Kaia Public Chain: A Rising Star in the Korean Stablecoin Wave

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become the focus of the crypto market due to its strong token performance. Since its merger launch with Klaytn and Finschia in August 2024, Kaia has been making continuous efforts in technical performance and ecosystem development. Recently, its movements in the stablecoin and payment sectors have sparked widespread discussion among industry investors. The foundation's CEO 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, supporting 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 cooperation with several super apps. This news has driven the prices of related concept stocks to rise sharply, and the price of Kaia tokens has increased 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.

Riding the Policy Tailwind, the Kaia Stablecoin Project Sets Sail

After the new South Korean government proposed policies to support local currency stablecoins in 2025, Kaia quickly responded and announced plans to launch a KRW stablecoin. Following the announcement, the stock prices of related concept stocks surged, and the market is filled with anticipation for the KRW stablecoin.

The Korean won stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is jointly promoted by multiple parties and is currently still in the planning stage, with no specific issuance timetable yet. A certain payment platform is widely considered a potential beneficiary of the local stablecoin due to its digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment system.

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 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 KRW to 500 million KRW.

However, according to the 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 concern over these proposals, believing that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins pegged to the Korean won could lead to "currency runs," which could 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 stablecoin legalization provisions in the "Basic Law." The group that Kaia relies on has large-scale payment and financial infrastructure, providing a convenient channel for the practical use of stablecoins in the future.

However, the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project are not entirely clear. On one hand, issues such as currency sovereignty and compliance with anti-money laundering regulations remain to be resolved; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin itself also need to be verified. In addition, there are several potential competitors also targeting this market. Recently, several large banks in South Korea publicly announced plans to jointly issue stablecoins.

Therefore, although Kaia's stablecoin plan has generated much anticipation amid policy opportunities, whether it can obtain regulatory approval and successfully land still faces many uncertainties.

Social giants join forces, potential user base is enormous

Kaia public chain is a large blockchain network primarily aimed at the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known blockchain projects with a background in social platforms, officially launching in August 2024. Its goal is to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating Web3 services with popular social applications.

These two social platforms dominate their respective markets, with a cumulative distribution capability of over 250 million users. Positioned as a high-performance and user-friendly public chain, Kaia has long been regarded as one of the "potential stocks" for promoting the popularization of crypto applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from multiple investment and financing institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before merging into Kaia, the two original projects achieved significant results in their respective fields. One project realized a 1,100% user growth in 2023, reaching 873,000 users; the other project accumulated over 5.6 million users and completed approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger, Kaia inherits the ecological advantages of the two projects to achieve technical 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 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, allowing for rapid 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 only 1 second and instant transaction finality. Unlike conventional PoW/PoS, Kaia adopts a BFT consensus tailored for enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is generated, it is final, eliminating the traditional risks of block rollback. 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 over 50 nodes can participate in consensus, balancing throughput and decentralization.

In terms of technical features, Kaia supports functions such as account abstraction and fee delegation, significantly simplifying the user experience; at the same time, it integrates identities and payment channels from two major social platforms, allowing ordinary users to use on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia also maintains equivalent 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. It is worth mentioning that the Kaia mainnet is actually a hard fork of the original mainnet, and all states are automatically inherited to the Kaia chain after the merger.

Expanding from the gaming sector to financial services

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

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 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 will provide a total value of $10 million 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 the original platform, 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.

Inspired by a well-known social platform and its associated blockchain, the Dapp Portal is one of the main tools for the development of the Kaia ecosystem in terms of Mini DApp distribution and user engagement. The Dapp Portal, built on the Kaia chain, is accessible to users through the official accounts of the social platform, allowing access to games, social interactions, trading, and other Mini DApps within the chat interface without the need to download or install any new applications. In January of this year, Kaia jointly launched the first batch of 32 Mini DApps, enabling users to create wallets, play games, claim rewards, and trade NFTs with just one click, all 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: in early 2025, it has launched a USD 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 conversion between 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 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 and jointly promoting the use case of "message as entry, on-chain as payment" with industry partners.