Kyobo Life Insurance and Japan’s SBI Group have completed a cross-border pilot that tested direct exchange between yen- and won-denominated stablecoin representations without converting funds through the U.S. dollar.
Summary
- Kyobo Life and SBI tested direct yen-won stablecoin exchange without routing transactions through U.S. dollars.
- The Canton Network test environment handled institutional transfer, foreign exchange, settlement, tracking, and reconciliation processes.
- Test tokens represented yen and won stablecoins, while no institutional funds changed hands during testing.
- Kyobo Life called the project South Korea’s first cross-border institutional stablecoin test by an insurer.
- Both companies plan further work linking digital asset exchange, settlement, and asset management between markets.
Yonhap, citing Kyobo Life on Sept. 17, reported that the project had run since July with SBI Digital Practice and used the Canton Network test environment to model institutional fund transfer, foreign exchange and settlement between Japan and South Korea. No actual institutional money or live stablecoins moved during the demonstration.
Kyobo Life tested yen-won exchange without a dollar leg
The pilot modeled a transaction route in which a yen-denominated stablecoin could be exchanged directly for a won-denominated stablecoin. Kyobo Life said the structure avoided an intermediate conversion from yen into U.S. dollars and then from dollars into won.
The companies used test tokens inside Canton Network instead of production stablecoins. Reporting from Financial News and TokenPost confirmed that the exercise did not transfer real stablecoins or institutional funds, limiting the result to a technical and operational demonstration.
Kyobo Life said the test covered the complete sequence of moving institutional funds across borders, including exchange and settlement. The insurer described it as the first such end-to-end stablecoin test conducted by a South Korean insurance company. That characterization comes from Kyobo Life and has not been presented as a finding by a regulator.
During the exercise, the companies examined how transaction information could be checked and tracked in real time. They tested procedures for handling digital assets arriving from overseas and processing related settlement activity inside South Korea.
Kyobo Life said the test showed the “technical feasibility and efficiency” of stablecoin-based institutional transfers. The company said fewer currency-conversion steps could reduce processing time and transaction costs, though it did not publish comparative figures quantifying those savings.
Canton Network provided the institutional test environment
The pilot ran on Canton Network, a blockchain infrastructure designed for regulated financial institutions that need configurable privacy and permission controls when exchanging assets and settlement information.
SBI Digital Practice has made Canton a central part of its institutional blockchain strategy. In July, SBI Holdings renamed SBI Security Solutions as SBI Digital Practice and said the subsidiary would focus on building financial infrastructure and applications using Canton Network.
SBI said the restructured unit would work on institutional on-chain finance while connecting financial organizations to Canton infrastructure. The group’s work extends across settlement, tokenized securities and stablecoin-related projects.
Canton has already appeared in other financial-sector stablecoin tests. Visa and Brale tested stablecoin settlement on the network while examining whether institutions could complete on-chain settlement without exposing sensitive transaction information publicly.
South Korean financial firms have been exploring the same infrastructure. Shinhan Asset Management and Shinhan Investment & Securities had entered cooperation arrangements involving Canton to study tokenized Korean assets and access to overseas markets.
SBI is building a separate Japan-Korea stablecoin network
The Kyobo Life pilot sits beside a separate SBI project announced in August with South Korean blockchain infrastructure company Nodeinfra.
SBI Digital Practice and Nodeinfra signed an agreement to develop Project Musubi, a Japan-Korea payment network intended to support yen- and won-denominated settlement on Canton Network. The companies said the initial phase would use test tokens before any move to regulated commercial stablecoins.
Project Musubi is designed around payment-versus-payment settlement and distributed netting. SBI Digital Practice is responsible for connecting Japanese financial institutions and existing systems, while Nodeinfra is developing settlement protocols and supporting participating Korean institutions.
Project Musubi and the Kyobo Life demonstration should not be treated as the same project. The Kyobo test began in July with SBI Digital Practice and focused on a specific institutional transfer model involving the insurer, while Musubi was announced separately in August as a network-development program with Nodeinfra.
SBI’s Japan-side stablecoin infrastructure is further developed than South Korea’s domestic framework. SBI launched the yen-denominated JPYSC through SBI Shinsei Trust Bank earlier in 2026 and has since expanded its use into lending and tokenized-asset initiatives. On Sept. 7, SBI said part of the trust assets backing JPYSC had begun being invested in Japanese government bonds.
South Korea remains in the process of defining a complete legal framework for won-backed stablecoins. Bank of Korea continued to favor bank-led issuance while lawmakers worked through disagreements over the country’s digital asset legislation.
Private-sector projects have continued during that process. South Korean custodian BDACS had expanded the technical infrastructure supporting its KRW1 won-backed stablecoin through LayerZero.
Kyobo and SBI plan more digital asset cooperation
Kyobo Life and SBI said they intend to explore further projects involving digital asset exchange and asset management between Japan and South Korea. The companies mentioned possible business models built around transaction structures tested during the pilot, but they gave no production launch date.
Their relationship extends beyond the latest blockchain work. SBI completed its acquisition of a stake in Kyobo Life on Jan. 16, 2026, making the South Korean insurer an equity-method affiliate. SBI later said the investment resulted in approximately 67.4 billion yen of bargain-purchase-related equity-method income in its fiscal fourth quarter.
Kyobo and SBI have worked together in digital finance for years. Kyobo’s corporate records say the companies expanded cooperation into tokenized securities and other digital-finance areas before the current stablecoin test, while SBI has maintained a strategic investment relationship with the insurer since 2007.
SBI Digital Practice’s separate Project Musubi remains at the test-token and infrastructure-development stage. Its August announcement did not identify a commercial launch date for live yen-won stablecoin settlement between financial institutions.
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