South Korea's Shinhan partners with Solana Foundation, Etherfuse, Orca for tokenized fund issuance

Shinhan Asset Management, one of South Korea's largest financial institutions, announced Friday that it has signed a four-party memorandum of understanding with the Solana Foundation, Etherfuse, and Orca.

The agreement covers a proof-of-concept for the issuance and distribution of a Korean won-denominated tokenized fund, according to the press release.

Shinhan said it modeled the initiative after BlackRock's tokenized fund BUIDL. The structure of the fund, currently under review, would involve overseas institutional investors purchasing a KRW ultra-short-term bond fund managed by Shinhan. The holdings would then be issued in tokenized form.

In the POC, the parties will examine know-your-customer and anti-money laundering frameworks consistent with both domestic and international rules, as well as security audits, blockchain operations, regulatory compliance, and onchain liquidity design.

"Our goal is to proactively secure capabilities that can be activated immediately upon the system's implementation, and to lead the market for managing KRW-based digital financial products," Lee Seok-won, CEO of Shinhan Asset Management, said in the release.

STO regulation

The partnership comes after South Korea's National Assembly passed amendments in January that established a legal framework for security token offerings (STO), which essentially paved the way for blockchain-based issuance and trading of tokenized securities in the country.

These amendments were promulgated in the following month and are scheduled to take effect in February 2027. The passage prompted several other Korean financial giants to prepare tokenized securities services. In April, South Korea's Ministry of Finance and Economy launched its own pilot project to test blockchain-based deposit tokens for expenses related to official duties.

According to an RWA.io report cited in the announcement, the market for tokenized real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, stood at approximately $36.27 billion, which is a 2,200% increase from 2020. 

Shinhan Asset Management, which is part of a much larger Shinhan Financial Group, reported roughly 133.6 trillion won ($96.6 billion) in assets under management as of August 2026.