In June I sat down with
@EtherfuseDave in Mexico City and asked him what actually happens when you put a government's debt onchain.
Yesterday Shinhan Asset Management signed a four-party MOU with the
@SolanaFndn,
@etherfuse and
@orca_so to build a won-denominated tokenized fund, modeled on BlackRock's BUIDL.
BUIDL is BlackRock's tokenized money market fund: real fund shares, issued onchain, now $2.6B. Korea wants that structure, denominated in won.
Here's the playbook I think we'll see play out:
1. The asset goes onchain first.
A short-term government bond fund gets tokenized. Korea's version is a PoC across the full lifecycle: issuance, KYC/AML, FX rules, liquidity. Their STO framework takes effect January 2027, and Shinhan is building to be live the day the law allows it.
2. Then things get built on top of it.
Dave broke this playbook down in the clip: "you can go from any bank account in that country to an onchain asset of equivalent value for free." Once that rail exists, the asset becomes collateral for everything else - stablecoins, lending, FX, payments.
3. Then the FX fee goes to zero and the asset still earns.
This is the part I think gets underrated. Today every won that touches onchain finance converts through a dollar, and the conversion is where the fee sits. Put the won onchain as government debt and the conversion stops being necessary. The fee goes away, and the asset keeps earning the yield on the underlying government debt the whole time it sits there.
Dave's own framing is simpler than mine: what they sell is FX and yield.
BREAKING: Korea's Shinhan Asset Management is building a KRW tokenized fund on Solana, modeled on BlackRock's BUIDL
The four-party MOU with Solana Foundation,
@etherfuse and
@orca_so targets a tokenized RWA market at $36B today, projected by BCG to reach as much as $30 trillion by 2030.