South Korea Puts Numbers on Its Tokenised Securities Regime Ahead of a 2027 Start
The country's financial regulator has proposed detailed rules covering capital requirements for issuers, licensing for over-the-counter trading and limits on how much retail investors can put in.
South Korea's financial regulator has published detailed draft rules for tokenised securities, filling in the mechanics of a regime due to take effect in 2027, Cointelegraph reported. The proposals cover capital requirements for firms that issue the instruments, a licensing route for over-the-counter trading, and caps on how much retail investors may commit.
A tokenised security is a claim on a real financial asset, a bond, a fund unit or a share, recorded on a distributed ledger rather than only in a central securities depository's books. The legal question every jurisdiction has to settle is whether the token is the security or merely a representation of one held elsewhere, and the practical question is who may issue, trade and hold it. Korea's draft addresses the second set.
Capital, licences and limits
Three elements stand out in the proposal as reported. Issuers face capital requirements, which is the standard tool for making sure a firm that creates a financial instrument can stand behind its obligations. Over-the-counter trading, meaning transactions arranged bilaterally rather than on an exchange order book, requires a licence. And retail participation carries investment limits, a cap on individual exposure of the kind Korea has used elsewhere in its securities rules.
Retail caps are the feature that distinguishes this from most of the frameworks built in Europe and the United States so far. Those have tended to define the instrument and the intermediary and leave position sizing to suitability rules. A hard limit changes the economics of a venue, because it sets a ceiling on how much of the order flow can come from individuals.
Why 2027 matters
A 2027 start date puts Korea in the same window as several other jurisdictions building tokenised market infrastructure. The gap between a published rule and a live market is where most of the work happens: custody arrangements, transfer agent equivalents, settlement finality and the question of what happens when a token and the official register disagree. A regulator that publishes capital and licensing detail more than a year ahead is giving firms time to build to it.
What this adds to the picture
Korea has an unusually large retail equity trading base relative to the size of its market, which is part of why individual investment limits appear in the draft at all. If tokenised securities are meant to widen access to assets that were previously hard to divide, such as property or private funds, then the cap on retail participation is the binding constraint on how wide that access gets.
The proposal is a draft. Consultation and revision normally follow, and the detail that matters most, including the exact capital thresholds and the size of the retail limits, is the part most likely to move between a first publication and a final rule.
What is already settled is the direction. Korea is legislating for tokenised securities as a regulated category with named licences rather than treating them as an experiment inside a sandbox, and the 2027 date gives that a schedule.
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