New Developments in Kaia Public Chain: South Korean Stablecoin Project Attracts Market Attention

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become one of the focal points in the crypto market due to the strong rise in its token price. Since its official launch in August 2024, Kaia has been continuously working on technical performance and ecological development. Recently, its actions in stablecoin and payment scenarios have sparked heated discussions among industry investors. Senior officials from the foundation publicly stated, "The summer of Kaia's stablecoin is coming soon," indicating that its fiat-pegged token plan may soon enter the implementation stage.

After the new government in South Korea took office, supporting the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won has become the latest policy direction. The Kaia team has seized this opportunity to announce collaborations with multiple super applications to launch a Korean won stablecoin. Once this news was announced, the prices of related concept stocks surged significantly, and the Kaia token rose from nearly $0.10 to a high of $0.17, indicating strong market expectations for the prospects of local stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Launch of South Korea's stablecoin project

After the new South Korean government proposed a policy to support domestic stablecoins in 2025, Kaia quickly responded and announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin. Following the release of this news, the prices of relevant 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 jointly promoted by multiple parties and is currently still in the planning stage, with no specific issuance timetable yet. With its digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment system, the related payment platforms are also widely seen as potential beneficiaries of the local stablecoin.

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. This draft bill aims to permit non-bank institutions and payment service providers to issue stablecoins and relax the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges. Under this proposed framework, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be held by the Financial Services Commission. The bill also significantly lowers regulatory thresholds, 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 authority to issue legal currency belongs to the central bank, and private institutions face legal obstacles in issuing fiat-pegged tokens. The Bank of Korea has expressed concerns over these proposals, believing that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins denominated in Korean won may lead to "currency runs," thereby affecting the competitiveness of the Korean won.

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

Despite the enthusiastic market response, the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project remain uncertain. On one hand, issues related to currency sovereignty and compliance with anti-money laundering regulations are still difficult to overcome; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin itself still need to be validated. In addition, several potential competitors are also targeting this market. Recently, several large banks in South Korea publicly announced plans to jointly issue stablecoins.

Therefore, although Kaia's stablecoin plan has attracted market attention, whether it can obtain regulatory approval and be smoothly implemented still faces many uncertainties.

Social giants join forces, potential user base is enormous

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. Its goal is to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating Web3 services with existing social applications.

These two social platforms have large user bases in South Korea and Japan, respectively. One has nearly 95% penetration in South Korea, with monthly active users around 50 million; the other covers 70% of the population in Japan and dominates markets such as Thailand and Taiwan. Based on the distribution capability of over 250 million users across these two major social platforms, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance and user-friendly public blockchain, has been regarded as one of the "potential stocks" to promote the popularization of crypto applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from multiple investment institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before the merger into Kaia, one of the blockchain projects was officially launched in 2019 and was an important representative of the Korean blockchain network after its launch. Its user base achieved a growth of 1,100% by 2023, reaching 873,000; the other project was launched in 2022 and provided an NFT platform within social media, accumulating over 5.6 million users and completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger of the two chains, Kaia inherited the DeFi and gaming ecosystems from the former and the NFT and payment application scenarios from the latter to achieve a complementarity of technology and users. The official vision emphasizes that Kaia will "put Web3 at the fingertips of hundreds of millions of users in Asia" and build an efficient platform to support the development of large-scale decentralized applications.

As a Layer 1 public chain compatible with Ethereum, Kaia inherits and optimizes the consensus framework of its predecessor. Its consensus algorithm is based on the optimized Istanbul BFT, enabling rapid final confirmation of blocks and supporting 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 aimed at enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is final, eliminating the risk of traditional block rollback. Kaia network nodes 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 functionalities like account abstraction and fee delegation, greatly simplifying the user experience; at the same time, it integrates identities and payment channels from two major social platforms, allowing ordinary users to use on-chain services without additional registrations. Kaia also maintains equivalent compatibility with EVM chains like 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 essentially a hard fork of its predecessor mainnet, with all existing states automatically inherited by the Kaia chain after the merge.

Expanding from the gaming industry to financial services

When Kaia was first launched, user and funding indicators were still in the initial stage. By mid-2025, Kaia ranked around the top fifty globally in DeFi TVL, reflecting the scale of its ecosystem's early stage. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia's official reports 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 the 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 ecosystem of its predecessor, forming a comprehensive ecosystem covering various fields such as DeFi, NFTs, GameFi, and Real-World Assets (RWA). According to official statistics, there are already over 420 decentralized applications and game services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network after the merger.

In addition, with the launch of the Kaia mainnet, a builder support program called Kaia Wave has also been initiated. 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 multiple channels. According to official documents, the Kaia Wave program plans to offer a total value of 10 million USD 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 stablecoins, cross-chain bridges, and other infrastructure; in terms of NFTs, Kaia inherits the user base of its predecessor platform, and its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user groups and partner resources of two major social platforms. Some game developers have started to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

Inspired by a certain well-known instant messaging software and its related blockchain, the Dapp Portal is one of the main tools for the development of the Kaia ecosystem in terms of Mini DApp distribution and user engagement. The Dapp Portal is built on the Kaia chain and is accessible to users through the official accounts on social platforms, allowing them to access games, social features, trading, and other Mini DApps within the chat interface without the need to download or install any new applications. In January of this year, Kaia jointly 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 its official strategy, Kaia is gradually expanding from the gaming sector to financial services and general applications: by early 2025, it had released a US dollar stablecoin yield product on social platforms, and future plans include introducing 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 USD stablecoin on Kaia, providing stablecoin payment and cross-border transfer services to nearly 200 million users, marking further expansion of Kaia's layout in the international stablecoin ecosystem. Overall, Kaia is accelerating the construction of a platform-level ecosystem, promoting the use case of "message as entry, on-chain as payment" together with industry partners.