South Korea's Financial Services Commission unveiled a three-phase implementation roadmap on September 4 for the country's tokenized securities market, set to take legal effect on February 4, 2027. Three days later, Hanwha Investment and Securities completed development of a tokenized securities platform built on Avalanche, the final piece of what has quietly become the most comprehensive infrastructure position any single Korean financial institution holds across the entire settlement stack for that market.
The three layers matter because three layers govern how a tokenized security actually moves. An issuer needs infrastructure to mint and register a security token. Counterparties need settlement rails to exchange it for cash. Investors need secondary market access to trade it afterward. Hanwha has made significant investments in infrastructure for each.
Canton Network sits at the centre of that stack. Hanwha Investment and Securities committed approximately 30 billion won, around $22 million, to Digital Asset as part of the $365 million funding round closed earlier this year, following a memorandum of understanding signed in April. Digital Asset's Canton Network is the institutional settlement layer, the infrastructure designed for delivery-versus-payment settlement between known, regulated counterparties. For Korea's Phase 1 rollout, which will cover privately placed money market funds, bonds, and unlisted stocks, the settlement layer is where the critical transaction mechanics occur.
The issuance layer is covered through Hanwha Group's 9.6% stake in Securitize, making it the largest shareholder in the company behind BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized money market fund and one of the most established tokenized securities issuance and registry platforms globally. Securitize listed on the New York Stock Exchange in July following a SPAC merger, raising $400 million at a $1.25 billion pre-money valuation.
The newly completed Avalanche platform, built throughout 2025 in partnership with FairSquare Lab, adds the third layer: secondary market and retail-accessible liquidity. It runs across both the public Avalanche C-Chain, which connects to broader liquidity pools and retail investors, and Hyperledger Besu, a permissioned enterprise blockchain suited to the regulated institutional settlement flows that will dominate Phase 1. The dual architecture is a direct response to a bottleneck the Bank of Korea identified explicitly in a May 2026 report: permissioned-only networks solve compliance requirements but restrict liquidity to a closed set of institutional participants. Avalanche's public C-Chain provides access to a significantly larger pool of buyers and sellers.
Mapped across the settlement stack, Hanwha's three investments cover issuance through Securitize, institutional DvP settlement through Canton and Digital Asset, and secondary market liquidity through Avalanche. No other single Korean financial institution, and few globally, holds infrastructure positions across all three layers simultaneously.
The FSC's roadmap establishes February 4, 2027 as the date Korea's amended Capital Markets Act and Electronic Securities Act take legal effect. Phase 1 permits tokenization of privately placed money market funds, bonds, and unlisted stocks in trust structures, with retail subscriptions capped at 30 million won or five percent of an issuance, whichever is smaller. Phase 2 would extend tokenization to all publicly offered securities. Phase 3, the most architecturally significant, envisions on-chain payment rails allowing stablecoin-based settlement, enabling cash and securities to move simultaneously on-chain rather than through correspondent banking infrastructure. The pace of Phases 2 and 3 will depend on Phase 1 performance and the progress of Korea's pending stablecoin legislation.
Critical details remain open. The FSC has committed to publishing proposed revisions to subordinate regulations before the end of September, covering custody licensing, disclosure standards, and which specific asset structures qualify in Phase 1. Those rules will determine the actual competitive landscape. Korean institutions building platforms before the rules are finalised are making architectural bets on regulatory answers that are not yet given.
Whether Hanwha's position across all three infrastructure layers constitutes competitive advantage or a structural concentration that regulators will want to examine is a question those subordinate regulations have not yet addressed.
