Kaia Public Chain Aims to Launch "Stablecoin Summer", Yet Faces Challenges Ahead

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become one of the hot topics in the crypto market due to its strong token performance. Since its launch in August 2024, Kaia has been making continuous efforts in technical performance and ecological construction. Recently, its actions in the stablecoin and payment sectors have sparked heated discussions among industry investors. Senior foundation officials stated, "Kaia's stablecoin summer is coming soon," hinting that its fiat-backed token plan is about to enter the implementation stage.

After the new government in South Korea took office, the support for the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won has become a new policy direction. The Kaia team announced that it will cooperate with several super apps to launch a Korean won stablecoin. This news has significantly boosted the prices of related concept stocks, and the price of the Kaia token has risen from about $0.10 to a peak of $0.17, reflecting the market's optimistic expectations for the prospects of domestic stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Stablecoin Projects under Policy Opportunities

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. This news triggered a strong market reaction, with related concept stocks experiencing significant price increases, indicating that the market is full of expectations for the Korean won stablecoin.

The Kaia Korean Won stablecoin project is jointly promoted by several well-known technology companies 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 payment platforms are widely seen 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 bill aims to relax the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges and reduce the capital requirements for stablecoin issuers.

However, according to the South Korean Constitution, the right 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" and affect the competitiveness of the won.

In terms of policy orientation, the head of the Digital Asset Committee of the ruling party in South Korea stated that they would support private issuance and plan to clarify the legalization of stablecoins in the "Basic Law." The technology group that Kaia relies on has its own 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, the future of the Kaia stablecoin project remains uncertain. On one hand, issues related to currency sovereignty and compliance with anti-money laundering regulations are still difficult to overcome; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin itself also need to be validated. Additionally, there are several potential competitors that are also eyeing this market opportunity. Recently, several major banks in South Korea publicly announced plans to jointly issue stablecoins.

Therefore, although Kaia's stablecoin plan has gained attention in policy opportunities, it still faces many challenges in obtaining regulatory approval and being successfully implemented.

Social giants join forces, potential user base is vast

Kaia public chain is a large blockchain network mainly targeting the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known blockchain projects with social platform backgrounds, officially launched 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 social platforms are the most popular instant messaging applications in South Korea and Japan, with extremely high penetration rates in their respective markets. Based on the distribution capability of over 250 million users from the two major social platforms, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance, user-friendly public blockchain, has always been regarded as one of the "potential stocks" to promote the popularization of crypto applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from several well-known investment institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before the two merged into Kaia, each had its own blockchain project. One project was officially launched in 2019 and was an important representative of the Korean blockchain network, with its user base experiencing an astonishing growth of 1,100% in 2023, reaching 873,000; the other project was launched in 2022 and provided an NFT platform on its social platform, accumulating over 5.6 million users and completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger of the two chains, Kaia inherited the DeFi, gaming, NFT, payment, and other application scenarios from both sides 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 create an efficient platform to support the development of large-scale decentralized applications.

As a Layer 1 public chain compatible with Ethereum, Kaia technically inherits and optimizes the consensus framework of previous projects. Its consensus algorithm is based on an optimized Istanbul BFT, enabling fast final confirmation of blocks and supporting 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 just 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.

In terms of technical features, Kaia supports account abstraction and fee delegation, greatly simplifying the user experience; it also integrates identity and payment channels from mainstream social platforms, allowing ordinary users to access on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia maintains equivalence compatibility with EVM chains such as Ethereum and plans to support CosmWasm smart contracts; its integration capabilities with industry-leading cross-chain bridges provide developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability.

Expanding from the gaming sector to financial services

When Kaia was just launched, user and capital indicators were still in the preliminary stage. By mid-2025, Kaia ranked approximately among the top fifty globally in DeFi TVL, reflecting the scale of its ecosystem at the early stage. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia's official sources revealed that over 40 million users have visited the Mini DApp portal. The number of wallets and transaction volume grew rapidly at the initial 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 previous projects, forming a comprehensive ecosystem that covers multiple fields such as DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and Real World Assets (RWA). According to official statistics, there are already more than 420 decentralized applications and game services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network after the merger.

In addition, alongside the launch of the Kaia mainnet, the relevant parties jointly introduced a builder support program called Kaia Wave. This program aims to provide multi-faceted 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 offers 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 and staking, lending projects, and the platform also supports infrastructure such as stablecoins and cross-chain bridges; in terms of NFTs, Kaia inherits the user base of previous projects, and its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user groups and partner resources of two major social platforms, with some game developers starting to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

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

In its official strategy, Kaia is gradually expanding from the gaming sector to financial services and general applications: By early 2025, it has launched a US dollar stablecoin yield product on a social platform, 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 issuer officially deployed its US dollar stablecoin on Kaia, providing stablecoin payment and cross-border transfer services to nearly 200 million users, marking further expansion of Kaia's layout in the international stablecoin ecosystem. Overall, Kaia is accelerating the construction of a platform-level ecosystem, jointly promoting use cases of "message as an entry point, on-chain as payment" with industry partners.