South Korea’s central bank isn’t just talking about tokenization anymore. It’s building the infrastructure.
Bank of Korea Governor Shin Hyun-song took the stage at the ECB Forum on Central Banking in Sintra, Portugal on June 30, presenting a paper titled “A unified ledger in practice: lessons from Project Hangang.” The core argument: tokenizing government bonds on a single permissioned ledger could fundamentally simplify how sovereign debt gets issued, settled, and managed.
What Project Hangang actually does
Project Hangang is the Bank of Korea’s flagship experiment in building what it calls a Digital Currency System, or DCS. The platform is permissioned, meaning it’s not an open blockchain anyone can join. It’s a controlled environment run by the central bank, designed to host tokenized central bank money, commercial bank deposits, and other tokenized assets on one unified ledger.
The key technical concept here is atomic settlement. When a bond trade happens, the exchange of the asset and the payment occurs simultaneously and automatically, with no gap between delivery and payment.
