Kaia Public Chain: A New Hope for South Korea's Stablecoin Project?

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become one of the highlights of the crypto market due to its strong token performance. Since its establishment in August 2024, Kaia has been committed to enhancing its technical performance and expanding its ecosystem. Recently, its actions in the stablecoin and payment sectors have sparked heated discussions among industry investors. The foundation's CEO even publicly declared, "Kaia's stablecoin summer is coming soon," implying that its fiat-pegged token plan is about to enter the implementation phase.

With the new government taking office, the support for the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won has become the latest policy direction in South Korea. The Kaia team seized this opportunity and announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin in collaboration with several super apps. The release of this news immediately triggered market reactions, with relevant stock prices soaring, and the Kaia token price rising from about $0.10 to a peak of $0.17, reflecting the market's optimistic expectations for the prospects of domestic stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Borrowing the Wind of Policy, Kaia Stablecoin Project Launches

In 2025, after the new South Korean government proposed policies to support the local currency stablecoin, Kaia quickly responded and announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin. Following the announcement, the prices of related concept stocks surged significantly, and the market showed strong interest in 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 stakeholders are also widely seen as potential beneficiaries of the local stablecoin.

Currently, the 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 bill aims to relax the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges, allowing non-bank institutions and payment service providers to issue stablecoins. Under this framework, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be 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 right to issue legal currency belongs to 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 denominated in Korean won could lead to "currency runs," thereby affecting the competitiveness of the Korean won.

In terms of policy inclination, the head of the Digital Assets Committee of the ruling party in South Korea stated that they will support private issuance and plan 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.

Despite the enthusiastic market response, the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project remain uncertain. On one hand, issues of monetary sovereignty and anti-money laundering compliance still need to be addressed; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin itself also 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 sparked many speculations amid policy opportunities, whether it can obtain regulatory approval and be successfully implemented still faces many uncertainties.

Social Giants Join Forces, With 250 Million Potential Users

The Kaia public chain is a large blockchain network primarily aimed at the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known chains, and officially launched in August 2024. Its goal is to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating Web3 services with two major social platforms.

These two social platforms are the most popular instant messaging applications in South Korea and Japan, with extremely high penetration rates in their respective countries. Based on the distribution capability of over 250 million users from the two major social platforms, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance and easy-to-use public chain, has always 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 two companies merged to form Kaia, they both achieved significant accomplishments in their respective fields. One of them officially launched in 2019 and was an important representative of the Korean blockchain network, with its user base experiencing an astonishing growth of 1,100% in 2023, reaching 873,000; the other one went live in 2022 and offered NFT services on its platform, accumulating over 5.6 million users and completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger, Kaia inherited the ecosystems and application scenarios of both to achieve complementary 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 an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 public chain, Kaia technically inherits and optimizes the existing consensus framework. Its consensus algorithm is based on an optimized Istanbul BFT, enabling fast final confirmation of blocks and supporting multi-node participation. The official documentation indicates that the Kaia network can handle up to 4000 transactions per second, with a block generation time of just 1 second and instant transaction finality. Unlike conventional PoW/PoS, Kaia adopts a BFT consensus oriented towards enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is conclusively determined, eliminating the traditional risk of block rollback. The 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 verification. 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, greatly simplifying the user experience; it also integrates the identities and payment channels of two major social platforms, allowing ordinary users to use on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia remains equivalently compatible with EVM chains such as Ethereum and plans to support CosmWasm smart contracts; its industry-leading cross-chain bridge integration capabilities provide developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability. It is worth mentioning that the Kaia mainnet is actually a hard fork of the original mainnet, with all states automatically inherited to the Kaia chain after the merger.

Expanding from the gaming sector to financial services

When Kaia was just launched, user and capital metrics were still in the preliminary stage. By mid-2025, Kaia ranked approximately in the top fifty globally in the DeFi TVL rankings, reflecting the scale of its early-stage ecosystem. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia's official data has revealed that over 40 million users have accessed the Mini DApp portal. The number of wallets and transaction volumes grew rapidly in the early stages of 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 original application ecosystem, forming a comprehensive ecosystem covering multiple fields such as DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and Real World Assets (RWA). According to official statistics, there are already over 420 decentralized applications and gaming services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network after the merger.

In addition, alongside the launch of the Kaia mainnet, relevant parties have jointly introduced a builder support program called Kaia Wave. This program aims to provide multi-faceted support to 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 will offer 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 stablecoins, cross-chain bridges, and other infrastructures; in terms of NFTs, Kaia inherits the existing user base of the original platform, and its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user groups and partner resources of two major social platforms, with some game manufacturers beginning to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

Inspired by Telegram and the Ton 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 reach. 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 interactions, trading, and other Mini DApps directly in the chat interface without the need to download or install any new applications. In January of this year, relevant parties jointly launched the first batch of 32 Mini DApps, enabling users to create wallets, play games, claim rewards, and trade NFTs with just one click, 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, a USD stablecoin yield product has been launched on one end, with subsequent plans including the introduction of lending, perpetual contracts, payments, and asset tokenization DeFi protocols, as well as achieving seamless exchange functionality between the Korean won and stablecoin.

In May of this year, Tether officially deployed its USD stablecoin USDT 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 usage scenario of "messages as entry points, on-chain as payments" in collaboration with industry partners.