Kakaopay Taps Dinari and Ondo to Explore Tokenized Korean Stocks

Kakaopay Securities has signed separate agreements with Dinari and Ondo Finance to study whether Korean-listed equities can be issued onchain and sold to investors outside South Korea. The two deals were announced Tuesday and cover three stages: acquiring the underlying Korean shares, building the token infrastructure, and distributing the resulting instruments in foreign markets.

The Dinari leg is a proof of concept built on that firm's dShares model, which is structured to carry applicable shareholder rights such as dividends and voting rather than merely mirroring a price. Dinari currently offers 724 tokenized US stocks and exchange-traded funds through dShares, according to the company, and the Kakaopay arrangement tests whether the same design can be extended to Korean-listed companies. Dinari CEO Gabe Otte told Cointelegraph that no specific Korean issuers have been chosen and that the partners have not published a target date for commercial launch. Otte said the design would use locally listed Korean shares as the underlying assets, in contrast to tokens that only track price.

The Ondo agreement starts earlier in the chain. The two companies will first define how Korean shares can be sourced and held in custody before any tokenization occurs, with Kakaopay operating a foreign investor omnibus account to hold and administer the underlying stock. Ondo and Kakaopay will also examine how tokens would be issued and redeemed. In a joint statement, the companies said any decision on whether or when to commercialize tokenized Korean equities would depend on the legal and regulatory requirements of South Korea and of the overseas markets involved.

That caveat points to a framework still being built. South Korea's National Assembly passed amendments in January that recognize distributed ledgers as valid securities registries and allow token securities to be issued and circulated. In June, the Financial Services Commission tied the construction of token securities infrastructure to a wider overhaul of the country's capital markets. The rules are scheduled to take effect in February 2027, and the Korea Securities Depository is working on infrastructure to link its existing securities account system with blockchain-based data.

The timing of the Kakaopay agreements places them ahead of that framework rather than alongside a finished rulebook. Both partnerships are exploratory, and the sources of underlying shares, the custody arrangement and the issuance mechanics would all need to satisfy regulators in Korea and in any destination market before trading could begin.

Tokenized equities have grown quickly in 2026, reaching roughly $3.2 billion in distributed value by late September, according to RWA.xyz. The category is still lopsided, though: most of that value sits in tokenized versions of US equities and US ETFs, spanning issuers such as Strategy, Circle, Nvidia and Tesla. Korean-listed stocks are effectively absent from the market today.

That imbalance is the opportunity Kakaopay is testing. Korean equities are largely out of reach for foreign investors because of account and settlement requirements tied to the domestic securities system; a token structure with a locally held omnibus account would aim to bypass those frictions. Whether it can do so without breaking shareholder-rights law or foreign ownership rules is what the two proofs of concept are meant to establish.

Kakaopay Securities is a unit of Kakao Pay, the payments arm of Korean internet company Kakao.