SBI and Kyobo Finish a Yen-Won Test Without Dollars

SBI Group and Kyobo Life Insurance finished a Japan-Korea stablecoin transfer test that swapped yen and won tokens without a dollar hop. The proof of concept ran from July on Canton Network and used test tokens, not live cash. Kyobo said on September 17 it was the first Korean insurer to verify that structure.

Crypto feeds put Ripple in the headline because SBI has been Ripple’s Japan partner since 2016. The transfer ran on Digital Asset’s Canton Network, the rail SBI has spent this year turning into a dedicated business.

Direct Yen-Won Tokens, No Dollar in Between

Kyobo Life and Japan’s SBI Group closed the Korea-Japan Stablecoin-Based Cross-Border Proof-of-Concept Project after work that started in July. The design was simple on paper. A yen-linked token in Japan would exchange straight into a won-linked token for a transfer into South Korea.

The live path still goes yen to dollars, then dollars to won. That extra hop costs time and fees and leaves both sides open to a second FX move. In the test, the dollar step came out. The firms also checked whether they could view and track the transaction data in real time.

They ran a second check on how Korea would handle digital assets arriving from overseas and the settlement funds sitting against them. No client money moved. Coverage citing Digital Asset, the New York firm that built Canton, said the trial used test tokens and did not touch actual stablecoins or institutional funds.

WHAT THE PILOT DID AND DID NOT DO

• The rail: Canton Network in a test environment, not the XRP Ledger.
• The money: Test tokens only, with no live yen, won, or client cash.
• The FX path: A direct yen-token to won-token exchange that dropped the dollar middle step.
• The claim: Kyobo presents itself as the first Korean insurer to verify this Japan-Korea structure.

A Kyobo Life official said the work confirmed that stablecoins and blockchain can move institutional funds across the border with less friction. The two firms said they will keep talking about digital-asset FX, asset management, and new models built on real transaction structures. That is a finished lab result. It is not a product a treasurer in Seoul or Tokyo can send today.

Canton Carried the Test That Crypto Feeds Misread

Canton is a privacy-enabled ledger aimed at banks, market utilities, and asset managers, developed by Digital Asset. SBI has been in that network from the start as a Super Validator, a node that helps approve and manage transactions. On July 28 it said a wholly owned unit, SBI Security Solutions, had already changed its name on June 22 to SBI Digital Practice and would now exist to do Canton work.

CANTON AT THE SCALE SBI CITES

• Participants: More than 600 institutions, among them Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Franklin Templeton, and Euroclear, SBI said in its July notice.
• Assets on the chain: More than $6 trillion, according to the same notice.
• Market plumbing: DTCC has used Canton for digital U.S. Treasury work, SBI noted as context for building a dedicated unit.

SBI Digital Practice’s job, the notice said, runs from planning apps on Canton through helping banks in Japan and abroad join, including deals that cross borders and currencies. Representative director Ryo Shimotsu leads the unit from Roppongi.

Korea is stacking names onto the same network. On September 15 the Canton Foundation said Shinhan Asset Management had joined as a Super Validator under CIP-0121 at Weight 10, with a program that includes regulated node operations, tokenized securities, KRW-denominated settlement, and fund administration. Canton Network’s own account welcomed the firm the next day. That is the rail under the Kyobo test, not a retail coin transfer on a public chain.

Who Operates This Japan-Korea Payment Rail?

Ripple is easy to reach for because SBI helped bring it into Japan a decade ago and still holds a large equity slice. The firm that actually sits on every operational leg of this corridor is SBI Holdings.

SBI’S FOUR HATS ON THIS CORRIDOR

• Network operator: Super Validator on Canton since the network began, now with SBI Digital Practice as a dedicated Canton company.
• Yen issuer: SBI Shinsei Trust Bank issues JPYSC, Japan’s first trust-type yen stablecoin, with SBI VC Trade handling distribution.
• Korean counterpart: Kyobo Life is the insurer on the September test and has been in a digital-finance partnership with SBI since 2024.
• Ripple shareholder: SBI has described a stake of about 9 percent in Ripple, its longest-running Asia ally since 2016.

A related build on the same ledger is not the Kyobo test. On August 7, SBI Digital Practice signed a memorandum with Seoul software firm Nodeinfra, led by CEO John Youngseok Yang, for the Musubi Project: a member-owned Japan-Korea payment network on Canton with atomic payment-versus-payment settlement and distributed peer netting. SBI Digital Practice is to connect Japanese institutions. Nodeinfra is to write the core protocol, Daml smart contracts, and Korean onboarding. First-phase money on that project is also a yen test token and a won test token, with regulated coins later if the law allows.

The SBI Group has been rapidly building on-chain financial infrastructure, most recently launching JPYSC, Japan’s first trust-type yen stablecoin, through SBI Shinsei Trust Bank. By connecting the Musubi Project with the SBI Group’s on-chain infrastructure and the broad financial network of SBI Group companies across securities, banking, and asset management, we will set a new standard for payment infrastructure linking Japan and Korea.

Ryo Shimotsu, Representative Director, SBI Digital Practice, August 7 notice

Yang said Nodeinfra would put its Canton and Daml work into Musubi’s core settlement protocol. That is a network construction plan. The Kyobo file is an insurer’s completed rehearsal on the same family of rails. Mixing them into one Ripple product launch is how the test got misread.

Sequential Dollar Hops Still Price Live Settlement

SBI Digital Practice’s Musubi notice stated the live-market problem in one clause. Payments between Japan and Korea still rely on sequential settlement through a USD vehicle, which leaves extra cost and settlement risk in the path. Atomic PvP on Canton is the proposed fix: both legs settle at once, so one side cannot pay and wait.

The Bank of Korea’s 2025 trade-settlement table shows how far local-currency payment still sits from daily trade. The dollar took 84.2 percent of Korean export settlements last year. The won’s export share, even at a record, was 3.4 percent. The yen’s export share was 1.9 percent, a record low in that series.

KOREA’S 2025 TRADE SETTLEMENT CURRENCIES

Those shares are why a lab swap of yen and won tokens is news, and why it is not yet a market. Correspondent banks still earn the two-hop FX. Until a legal won token can meet a yen token that is allowed to leave its issuer’s platform, the dollar remains the vehicle on live tickets.

A 201 Billion Yen Coin That Cannot Leave Home

Japan already has the yen leg in regulated form. On June 24, SBI Holdings, SBI Shinsei Bank, SBI Shinsei Trust Bank, SBI VC Trade, and Singapore’s Startale Group, an SBI equity-method affiliate, started JPYSC. SBI Shinsei Trust Bank is the issuer. SBI VC Trade handles circulation. It is a Type 3 electronic payment instrument under Japan’s Payment Services Act, a trust-type yen coin with no 1 million yen cap on sends or balances, unlike earlier money-transmitter coins.

At launch it could be used only inside SBI VC Trade accounts. External wallet transfers were blocked. The June 24 notice said public-chain circulation would wait on legal and tax treatment and on supervisor confirmation, even though the firms said technical prep for that move was done. Japan’s rules still steer this product toward coins issued only by licensed banks or trust companies, or registered money transfer agents, with full reserves.

On September 7, SBI Shinsei Trust Bank and SBI VC Trade said they had put 10 billion yen of JPYSC trust assets into short-term Japanese government bonds. The same notice put issuance at about 201 billion yen of JPYSC, with lending applications of about 69 billion yen, for a combined scale of about 270 billion yen. That is a real yen token with a growing book. It is still not a free-floating cross-border coin.

SBI VC Trade also lists Ripple’s dollar coin RLUSD and Circle’s USDC, so the same licensed shop already holds yen and dollar tokens. The missing piece on the September test is a legal Korean won coin that can meet JPYSC, or even meet JPYSC’s test-token stand-in, in production.

Seoul’s Basic Act Has Sat in Committee Two Years

South Korea still has no statute that lets a firm issue a won stablecoin. The Digital Asset Basic Act, meant to cover won coins plus the wider virtual-asset business, has been in argument for two years. Democratic Party lawmaker Kang Joon-hyun said on September 14 that about 10 bills have sat in the National Assembly and that the remaining fight had narrowed, in his view, to a cap on major shareholders of virtual-asset exchanges.

On September 15 the National Policy Committee did not take up the basic act. A government official said passage this year would be hard because the ruling party still lacked a single draft. Separate fights include whether a bank consortium should hold 50 percent plus one share of a won-coin issuer and how far a technology firm could go as a top shareholder. Detailed payment rules are being pushed into later decrees.

The legal and institutional framework for Korean won stablecoins is moving more slowly than expected, but we are using this time to prepare the technology and business model in advance.

Park Jin-ho, vice president, Kyobo Life Insurance, June 24, after a domestic won-coin premium and claims test with EQBR

That June run, on the same day JPYSC launched, linked Kyobo’s insurance systems to a blockchain so a wallet could pay a premium and a claim could be paid in a won token, with the data hitting Kyobo’s books in real time. It was also a test, not a live product. Democratic Party lawmaker Ahn Do-geol warned on September 16 that delay hands the payment layer to dollar coins and weakens monetary control. He said the basic act, the Electronic Financial Transactions Act, and the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act all need updates before a won coin can do real remittances, tourism payments, or merchant fees.

So the September Japan-Korea rehearsal had to use stand-in tokens on the Korean side. Japan can point to a trust bank coin. Korea can point to an insurer that has now tested both domestic claims and a cross-border hop. The law has not caught either file.

Ripple’s Korea File Is Custody, Not This Transfer

Ripple’s documented Korea work with Kyobo is a different product. On April 15 in Seoul, Ripple and Kyobo announced a partnership for tokenized Korean government bond settlement on Ripple Custody, aiming to compress a typical two-day cycle toward near real-time. Fiona Murray, Ripple’s Asia Pacific managing director, and Jin Ho Park, a senior executive vice president at Kyobo, appeared at the launch. Ripple also said it would help Kyobo look at stablecoin payment rails inside a regulated setup. The April notice did not name Canton, JPYSC, or a yen-won corridor.

SBI and Ripple have worked together since 2016, including SBI Ripple Asia. In June, SBI VC Trade began handling RLUSD in Japan after Financial Services Agency treatment of foreign-issued coins as electronic payment instruments. SBI has called itself Ripple’s largest outside shareholder, with a holding it has described as about 9 percent. In July it told investors that Ripple shareholding alone was worth ¥6.6 trillion ($41.2 billion) on the group’s own figures. That equity story explains why Ripple’s name travels with any SBI payments headline. It does not put XRPL under the September test.

Kyobo’s own digital-asset push is broader than one vendor. It set up a digital-asset unit in the spring, tested won-coin premiums with EQBR in June, and now has a Canton rehearsal with SBI. Ripple Custody remains the bond-settlement file. Canton is the Japan-Korea hop that just closed. Treating those as one Ripple corridor collapses three products into a ticker reaction.

The test proved a path two institutions can operate on a ledger SBI already governs as a Super Validator. JPYSC is still boxed inside one licensed exchange, and Korea still has no legal won coin to send the other way. Shinhan Asset Management joined Canton as a Super Validator in the same week Kyobo spoke. Live yen-won tickets still clear through the dollar.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a completed proof of concept and related market facts. It is informational only and does not constitute investment, trading, legal, or digital-asset advice. Readers should consult a licensed financial adviser and, where relevant, legal counsel in Japan or South Korea before acting on any token, stablecoin, or cross-border payment arrangement named here. Figures, product statuses, and bill timelines reflect the company notices, central-bank table, and public statements cited, and they can change as tests move toward live issuance or as Seoul’s drafts move.