The Kaia public chain is developing rapidly, and the plan for the Korean won stablecoin has sparked heated discussions.

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become the focus of the crypto market due to the strong rise in its token price. Since its establishment in August 2024, Kaia has been continuously working on technical performance and ecological construction. Recently, its actions in stablecoin and payment scenarios have sparked enthusiastic discussions among industry investors. Senior officials from the foundation stated, "Kaia's stablecoin summer is coming soon," hinting that its fiat-pegged token plan is about to enter the implementation stage.

With the new government coming to power, the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won has become the latest policy trend in South Korea. The Kaia team seizes this opportunity to announce a collaboration with several super apps to launch a Korean won stablecoin. Following this announcement, the stock prices of related companies surged, and the price of Kaia tokens rose from nearly $0.10 to a peak of $0.17, reflecting the market's high expectations for the prospects of locally issued stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Kaia Stablecoin Project under Favorable Policies

After the new government of South Korea proposed a policy to support local currency stablecoins in 2025, Kaia quickly responded and announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin. Following the release of this news, the prices of related concept stocks surged, and the market is full of expectations for the Korean won stablecoin.

The Korean won stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is being promoted by multiple parties and is currently still in the planning stage, with no specific issuance timetable yet. Some partners are also widely regarded as potential beneficiaries of the local stablecoin, thanks to their digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment system.

The current South Korean government is formulating the "Basic Law on Digital Assets" and actively discussing a regulatory framework that allows private institutions to issue stablecoins. The draft bill aims to permit non-bank institutions and payment service providers to issue stablecoins, while easing the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges. Under this proposed framework, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be undertaken by the Financial Services Commission. The bill also significantly lowers the regulatory threshold, reducing the capital requirement for issuers from the previously proposed 5 billion KRW to 500 million KRW.

However, according to the South Korean Constitution, the issuance of legal tender is the prerogative of the central bank, and private institutions face legal obstacles in issuing fiat-backed tokens. The Bank of Korea has expressed concerns about these proposals, believing that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins pegged to the Korean won could lead to "currency runs," thereby affecting the competitiveness of the won.

In terms of policy orientation, the head of the Digital Asset Committee of the ruling party in South Korea stated that it will support private issuance and plans to clarify the legalization of stablecoins in the "Basic Law". The group that Kaia relies on itself possesses large-scale payment and financial infrastructure, which provides a convenient channel for the practical use of stablecoins in the future.

However, under the enthusiastic feedback from the market, the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project are not clear. On one hand, compliance issues including currency sovereignty and anti-money laundering are still difficult to overcome; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin itself also need to be validated, and there are multiple potential competitors that have long set their sights on this field. During the recent experiments by the Bank of Korea with tokenized deposits and wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), several large banks in South Korea publicly announced plans to jointly issue stablecoins.

Therefore, amidst the policy opportunities, the launch and advancement of Kaia's stablecoin program brings a lot of imagination, but whether it can obtain regulatory approval and be smoothly implemented still faces numerous uncertainties.

Kaia Public Chain: A Social Giant Alliance with 250 Million Potential Users

Kaia Public Chain is a large blockchain network primarily aimed at the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known blockchain projects with backgrounds in social platforms, officially launched in August 2024. It aims to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating Web3 services with the two major social applications.

These two social platforms are the most popular instant messaging applications in South Korea and Japan, with extremely high penetration rates and monthly active users in their respective countries. Based on the distribution capabilities of over 250 million users from the two major social platforms, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance, easy-to-use public blockchain, has long been regarded as one of the "potential stocks" to promote the popularization of cryptocurrency applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from multiple investment and financing institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before the two merged into Kaia, one of the chains was developed by the blockchain subsidiary of a South Korean tech giant and officially launched in 2019. After its launch, it became an important representative of the South Korean blockchain network, with its user base achieving an astonishing growth of 1,100% in 2023, reaching 873,000 users. The other chain was launched in 2022 and provided an NFT platform within its parent company, accumulating over 5.6 million users and completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger of the two chains, Kaia inherited the DeFi, gaming, and other ecosystems from the former, along with the NFT, payment, and other application scenarios from the latter, to achieve complementarity in technology and users. The official vision emphasizes that Kaia will "bring Web3 to the fingertips of hundreds of millions of users in Asia" and create an efficient platform to support the development of large-scale decentralized applications.

As an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 public chain, Kaia technically inherits and optimizes the consensus framework of its predecessor. Its consensus algorithm is based on the optimized Istanbul BFT, which enables rapid final confirmation of blocks and supports multi-node participation. The official documentation states that the Kaia network can handle up to 4000 transactions per second, with a block generation time of only 1 second and instant transaction finality. Unlike conventional PoW/PoS, Kaia adopts a BFT consensus tailored for enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is final and there is no risk of block rollback in the traditional sense. The nodes in the Kaia network are divided into consensus nodes, proxy nodes, and endpoint nodes, with consensus nodes managed by core operators responsible for block generation and validation. The network design ensures that over 50 nodes can participate in consensus, balancing throughput and decentralization.

In terms of technical features, Kaia supports account abstraction and fee delegation functions, significantly simplifying the user experience; at the same time, it integrates identity and payment channels from two major social platforms, allowing ordinary users to access on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia also maintains equivalent compatibility with EVM chains such as Ethereum and plans to support CosmWasm smart contracts; its industry-leading cross-chain bridge integration capability provides developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability. It is worth mentioning that the Kaia mainnet is actually a hard fork of an original chain, and after merging, all states of that chain are automatically inherited by the Kaia chain.

Expand from the gaming sector to financial services

When Kaia was just launched, user and funding indicators were still at a preliminary stage. By mid-2025, Kaia is estimated to rank around the top fifty globally in DeFi TVL, reflecting the scale of its ecosystem's initial stage. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia officials have disclosed that over 40 million users have accessed the Mini DApp portal. The number of wallets and transaction volume grew rapidly in the early stages of its launch, but the overall level is still far below that of mature mainstream public chains like Ethereum, Solana, and BNB.

Ecologically, Kaia has merged the application ecosystems of two chains, forming a comprehensive ecosystem covering multiple fields such as DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and Real-World Assets (RWA). According to official statistics, after the merger, there are already over 420 decentralized applications and game services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network.

In addition, at the same time as the launch of the Kaia mainnet, a partner and the Kaia Foundation jointly launched a builder support program called Kaia Wave. This program aims to provide multi-faceted support for promising Dapps, enabling them to reach consumer users in both Web2 and Web3, and gain additional advantages from sources such as social platforms, Web3 marketing alliances, creators, and Kaia's vertical services. According to official documents, the Kaia Wave program will provide a total value of $10 million in KAIA tokens, specifically for user acquisition and rewards.

In the DeFi field, Kaia has launched multiple decentralized exchanges and staking, lending projects, and the platform also supports infrastructure such as stablecoins and cross-chain bridges; in terms of NFTs, Kaia inherits the user base of its predecessor's NFT platform, and its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user base and partner resources of two major social platforms, with some game developers starting to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

Inspired by the collaboration models of other well-known social platforms and blockchain, Dapp Portal is one of the main focuses of the Kaia ecosystem development in terms of Mini DApp distribution and user reach. The Dapp Portal is built on the Kaia chain and is accessible to users through the official accounts of social platforms, allowing access to games, social interactions, trading, and other Mini DApps directly within the chat interface without the need to download or install any new applications. In January of this year, Kaia, in collaboration with partners, launched the first batch of 32 Mini DApps, enabling users to create wallets, play games, claim rewards, trade NFTs, and more, all without needing to install a separate client.

In terms of official strategy, Kaia is gradually expanding from the gaming sector to financial services and general applications: by early 2025, it has launched a USD stablecoin yield product on its partner platform, with future plans including the introduction of lending, perpetual contracts, payment, and asset tokenization DeFi protocols, as well as achieving seamless exchange functionality between the Korean won and stablecoins.

In May of this year, a well-known stablecoin issuer officially deployed its US dollar stablecoin on Kaia, providing stablecoin payment and cross-border transfer services to its 196 million users on the cooperative social platform, marking further expansion of Kaia's layout in the international stablecoin ecosystem. Overall, Kaia is accelerating the construction of a platform-level ecosystem and jointly promoting the usage scenario of "message as entry, on-chain as payment" with industry partners.