Kaia public chain is expected to usher in the "stablecoin summer"

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become the focus of the crypto market due to its strong token growth. Since its merger and launch with Klaytn and Finschia in August 2024, Kaia has continuously made efforts in technical performance and ecological construction. Recently, its actions in stablecoins and payment scenarios have sparked heated discussions among industry investors. The foundation's CEO publicly stated, "Kaia's stablecoin summer is coming soon," indicating that its fiat-backed token plan is entering the implementation phase.

With the new South Korean government's support for the issuance policy of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won, the Kaia team announced plans to launch a Korean won stablecoin in collaboration with several super apps. This news quickly triggered market reactions, causing related concept stock prices to soar, and the price of Kaia tokens rose from nearly $0.10 to a peak of $0.17, reflecting the market's optimistic outlook on the prospects of local stablecoin projects in South Korea.

Policy tailwinds promote the Kaia stablecoin project

After the new South Korean government proposed policies to support the local stablecoin in 2025, Kaia quickly responded and announced plans to launch the Korean won stablecoin. Following the announcement, the market is filled with anticipation for the Korean won stablecoin.

The Korean won stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is being jointly promoted by multiple parties and is still in the planning stage, with no specific issuance timetable yet. With its digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment system, relevant payment service providers are widely regarded as potential beneficiaries of the local stablecoin.

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, while easing the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges. Under this proposed framework, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be held by 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 South Korean Constitution, the right 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 concerns about these proposals, believing that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins pegged to the won may lead to "currency runs," thereby affecting the competitiveness of the won.

In terms of policy orientation, the head of the Digital Assets Committee of the ruling party in South Korea stated that they will support private issuance and plan to clarify the legalization of stablecoins in the "Fundamental Law." The group on which Kaia relies itself has large-scale payment and financial infrastructure, which provides 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. On one hand, issues related to currency sovereignty and anti-money laundering compliance are still difficult to overcome; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin itself also need to be verified. In addition, several potential competitors are also targeting this market. Recently, several large banks in South Korea have publicly announced plans to jointly issue stablecoins.

Therefore, while Kaia's stablecoin plan evokes much imagination, it still faces numerous challenges in obtaining regulatory approval and being smoothly implemented.

Social giants join forces, potential user base is huge

Kaia is a large blockchain network mainly targeting the Asian region, formed by the merger of blockchain backgrounds from two major social platforms in South Korea and Japan, officially launching in August 2024. Its goal is to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users by seamlessly integrating Web3 services with mainstream social applications.

These two major social platforms have extremely high market penetration rates in South Korea and Japan, with a large number of monthly active users. Based on the distribution capability of over 250 million users accumulated by the two social platforms, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance and easy-to-use public chain, has always been regarded as one of the "potential stocks" to promote the popularization of crypto applications. This year, the Kaia Foundation has raised external funds from multiple investment institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before the two companies merged into Kaia, each of their blockchain networks had achieved impressive development. One party experienced an astonishing 1,100% growth in users in 2023, reaching 873,000; the other party provided an internal NFT platform with a cumulative user base exceeding 5.6 million, completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger, Kaia inherited the advantages of both ecosystems, achieving a complementarity of technology and users.

As an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 public blockchain, Kaia technically inherits and optimizes the existing 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 immediate transaction finality.

Kaia adopts a BFT consensus aimed at enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is definitively confirmed, eliminating the traditional risk of block rollback. The 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 validation. 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; it also integrates identities and payment channels from mainstream social platforms, allowing ordinary users to use on-chain services without extra registration. Kaia maintains equivalence compatibility with EVM chains such as Ethereum and plans to support CosmWasm smart contracts; its integration capability with industry-leading cross-chain bridges provides developers with flexible multi-chain interoperability.

Expanding from the gaming sector to financial services

In the early stages of its launch, Kaia's user and funding metrics were at a starting level. By mid-2025, Kaia ranked approximately among the top fifty globally in DeFi TVL. In terms of on-chain activity, the official report disclosed that over 40 million users have accessed the Mini DApp portal. The number of wallets and trading volume grew rapidly in the early stages, but the overall level still lags behind mainstream public chains.

Ecologically, Kaia has merged the application ecosystems of two existing networks, forming a comprehensive ecosystem that covers various fields such as DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and real-world assets (RWA). According to official statistics, there are already over 420 decentralized applications and gaming services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network after the merger.

To support ecological development, Kaia has also launched the Builder Support Program, Kaia Wave. 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 sources such as social platforms, Web3 marketing alliances, creators, and Kaia's vertical services. Official documents state that the Kaia Wave program will offer 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 as well as staking and lending projects. The platform also supports infrastructure such as stablecoins and cross-chain bridges. In terms of NFTs, Kaia inherits the existing user base of the original platform, and its GameFi ecosystem benefits from the user groups and partner resources of two major social platforms. Some game developers have started to launch mobile games, NFT items, and other content on Kaia.

In terms of distribution and user engagement for Mini DApps, Dapp Portal is one of the main tools for the development of the Kaia ecosystem. Users can access 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, allowing users to create wallets, play games, claim rewards, and trade NFTs with just one click, without the need 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 has launched a USD stablecoin yield product on social platforms, with future 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 USD 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, jointly promoting the usage scenario of "message as entry, on-chain as payment" with industry partners.