South Korea’s National Assembly passed amendments to the Capital Markets Act and the Electronic Securities Act on January 15, 2026, formally recognizing tokenized securities under Korean law. The package legalizes issuance and secondary trading of blockchain-based securities and starts a one-year preparation period ahead of full implementation in January 2027.
The change establishes a regulated Security Token Offering (STO) pathway, bringing blockchain-based securities into a supervised capital-markets perimeter. Distributed ledger records are treated as an official registration method, and eligible issuers can create tokenized securities under the Electronic Securities Act while trading is enabled under the Capital Markets Act through licensed intermediaries.
How the framework is structured
Korea’s model centralizes registration and issuance integrity under the Korea Securities Depository (KSD). KSD is positioned as the electronic registration authority and the manager of issuance-volume integrity, supported by a new “issuance account management institution” concept that reinforces control over total issuance and record accuracy.
Implementation will be led by the Financial Services Commission (FSC) in coordination with the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) and industry participants. Secondary trading is restricted to brokerages and licensed intermediaries, keeping investor-protection and market-integrity controls aligned with existing securities infrastructure.
Readiness timeline to January 2027
Operational readiness has already been initiated through KSD’s Token Securities Test Bed Platform launched in mid-2025 with eight participating institutions. The one-year preparation window is designed to de-risk issuance, node operations, and ledger-based registration before enforcement begins in January 2027.
Market-sizing expectations included alongside the legislative context point to meaningful scale potential. One estimate places South Korea’s tokenized securities market at about 367 trillion won (≈$249 billion) by 2030, while global projections cited in the same context range from $2 trillion by 2028 to $5 trillion by 2030.
