South Korea to test tokenized government bonds with CBDC in 2027

South Korea will test tokenized government bonds linked to the Bank of Korea’s wholesale CBDC system in 2027 as token securities rules take effect.

South Korea plans to conduct a 2027 pilot linking tokenized government bonds to its institutional central bank digital currency (CBDC) infrastructure, moving sovereign debt tokenization from a proposal to an official government timeline. 

On Tuesday, the government unveiled its 2026 Economic Growth Strategy for the Second Half, which includes the plan. In addition to assigning a date for the pilot, the strategy said authorities would study how to make the Bank of Korea's (BOK) CBDC infrastructure interoperable with other blockchains, enabling a potential connection between external distributed ledgers and the bank’s permissioned system. 

The project would test whether South Korea’s wholesale CBDC, designed for use by financial institutions, can support capital markets infrastructure, rather than serving only as a digital payment instrument.

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