Kaia Public Chain: The New Star of Korean Stablecoin Projects

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become one of the focal points in the cryptocurrency market due to the strong performance of its token price. Since its launch in August 2024, Kaia has been continuously focusing on technical performance and ecological construction. Recently, its actions in the stablecoin and payment fields have sparked heated discussions among industry investors. Senior officials of the foundation publicly stated, "Kaia's stablecoin summer is coming soon," indicating that its fiat-pegged token plan has entered the implementation stage.

With the new government in South Korea taking office, the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won has become the latest policy direction. The Kaia team announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin in collaboration with several super apps. As soon as this news was released, the prices of related concept stocks surged, and the Kaia token also rose, increasing from nearly $0.10 to a high of $0.17, reflecting the market's optimistic expectations for the prospects of domestic stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Seizing the Policy Wind, Kaia stablecoin Project Launch

After the new South Korean government proposed a policy to support the local currency stablecoin in 2025, Kaia quickly responded and announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin. Following the release of this news, the prices of related concept stocks surged, and the market is filled with anticipation for the Korean won stablecoin.

The South Korean won stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is being jointly promoted by multiple parties and is currently still in the planning stage, with no specific issuance timetable yet. With its digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment system, the relevant partners are also widely regarded as potential beneficiaries of the local stablecoin.

The current South Korean government is formulating the "Basic Law on Digital Assets" and actively discussing a regulatory framework that allows private institutions to issue stablecoins. The draft legislation aims to permit non-bank institutions and payment service providers to issue stablecoins and relax the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges. Under this proposed framework, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be under the Financial Services Commission. The bill also significantly lowers the regulatory threshold, reducing the capital requirement for issuers from the previously proposed 5 billion won to 500 million won.

However, according to the South Korean constitution, the authority to issue legal currency belongs to the central bank, and private institutions face legal obstacles in issuing fiat-backed tokens. The Bank of Korea has expressed concerns about these proposals, believing that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins denominated in Korean won could lead to "currency runs," thereby affecting the competitiveness of the Korean won.

In terms of policy orientation, the head of the Digital Asset Committee of the ruling party in South Korea stated that it will support private issuance and plans to clarify the legalization of stablecoin in the "Fundamental Law." The group on which Kaia relies itself has large-scale payment and financial infrastructure, which provides a convenient channel for the practical use of stablecoins in the future.

Despite the enthusiastic market response, there remains uncertainty about the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project. On one hand, issues related to monetary sovereignty and anti-money laundering compliance still need to be overcome; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin itself also need to be verified. Additionally, there are several potential competitors targeting this market. During the Bank of Korea's experiments with tokenized deposits and wholesale central bank digital currencies, several major banks publicly announced plans for joint issuance of stablecoins.

Therefore, although Kaia's stablecoin project was launched amid policy opportunities, there are still many uncertainties regarding whether it can obtain regulatory approval and be successfully implemented.

Social giants join forces, with 250 million potential users

Kaia public chain is a large blockchain network mainly aimed at the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known chains, and it will officially launch in August 2024. Its goal is to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating Web3 services with mainstream social applications.

These two major social media platforms dominate their respective markets, with a cumulative distribution capability of over 250 million users. Kaia, positioned as a high-performance and user-friendly public blockchain, has always been regarded as one of the "potential stocks" that promote the popularization of crypto applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from several investment institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before the merger into Kaia, one of the chains was developed by a blockchain subsidiary of a well-known tech company, officially launched in 2019, and was an important representative of the Korean blockchain network. Its user base achieved an astonishing growth of 1,100% by 2023, reaching 873,000; the other chain was launched in 2022 and provides an NFT platform within its ecosystem, with a cumulative user count exceeding 5.6 million and completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger, Kaia inherited the application scenarios of DeFi, gaming, NFT, and payment from the two chains to achieve technological and user complementarity. The official vision emphasizes that Kaia will "put Web3 at the fingertips of hundreds of millions of users in Asia" and build an efficient platform to support the development of large-scale decentralized applications.

As an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 public chain, Kaia technically inherits and optimizes the IBFT consensus framework. Its consensus algorithm is based on an optimized Istanbul BFT, which enables rapid final confirmation of blocks and supports multi-node participation. The official documentation states that the Kaia network can handle up to 4000 transactions per second, with a block generation time of only 1 second and instant transaction finality. Unlike conventional PoW/PoS, Kaia adopts a BFT consensus aimed at enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is definitively confirmed, eliminating the traditional risk of block rollback. The Kaia network nodes are divided into consensus nodes, proxy nodes, and endpoint nodes, with consensus nodes managed by core operators responsible for block generation and verification. The network design ensures that more than 50 nodes can participate in consensus, balancing throughput and decentralization.

In terms of technical features, Kaia supports account abstraction and fee delegation, significantly simplifying the user experience; it also integrates identities and payment channels from mainstream social platforms, allowing ordinary users to use on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia also maintains compatibility with EVM chains such as Ethereum and plans to support CosmWasm smart contracts; its industry-leading cross-chain bridge integration capabilities provide developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability. It is worth mentioning that the Kaia mainnet is essentially a hard fork of the original mainnet, with all states automatically inherited to the Kaia chain after the merger.

Expanding from the gaming sector to financial services

When Kaia was first launched, user and capital indicators were still in the preliminary stage. By mid-2025, Kaia ranked approximately in the top fifty globally in DeFi TVL, reflecting the scale of its ecosystem's initial stage. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia's official disclosure indicated that over 40 million users have accessed the Mini DApp portal. The number of wallets and transaction volume grew rapidly in the early stages of the launch, but the overall level is still far below that of mature mainstream public chains like Ethereum, Solana, and BNB.

Ecologically, Kaia has merged the application ecosystems of two chains, forming a comprehensive ecosystem that covers multiple fields such as DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and Real World Assets (RWA). According to official statistics, after the merger, there are already over 420 decentralized applications and game services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network.

In addition, alongside the launch of the Kaia mainnet, a builder support program called Kaia Wave has also been introduced. This program aims to provide multifaceted support for promising Dapps, enabling them to reach consumer users in both Web2 and Web3, and gain additional advantages from multiple channels. According to official documents, the Kaia Wave program will offer a total value of 10 million USD in KAIA tokens, specifically for user acquisition and rewards.

In the DeFi space, Kaia has launched multiple decentralized exchanges as well as staking and lending projects. The platform also supports infrastructure such as stablecoins and cross-chain bridges. In terms of NFTs, Kaia inherits the user base of the original platform, and its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user groups and partner resources of two major social platforms. Some game developers have started to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

In terms of distribution and user engagement for Mini DApps, the Dapp Portal is one of the main tools for the development of the Kaia ecosystem. The Dapp Portal is built on the Kaia chain and is accessible to users through the official accounts of social applications, allowing access to games, social interactions, trading, and other Mini DApps within the chat interface without the need to download any new applications. In January of this year, the first batch of 32 Mini DApps was jointly launched, enabling users to create wallets, play games, claim rewards, and trade NFTs with just one click, without needing to install a separate client.

In its official strategy, Kaia is gradually expanding from the gaming sector to financial services and general applications: by early 2025, it had launched a US dollar stablecoin yield product on social platforms, with subsequent plans including the introduction of lending, perpetual contracts, payment, and asset tokenization DeFi protocols, as well as achieving seamless exchange functionality between the Korean won and stablecoins.

In May of this year, a well-known stablecoin project officially deployed its US dollar stablecoin on Kaia, providing stablecoin payment and cross-border remittance services to nearly 200 million users, marking Kaia's further expansion in the international stablecoin ecosystem. Overall, Kaia is accelerating the construction of a platform-level ecosystem and promoting the use case of "message as the entry point, on-chain as payment" in collaboration with industry partners.