Kaia Public Chain Aims at the Korean Stablecoin Market, Can It Open a "Stablecoin Summer"?

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become a hot topic in the crypto market due to the strong rise in its token price. Since its launch in August 2024, Kaia has been continuously making efforts in technology and ecosystem development. Recently, its actions in the stablecoin and payment fields have attracted widespread attention from industry investors. The CEO of the Kaia Foundation publicly stated, "The summer of Kaia's stablecoin is coming soon," hinting that its fiat-pegged token plan is about to enter the implementation stage.

With the new government in South Korea taking office, supporting the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won has become a new policy direction. The Kaia team has also seized this opportunity, announcing collaborations with several well-known technology companies to launch a Korean won stablecoin. As soon as this news was released, the stock prices of related companies surged, and the Kaia token rose from nearly $0.10 to a high of $0.17, reflecting the market's optimistic expectations for the prospects of domestic stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Riding the Policy Wind, Kaia Stablecoin Project Launched

In 2025, after the newly elected president of South Korea proposed a policy 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, and the market is full of expectations for the Korean won stablecoin.

The Korean won stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is being promoted by several well-known technology companies and is currently still in the planning stage, with no specific issuance timetable. With its digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment system, the relevant payment companies are also widely regarded as potential beneficiaries of the local stablecoin.

Currently, the South Korean government is brewing the "Digital Asset Basic Law" 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 and to relax the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges. According to this proposed framework, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be assumed 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 right to issue legal tender 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, stating that indiscriminate issuance of stablecoins pegged to the won could lead to "currency runs" and affect the competitiveness of the won.

In terms of policy inclination, 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 technology 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.

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

Therefore, amidst policy opportunities, the launch and advancement of Kaia's stablecoin program has generated considerable expectations. However, whether it can obtain regulatory approval and be successfully implemented still faces many uncertainties.

Social giants join forces, 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, officially launching in August 2024. It aims to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating Web3 services with mainstream social applications.

These two social media platforms have a very high market penetration rate in regions such as South Korea and Japan, with monthly active users in the hundreds of millions. Based on the distribution capability of over 250 million users from the two major social platforms, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance and user-friendly public blockchain, has been regarded as one of the "potential stocks" for promoting the popularization of crypto applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funding from several well-known investment institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before the merger into Kaia, these two blockchain projects were developed by different technology companies and had achieved certain results in their respective fields. After the merger, Kaia inherited the application scenarios from both sides in DeFi, gaming, NFTs, payments, and more, 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 create an efficient platform to support the development of large-scale decentralized applications.

As a Layer 1 public chain compatible with Ethereum, Kaia technically inherits and optimizes the original consensus framework. Its consensus algorithm is based on an optimized Istanbul BFT, which allows for 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 BFT consensus aimed at enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is final and there is no risk of traditional block rollback.

In terms of technical features, Kaia supports account abstraction and fee delegation, significantly simplifying the user experience; it also integrates identities and payment channels from mainstream social platforms, allowing ordinary users to access on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia also maintains equivalence compatibility with EVM chains like Ethereum and plans to support CosmWasm smart contracts; its industry-leading cross-chain bridge integration capabilities provide developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability.

Expand from the gaming sector to financial services

When Kaia was first launched, user and funding indicators were still in the preliminary stage. By mid-2025, Kaia is ranked around the top fifty globally in the DeFi TVL rankings, reflecting the scale of its ecosystem's initial stage. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia's official sources 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 launch, but the overall level is still far below that of mature mainstream public chains such as Ethereum, Solana, and BNB.

In terms of ecology, Kaia has merged the application ecosystems of the original two projects, 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 game services that have launched or are planned to launch on the Kaia network after the merger.

In addition, with the launch of the Kaia mainnet, the relevant parties have jointly introduced 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 multiple channels. 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 the NFT aspect, 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. Some game developers have started to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

In terms of distribution and user engagement for Mini DApp, the Dapp Portal is one of the main tools for the development of the Kaia ecosystem. The Dapp Portal is built on the Kaia chain and is accessible to users through the official accounts of social applications, allowing access to games, social interactions, trading, and other Mini DApps within 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 a single click, without the need to install a separate client.

In terms of official strategy, Kaia is gradually expanding from the gaming sector to financial services and general applications: at the beginning of 2025, it has launched US dollar stablecoin yield products on relevant platforms, with subsequent 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 project officially deployed its US dollar 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, jointly promoting the use cases of "message as an entry point, on-chain as payment" with industry partners.