Stock and Bond Tokenization…It’s going to bloom overseas, but when will it be in Korea
After issuing tokenized bonds such as Germany and Slovenia
“Financial authorities tend to exclude tokenization of formal securities”
Financial investment industry “Shares and bonds should also be tokenized”
This article has been translated into English through AI.
[Edaily Marketin Reporter Kim Yeon-seo] Tokenized bonds are being issued one after another in the global market. As demand for bond investment increases, the means to easily invest in bonds are diversifying. While bonds are being tokenized and issued from overseas, the Korean market is still preoccupied with tokenizing unstructured securities such as real estate and art. The financial investment industry says that tokenization of standardized securities such as stocks and bonds is also necessary.
According to CoinDesk on Friday, Germany is set to issue tokenized bonds. German government-owned development bank Kredditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau announced that it will release blockchain-based tokenized digital bonds in cooperation with digital and cryptocurrency infrastructure partner Borestadt Digital (BSD).
Earlier in July, Slovenia issued 30 million euros (about 44.9 billion won) worth of digital sovereign bonds. It was the first case in which a member state of the European Union issued a digital bond, and it was promoted as part of the European Central Bank’s wholesale distributed ledger technology (DLT) payment test.
Global asset managers including Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Fidelity have also started making real assets (RWA) tokens. RWA refers to making real physical assets a digital token, enabling transactions and distribution on the blockchain. By converting various assets into tokens, it can increase the liquidity of assets and improve the transparency and efficiency of transactions.
On the other hand, it is pointed out that Korea is a “half-sized” as only the fragmented investment market is growing without receiving attention from the tokenization of formal securities. In fact, a large domestic securities company applied for bond-based token securities products to the financial authorities’ innovative financial services this year, but it was reported that they were rejected without obtaining approval. An industry official explained, “The authorities seem to think that the need for tokenization is not significant as stocks and bonds are already issued as electronic securities.”
Experts advise that Korea should follow this trend well as major markets around the world believe that tokenization of real-linked assets will become the mainstream of the financial market. An official familiar with the matter said, “The tokenization of assets is the direction of the global market, including the U.S., and when tokenization proceeds, it has the effect of reducing the operating costs of the financial market by simplifying processes such as issuance and transaction.” “The authorities tend to exclude tokenization of formal securities,” he said. “We also need to look at the fact that token securities can play a role of ‘funding’ in the mid to long term.”