Visa senior executive visits Korea: Korea is the world’s best stablecoin testing ground; 17 million crypto investors + ChatGPT paying customers makes it the world’s second-largest by this measure

Visa Group Global Business President Oliver Jenkyn and Asia-Pacific President Stephen Karpin recently led a senior delegation to visit Seoul, holding closed-door meetings with CEOs of multiple major South Korean financial institutions, including Shinhan Financial Group. According to an exclusive report by The Seoul Economic News, Visa executives gave the South Korean market extremely high praise during the talks, and specifically pointed out that South Korea is the best market worldwide—outside the United States—to experiment with stablecoins.

Visa’s core judgment: 17 million crypto investors + AI applications—double champion

In the talks, Visa executives presented specific data to support this assessment: South Korea currently has about 17 million cryptocurrency investors, and in its global contribution rate to paid ChatGPT users, it ranks second worldwide at 5.4%, behind the United States (35.4%). South Korea is also the second-largest contribution market globally for Google Gemini revenue, with a share of 11.4%.

Visa’s logic is: in the Agentic AI (autonomous action AI) era, the entire process—from search and comparison to checkout—will be completed in a single interaction. At that time, stablecoins and blockchain will become the core infrastructure of this closed-loop system. South Korea also has extensive experience participating in cryptocurrencies and a high rate of AI adoption, making it an ideal testing ground for validating this future scenario.

The world is already experimenting, but South Korea’s legal framework is stuck

The irony is that, even as Visa actively affirms South Korea’s market potential, discussions on South Korea’s domestic digital-asset legal framework are almost at a standstill. Reports say overseas markets are already trying to tokenize South Korea-related ETF tokens for trading and shorten stock settlement days through stablecoins—but South Korea itself has not yet established even the basic legal framework needed to move these experiments forward.

The main contentious points currently blocking progress include: restrictions on holdings by cryptocurrency exchanges, and uncertainty over the determination of the legal issuing entity for original-asset-backed stablecoins (Won-backed stablecoins). These issues have stalled discussions of the “Digital Asset Basic Act,” preventing substantive progress.

Senior executives in South Korea’s financial industry said plainly in the report: “The tokenization of all assets and on-chain finance are trends that cannot be avoided; establishing the relevant system is an urgent task that cannot be delayed.”

This contrast between inside and outside is worth considering for Taiwan. Taiwan just passed the draft “Virtual Asset Services Act” on April 2, accelerating its catch-up efforts; South Korea’s case shows that even when market fundamentals are excellent, legal lag may still cause first-mover advantages to be squandered.

This article, Visa executives visit South Korea: South Korea is the world’s best stablecoin testing ground, 17 million crypto investors + ChatGPT’s global second-largest paid contribution, first appeared on Lian News ABMedia.