South Korea's central bank targets September for second CBDC pilot phase
In brief
- Project Hangang CBDC pilot expands to nine banks in September 2025
- Kyongnam Bank and iM Bank join as new regional participants in phase two
- New features: peer-to-peer transfers, biometric authentication, government subsidy disbursements
- First phase engaged 81,000 participants and processed 114,880 transactions
Expansion and new participants
The next stage expands participation to nine banks from seven, according to reporting on the project. Regional lenders Kyongnam Bank and iM Bank will join the existing group of participants in the second phase. This marks a deliberate widening of the pilot's scope beyond the initial cohort.
Technical features and use cases
The second phase introduces new payment features and tests government subsidy disbursements through tokenized bank deposits. Specifically, the pilot will add peer-to-peer transfers, biometric authentication, and automated deposit token transfers. Participating banks will also be allowed to bring merchants with which they have partnership agreements into the program, expanding the ecosystem of real-world use cases.
How Project Hangang works
Project Hangang uses a blockchain-based wholesale CBDC issued by the central bank as the settlement asset for deposit tokens issued by commercial banks. This architecture separates the central bank's role (issuing the base CBDC) from commercial banks' role (issuing deposit tokens on top of it). The structure mirrors existing interbank settlement systems but introduces blockchain infrastructure and tokenization.
First phase results
The first phase ran from April to June 2025 and attracted about 81,000 participants who completed 114,880 transactions using deposit tokens. That initial stage focused on payment infrastructure, validating the core technical and operational foundations before moving to more complex features like government subsidy distribution.
