Toss builds stablecoin and blockchain plans

South Korean fintech Viva Republica is preparing to push its Toss “super app” into crypto markets by building its own blockchain network and reserving brand names for won-pegged stablecoins. According to Bitcoin.com News and South Korea’s Blockmedia, the company has filed 24 trademarks for Korean-won stablecoin names such as “TOSSKRW” and has been hiring blockchain engineers since February 2026.

Toss says it has roughly 30 million registered users, a scale that makes even small feature changes meaningful for payments, brokerage and lending. A proprietary mainnet would let the firm set transaction fees and technical standards itself, rather than relying on external chains whose governance and upgrades it cannot control. The recruitment list described in the report—wallet systems, transaction processing, node operations, cryptographic signing and financial compliance—reads less like a pilot project and more like a payments rail.

The timing is not accidental. South Korea is still working on a Digital Asset Basic Law, and the report says Toss has not made a final call on whether it will build a full layer-one chain or a layer-two system on top of an existing network. That uncertainty matters because stablecoin issuance sits at the intersection of securities rules, payments regulation and foreign-exchange controls; a “bank-like” app that already touches deposits and brokerage cannot treat token issuance as a side experiment. Toss has reportedly set up a dedicated Stablecoin Task Force led by chief business officer Kyuha Kim to structure the work around compliance readiness.

The strategic logic is familiar in Asia’s platform economy: if users already keep money, IDs and transaction history inside one app, crypto becomes another product category—provided the platform can keep custody, settlement and fraud controls inside its own perimeter. Toss has said it is building a Web3 wallet directly into the existing app so users do not need a separate download, and that the wallet would support storage, transfers, payments and tokenised securities management.

Competition is moving in the same direction. Dunamu, the operator of Upbit, is developing an Ethereum layer-two network called Kiwachain, while Hashed is building an L1 network focused on won stablecoins. Toss would enter that race with a larger consumer base than either, but also with a higher regulatory profile.

At a March Seoul Blockchain Meetup, Toss executives framed the plan as “Money 3.0”, including programmable lending tied to the company’s small-business credit model. For now, the most concrete step is the one that costs least to reverse: reserving the names before the law is finished.

The stablecoin trademarks were filed in June 2025, and the engineering hiring began in February 2026.