Korea and Japan test direct won-yen stablecoin settlement, skipping the dollar

South Korea's Kyobo Life Insurance and Japan's SBI Group have completed a cross-border pilot testing direct exchange between yen- and won-denominated stablecoins, built on the Canton Network, a blockchain designed for regulated financial institutions with built-in privacy controls. The test ran from July through mid-September and used test tokens only — no live stablecoins or institutional funds changed hands.

Why skipping the dollar matters

Cross-border payments between Korea and Japan typically route through an intermediate conversion into US dollars before reaching the destination currency — an extra step that adds cost and settlement time. The pilot's stablecoin-to-stablecoin swap mechanism cuts that step out entirely, testing real-time transaction tracking, verification and settlement directly between the two currencies.

Part of a wider push

Kyobo Life described the test as South Korea's first cross-border institutional stablecoin pilot run by an insurer, though that claim hasn't been independently confirmed by regulators. It sits alongside a separate initiative, Project Musubi, announced in August by SBI Digital Practice and Nodeinfra, which is building its own yen-won settlement infrastructure — a sign that multiple Japanese and Korean institutions are racing toward the same goal from different angles before either country's stablecoin framework is fully settled.