The ruling party in South Korea proposes implementing foreign exchange controls on stablecoins and mandates mandatory trusts for RWA assets.

CoinDesk.com reports that, according to Seoul Economic Daily, South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party’s latest consolidated bill for the digital asset special task force has, for the first time, clearly set issuance standards for the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA). It requires issuers to place the related underlying assets into a managed trust in accordance with the Capital Markets Act, with related implementation details to be stipulated separately by presidential decree. For stablecoins, the bill provides that if they are used for foreign-exchange transactions, they are deemed to be a payment instrument under the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act; operators do not need to register separately and will be automatically brought under the supervision of the foreign-exchange regulatory authority, while daily consumer payment activities are exempted from filing obligations. The bill also explicitly prohibits stablecoin issuers, in any form, from paying interest to holders.

The Financial Services Commission will need to set interoperable technical standards for stablecoins to prevent liquidity fragmentation when Korean won stablecoins are issued across multiple chains. The exchanges and the fragmented disclosure regime will be integrated into a unified disclosure system under the Digital Asset Industry Association. Core controversial provisions, such as shareholding limits for major shareholders of exchanges and stablecoin issuers holding shares in banks, were not included in this bill.