Korea Institutional Tracker - August Week 4 This week the institutional story moved onto the balance sheets. Two brokerages built out tokenized-securities rails, a TradFi asset manager put fresh capital into a crypto exchange, and a regional bank went live on Ripple's cross-border rails. Four fronts: 1. SECURITIES · Meritz Securities to Expand Its Tokenized-Securities Business Meritz Securities said on August 20 it will expand its tokenized-securities business, joining the widening group of Korean brokerages treating security-token offerings as core infrastructure rather than a pilot. The move positions domestic houses to issue and distribute tokenized real-world assets once the STO legal framework is finalized. <> 2. TOKENIZATION · NH Investment & Securities Joins Koscom's STO Platform NH Investment & Securities signed on August 13 to join Koscom's shared tokenized-securities platform. Koscom, the Korea Exchange's IT arm, runs the market-utility layer that lets brokerages issue, register and trade STOs without each building the rails alone, and NH is one of the larger houses to plug into the common infrastructure ahead of a formal regime. <> 3. M&A · Mirae Asset Injects Won 50B Into the Korbit Operator Mirae Asset injected about 50 billion won, roughly 36 million dollars, into the company behind the Korbit exchange, one of Korea's oldest licensed venues. Fresh capital from a traditional asset-management giant deepens TradFi ownership of domestic exchange infrastructure and signals that regulated crypto trading is becoming a mainstream asset-management adjacency. <> 4. PAYMENTS · Jeonbuk Bank Taps Ripple for Cross-Border Payments Ripple partnered with Jeonbuk Bank on August 18 to make it the first Korean regional bank to run Ripple Payments for international remittances, settling cross-border transfers in seconds to minutes rather than the multi-day cycles of correspondent banking. The service targets the province's import-export firms, IT startups and content creators, and marks Ripple's third Korean institutional deal of 2026 after Kbank custody and Kyobo Life bond-tokenization work. <>

Pleased to announce Jinseok Cho from KODA as a speaker at EastPoint:Seoul 2026! Jinseok is CEO of KODA (Korea Digital Asset), the country's leading institutional digital-asset custodian, established by KB Kookmin Bank and Hashed. Custody is the foundation everything institutional in Korea is built on, and KODA holds the majority of that market. At EastPoint:Seoul2026, Jinseok will share how institutional custody underpins Korea's institutional adoption. 📍 Seoul | 🗓️ September 28 | 🔗

Pleased to announce Darius Sit @dariussitzl from QCP @QCPgroup as a speaker at EastPoint:Seoul 2026! Darius is Founder of QCP, one of Asia's leading digital-asset trading and derivatives desks. His read on liquidity, volatility, and institutional positioning is followed closely across the market. At EastPoint:Seoul2026, Darius will share what derivatives and institutional flows signal for the market ahead. 📍 Seoul | 🗓️ September 28 | 🔗

Korean Web3 Policy Decoder - August Week 3 This week's policy: Korea reopens direct crypto trading to corporations. After a de facto nine-year freeze, the Financial Services Commission is clearing listed companies and professional investors to open real-name accounts and trade digital assets on licensed domestic exchanges. It is the most concrete step yet toward institutional participation in Korea's spot market, and the FSC calls corporate access a prerequisite for the next phase of digital-asset law. WHAT IT SAYS Under the FSC's phased roadmap first set out in February 2025, corporations and professional investors may allocate up to 5% of annual equity capital to crypto, limited to the top 20 tokens by market cap on the five major won exchanges and refreshed semiannually. Phase one in 2025 let non-profits and exchanges sell holdings; the final phase opens buying and trading to an estimated 3,500 eligible entities. Whether USD stablecoins such as USDT make the eligible list is still under discussion. WHO WINS Won-based exchanges (Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone) gain corporate order flow they have never had. Custodians and compliance vendors that can service real-name corporate accounts, KYC, and reporting move to the center. Listed treasuries and asset managers get a regulated onshore route to exposure they were already chasing offshore, where Tiger Research counts roughly $507B in five-year outflows. WHAT'S NEXT Feb 2025: FSC unveils the three-phase corporate access roadmap. 2025: non-profits and exchanges cleared to sell holdings. Early 2026: FSC finalizes the corporate investment guideline (5% cap, top-20). 2026: final phase opens trading to roughly 3,500 listed firms and professional investors. Ahead: USD-stablecoin eligibility, plus the phase-two Digital Asset Basic Act targeted for reintroduction in September. EastPoint's read The ETF debate gets the headlines, but real-name corporate accounts are the faster unlock: they route institutional demand straight onto regulated Korean venues instead of waiting on a Capital Markets Act rewrite. Watch the top-20 eligibility list and the stablecoin decision, they set which assets actually receive the new inflows. For allocators, this is the first clean onshore answer to five years of capital leaving the country. Source: <>

Pleased to announce Joseph Chalom @joechalom from SharpLink @Sharplink as a speaker at EastPoint:Seoul 2026! Building on his two decades at BlackRock, Joseph is now leading SharpLink, one of the world's largest Ethereum treasuries, turning a Nasdaq-listed company into a vehicle for accumulating ETH and putting it to work through staking and onchain yield. At EastPoint:Seoul2026, Joseph will share how institutions are building treasuries onchain and what Ethereum's next chapter means for corporate balance sheets. 📍 Seoul | 🗓️ September 28 | 🔗

Pleased to announce Shan Shan Shui @shanandwater from Morpho @MorphoLabs as a speaker at EastPoint:Seoul 2026! Shan Shan is APAC Growth Lead at Morpho, one of the leading on-chain lending networks. She drives how institutional on-chain credit is expanding across Asia-Pacific. At EastPoint:Seoul2026, Shan Shan will share how on-chain credit and lending scale for institutions in APAC. 📍 Seoul | 🗓️ September 28 | 🔗

How did EastPoint come to life? 🎙️ We couldn't unsee it: deep silos between industry segments that should've shared a room, but never did. So we built the place where those voices meet. 60 sec on the origin. The cold open. by @Wooster_Han92 and @BQYouTube from @hashed_official

Korea's institutional rails came online fast this week A megabank building a digital-asset wallet, a securities ruling for tokenized stocks, record on-chain transfer volume, and a won stablecoin opening the door to SpaceX. 1. BANKING · Shinhan Bank to Build Digital-Asset Wallet Into Super SOL App Shinhan Bank issued a 900 million won tender to design a digital-asset wallet inside its Super SOL super-app, supporting won stablecoins, STOs, and RWAs. Development could begin within the year, ahead of Korea's Digital Asset Basic Act in H2 2026. One of Korea's largest banks is wiring crypto custody straight into a mainstream retail app. 2. POLICY · Korea Rules Tokenized Stocks Are Securities, Preps 22% Tax Korea's FSC classified tokenized stocks as securities under the Capital Markets Act — not virtual assets — and the Ministry of Economy and Finance began preparing taxes: 15.4% on dividends and 22% on trading gains, matching overseas stocks. Full enforcement tracks the OECD's CARF framework from 2027. Regulatory clarity turns tokenized equities into an investable, taxable asset class. 3. MARKETS · Tokenized-Stock Transfers Surge 105% to $8.41B in a Month Global tokenized-stock transfer volume jumped 105% in a month to $8.41 billion, with market value up 43% to $2.16 billion and holders past 409,000, per Tokenized stocks outpaced every other real-world asset class, driven heavily by Korean demand. On-chain equities are scaling faster than any other RWA segment. 4. PAYMENTS · Won Stablecoin KRWQ Lists on Grow, Opening SpaceX Access KRWQ — a won-pegged stablecoin from IQ and Frax with Chainlink Proof of Reserve — listed on Grow, a platform of 500+ tokenized stocks, ETFs, and commodities. Korean-won holders can now gain on-chain exposure to SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. A won stablecoin becomes a direct bridge from Korean capital to private tech giants.

EastPoint 2025 Retropsect: How digital assets moved from the edges into the core of capital markets, stablecoins, treasuries, and the institutional playbook. "Institutional Investment Products: Crypto ETFs, Tokenized Assets and Stablecoins" @GuruXing Founder and CEO of @caladanxyz, @ysiu Chairman and Co-Founder of @animocabrands & Matthew Long GM APAC & Middleeast from @FalconXGlobal moderated by @NathanYJLee CSO of @factomind .