Kaia Blockchain: A New Star in Blockchain Under South Korea's New Policy

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become the focus of the crypto market due to the strong rise in its token price. Since its merger launch in August 2024, Kaia has been continuously working on technical performance and ecological construction. Recently, its actions in stablecoins and payment scenarios have sparked heated discussions among industry investors. Senior officials from the foundation hinted that Kaia's "stablecoin summer" is approaching, indicating that its fiat-pegged token plan is entering the implementation stage.

With the new government supporting the issuance policy of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won, the Kaia team announced that it will collaborate with several super apps to launch a Korean won stablecoin. This news has triggered a strong market reaction, with related concept stocks soaring in price, and the price of Kaia tokens rising from nearly $0.10 to a peak of $0.17, reflecting the market's optimism about the prospects of local stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Stablecoin Projects under the Policy Tailwind

In 2025, after the new government of South Korea proposed policies to support the local currency stablecoin, Kaia quickly responded and announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin. Following the announcement, the prices of related concept stocks surged, and the market is filled with expectations for the Korean won stablecoin.

The Korean won stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is being promoted by multiple parties and is currently still in the planning stage, with no specific issuance timetable yet. A certain payment platform is widely regarded as 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 relevant laws to discuss a regulatory framework that allows private institutions to issue stablecoins. The draft bill aims to relax the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges, enabling them to engage in lending and independently choose the tokens to list. Under this framework, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be transferred to the Financial Services Commission, significantly lowering the regulatory threshold.

However, according to the South Korean Constitution, the issuance of legal tender is the responsibility of the central bank, and private institutions face legal obstacles in issuing fiat-backed tokens. The Bank of Korea has expressed concerns over these proposals, stating that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins denominated in Korean won could lead to "currency runs" and affect the competitiveness of the Korean won.

In terms of policy orientation, the head of the digital asset committee of South Korea's ruling party stated that they will support private issuance and plan to explicitly clarify the legalization of stablecoins in the law. The group behind Kaia itself has large-scale payment and financial infrastructure, providing a convenient channel for the practical use of stablecoins in the future.

Despite the enthusiastic market response, the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project remain uncertain. Issues related to monetary sovereignty and compliance with anti-money laundering regulations, as well as the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin itself, need further validation. At the same time, several potential competitors are also targeting this market. Several large banks in South Korea have publicly announced plans for a joint issuance of stablecoins.

Therefore, while Kaia's stablecoin plan has attracted market attention, it still faces numerous challenges in obtaining regulatory approval and successfully being implemented.

Social giants join forces, potential user base is massive

Kaia public chain is a large blockchain network primarily targeting the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known company-backed blockchain projects, officially launching in August 2024. Its goal is to seamlessly integrate with two major social platforms to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users with Web3 services.

These two social platforms have a very high user penetration rate in their respective countries, covering over 250 million users in total. Based on this massive distribution capability, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance, user-friendly public blockchain, has been seen as a potential stock to promote the popularization of cryptocurrency applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from multiple investment institutions to support ecosystem incubation and market promotion.

Before merging into Kaia, the two original blockchain projects achieved significant results in their respective fields. One project saw an astonishing growth of 1,100% in its user base in 2023, reaching 873,000; the other project provided an NFT platform within its parent company, with a total user base exceeding 5.6 million and completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger, Kaia inherited the ecological advantages of both projects, achieving a complementary relationship in technology and users. 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 adopts an optimized consensus framework. Its consensus algorithm is based on the improved Istanbul BFT, which enables fast 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 uses BFT consensus aimed at enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is final and there is no risk of block rollback in the traditional sense.

The Kaia network nodes are divided into consensus nodes, proxy nodes, and endpoint nodes. Consensus nodes are managed by core operators and are 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 functions such as account abstraction and fee delegation, greatly simplifying the user experience; at the same time, it integrates the identities and payment channels of 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 industry-leading cross-chain bridge integration capabilities provide developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability.

Expanding from the gaming sector to financial services

When Kaia was first launched, user and fund metrics were still in the preliminary stage. By mid-2025, Kaia ranked around the top fifty globally in the DeFi TVL rankings, reflecting the scale of its ecosystem at the early stage. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia officials have disclosed that over 40 million users have accessed the Mini DApp portal. The number of wallets and transaction volume grew rapidly in the early stages, but overall levels are still far below those of established 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 been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network after the merger.

At the same time as the launch of the Kaia mainnet, a builder support program called Kaia Wave was also introduced. This program aims to provide multi-faceted support to promising Dapps, enabling them to reach consumer users in both Web2 and Web3, and gain additional advantages from multiple channels. Official documents state that 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, 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 NFT platform, and its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user groups and partner resources of two major social platforms, with some game developers beginning to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

In terms of Mini DApp distribution and user reach, the Dapp Portal is one of the main tools for the development of the Kaia ecosystem. The Dapp Portal is based on the Kaia Blockchain and is open to users through the official accounts on social platforms, allowing access to games, social interactions, transactions, and other Mini DApps directly 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 a single click, without needing to install another 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 USD stablecoin yield product on one of the 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 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 and jointly promoting the use case of "message as the entry point, blockchain as the payment" with industry partners.