Bank of Korea CBDC pilot expands to 500,000 users with programmable deposit tokens
The Bank of Korea (BoK) will move Project Hangang into Phase 2 in September, scaling its wholesale CBDC pilot to a user cap of 500,000 across nine banks. The CBDC pilot is built as a wholesale model: BoK issues wholesale CBDC to financial institutions, while commercial banks mint “deposit tokens” for consumers and merchants to pay with.
Phase 1 ran from April to June 2025 with seven banks and 12,000 merchants. BoK opened about 81,000 wallets and processed 114,880 transactions, but only 42% of wallet holders actually spent. For Phase 2, BoK aims to better mimic real banking by adding biometric fingerprint approvals, person-to-person transfers, automatic top-ups, recurring auto-payments, cash receipt generation, and interest payments.
A key new test in this CBDC pilot will use programmable tokens to disburse government subsidies, with built-in spending rules (allowed purposes, vendors, and time windows) to reduce fraud risk and audit burden. The pilot remains open-ended, while the article also notes the ongoing global debate over CBDC programmability and surveillance.
Neutral
This is a regulatory/rail-tech expansion (Bank of Korea’s wholesale CBDC pilot) rather than a new token listing or a direct catalyst for any specific crypto asset’s cashflows. The programmability and programmable token subsidy tests are meaningful for institutional use of on-chain rails, but they are unlikely to create immediate price pressure or demand shock for a traded coin. In the short term, traders may see it as incremental infrastructure progress; in the long term, it could support regulated on-chain payments and interoperability narratives, yet the article itself frames it as a medium-term adoption path rather than a near-term market driver.