South Korea to test tokenized government bonds with CBDC in 2027
South Korea plans to conduct a 2027 pilot linking tokenized government bonds to its institutional central bank digital currency (CBDC) infrastructure, moving sovereign debt tokenization from a proposal to an official government timeline. On Tuesday, the government unveiled its 2026 Economic Growth Strategy for the Second Half, which includes the plan. In addition to assigning a date for the pilot, the strategy said authorities would study how to make the Bank of Koreas (BOK) CBDC infrastructure interoperable with other blockchains, enabling a potential connection between external distributed ledgers and the banks permissioned system. The project would test whether South Koreas wholesale CBDC, designed for use by financial institutions, can support capital markets infrastructure, rather than serving only as a digital payment instrument. The document did not identify which bonds would be included, the size of the pilot, the participants, or which blockchain technologies would be used. It also did not provide specifics on whether the project would cover the initial issuance of government debt, secondary-market trading or only post-trade settlement. South Korea expands blockchain and tokenization agenda The idea was first outlined publicly on July 1 by BOK Governor Hyun Song Shin during a panel at the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking. Shin









