Bank of Korea's Project Hangang paper omits privacy, raising central bank design questions

The Bank of Korea released a paper on Project Hangang, its unified ledger initiative, timed to coincide with a presentation at the ECB Forum on 1 July 2026. The project combines tokenised deposits from commercial banks with a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) for interbank settlement, positioning it as a full-stack digital money infrastructure rather than a narrow payments experiment.

Seven banks participated in the first phase of the project earlier in 2026, with the cohort expanding to nine banks for the second phase. The architecture, blending private bank liabilities with central bank settlement assets on a shared ledger, mirrors the unified ledger concept advanced by the Bank for International Settlements, and its progress to a multi-bank second phase suggests the design is moving beyond proof-of-concept territory.

The commentary accompanying the paper centres on a notable absence: privacy. For a system in which commercial bank transaction data and wholesale settlement flows would coexist on a common infrastructure, the silence on how participant and user data is protected is a structural gap rather than a detail to be resolved later. The framing, directed at central banks broadly, suggests the critique is intended as a design benchmark for the wider field, not merely a reading of Korea’s project in isolation.

For operators tracking wholesale CBDC and tokenised deposit infrastructure, Project Hangang represents one of the more advanced live multi-bank implementations in Asia. The privacy question it leaves open is the same one any operator building on or connecting to such a ledger will eventually need to answer, whether through confidential computing, zero-knowledge proofs, or access-tiering, before institutional participants will commit at scale.