Bank of Korea forms tokenisation task force targeting government bond digitisation

The Bank of Korea (BOK) has established a dedicated asset tokenisation unit within its Digital Currency Office, with a stated focus on tokenising Korean government bonds. The unit is intended to operate within Korea’s Digital Currency System (DCS), the unified ledger that already hosts the wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) and tokenised deposits developed under Project Hangang.

The move consolidates an ambition the BOK has signalled for some time. At last month’s European Central Bank Forum, the BOK published a paper on Project Hangang that explicitly identified government bond tokenisation as an area for further exploration. The paper drew on work from Project Pine, a simulation exercise conducted by the Bank for International Settlements alongside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which demonstrated how placing tokenised assets including government securities on a common ledger could automate central bank operations such as margin calls, haircut calculations, and repo and collateralised lending execution.

Hosting tokenised government bonds alongside wholesale CBDC on a single ledger is the operational logic here: it is not about digitising bonds in isolation but about enabling the BOK to conduct a broader range of monetary and collateral operations continuously. The BIS simulations cited in the paper suggest that such an architecture could eventually support round-the-clock central bank activity and accelerate crisis response, framing this task force as infrastructure work with systemic implications rather than a narrow capital markets experiment.