Kyobo Life Insurance and Japan's SBI Group have completed a cross-border pilot testing direct exchange between yen- and won-denominated stablecoin representations on Canton Network, without routing transactions through the US dollar as an intermediate currency.
The pilot ran from July with SBI Digital Practice using Canton Network's test environment to model institutional fund transfer, foreign exchange, and settlement between Japan and South Korea. Test tokens represented yen and won stablecoins. No institutional funds or live stablecoins moved during the exercise, limiting the result to a technical and operational demonstration. Kyobo Life described the test as the first end-to-end cross-border stablecoin demonstration conducted by a South Korean insurance company, a characterisation that comes from the company and has not been independently verified by a regulator.
The transaction model the companies tested avoided the conventional yen-to-dollar-to-won conversion path, which adds settlement steps and associated costs. Kyobo Life said the structure demonstrated the technical feasibility of stablecoin-based institutional transfers with fewer intermediary currency conversions, though it did not publish comparative figures quantifying those savings. The exercise also examined real-time transaction tracking and procedures for handling digital assets arriving from overseas and processing related settlement inside South Korea.
Canton Network provided the institutional test environment. The network's configurable privacy and permission controls make it suited to the kind of cross-border institutional settlement both firms were modelling. SBI Digital Practice has made Canton a central part of its institutional blockchain strategy. In July, SBI Holdings renamed SBI Security Solutions as SBI Digital Practice, focusing the subsidiary on building financial infrastructure and applications on Canton.
The Kyobo test sits alongside but is separate from Project Musubi, a Japan-Korea payment network SBI Digital Practice and Korean blockchain infrastructure company Nodeinfra announced in August. That project is designed around payment-versus-payment settlement and distributed netting on Canton Network, and remains at the test-token and infrastructure development stage without a commercial launch date.
SBI's yen stablecoin infrastructure is further along. SBI launched the yen-denominated JPYSC through SBI Shinsei Trust Bank earlier in 2026 and has since expanded its use into lending and tokenised asset initiatives. South Korea's regulatory framework for won-backed stablecoins remains in development.
Kyobo Life and SBI said they intend to explore further cooperation in digital asset exchange and asset management between Japan and South Korea, without providing a production launch date.
