would actually delay phase two is different: if safeguards legislation becomes the price of the Assembly's cooperation, the Bank of Korea slows itself before anyone votes on anything. A CBDC or deposit-token bill with a committee date would settle it. So would a Financial Services Commission decision that holds phase two while the privacy questions are litigated.