Shinhan Card and the Solana Foundation have signed a strategic memorandum of understanding to jointly develop stablecoin payment technology and a Web3 payments ecosystem—formalizing a partnership that, three weeks earlier, completed a comprehensive six-project proof of concept and produced a working programmable-money smart contract design.
The agreement, announced on April 30, was signed at Shinhan Card’s Seoul headquarters by Vice President Kim Young-il and Lu Yin, the Solana Foundation’s Asia-Pacific business development lead, but was architected at the principal level—by Shinhan Card CEO Park Chang-hoon and Solana Foundation President Lily Liu in discussions held throughout 2025.
What the MoU Covers
The new partnership is structured around three workstreams.
An advanced PoC on the Solana testnet will simulate payment flows between customers and merchants and assess the network’s technical stability and ease-of-use in real-world settings. The work builds directly on the preliminary PoC completed earlier this year—with Shinhan Card framing the new phase as moving from feasibility validation to commercial scenario-testing.
Non-custodial wallet verification will examine the operational stability and security of wallets where users retain full control over their assets, without depending on third-party institutions. This is a meaningful technical commitment for a card issuer—non-custodial wallet integration moves the card payment model away from institutional custody toward user-sovereign asset control, a fundamental architectural shift from existing card payment infrastructure.
A hybrid TradFi-DeFi financial model will combine traditional finance infrastructure with decentralized finance using oracle technology to securely connect real-world transaction data to blockchain networks. Shinhan Card said it will use the work to test smart contract execution stability and build a monitoring framework for what it called “next-generation financial models.”
An Already-Working Partnership
The April 30 MoU is not a starting point—it’s the formalization of a partnership that has already produced concrete technical validation.
On April 9, 2026, Shinhan Card disclosed completion of a six-project PoC covering blockchain-based P2P payments, integrated digital asset payment infrastructure, stablecoin-based hybrid check-and-credit products, stablecoin cross-border remittance and settlement, stablecoin payment/exchange/settlement network verification, and IC chip-based hardware wallet card payment services.
The PoC’s architecture cut across multiple counterparties: Shinhan Card worked with Solana and Node Infra on programmable-money smart contract design; with Fireblocks and Mastercard on a hybrid card structure where check mode triggers instant stablecoin withdrawal and credit mode uses stablecoin as collateral; with Visa on stablecoin cross-border remittance and settlement; and with Korean partners Aton, BlockOdyssey, and IoTrust on hardware wallet integration.
In other words, by the time the April 30 MoU was signed, the technical foundations of the Shinhan-Solana partnership were already validated. The MoU’s purpose is to commercialise — to take what worked in the PoC environment and prepare it for production deployment when Korean regulation permits.
The Digital Asset Basic Act
The timing is not accidental. South Korea is in the final stretch of finalizing the Digital Asset Basic Act, the comprehensive framework that will replace the existing virtual asset terminology, formalize stablecoin issuance rules, and re-authorize domestic Initial Coin Offerings for the first time since 2017.
Two policy questions remain unresolved at the center of the legislative debate:
The Bank of Korea has argued that only bank-led consortiums with at least 51% bank ownership should be permitted to issue won-pegged stablecoins. The Financial Services Commission has taken a more flexible view, citing the EU’s MiCA regime — where 14 of 15 licensed stablecoin issuers are electronic money institutions rather than banks — as evidence that fintech-led issuance can coexist with stability requirements.
Eight of South Korea’s largest banks—including Shinhan Bank, KB Kookmin, Woori, Nonghyup, IBK, Suhyup, Citibank Korea, and SC First Bank—are already preparing a joint venture to issue a won-pegged stablecoin under the bank-consortium model. KB Kookmin filed 17 stablecoin-related trademark applications in mid-2025 (covering tickers including KBKRW and KRWKB), signaling its issuance intent.
Separately, the Credit Finance Association launched a second card-issuer task force in February 2025 covering nine major card companies—Samsung, Shinhan, KB Kookmin, Hyundai, Lotte, Hana, Woori, BC, and NH Nonghyup Card—representing nearly the entire Korean credit card market. The task force focused on stablecoin payment processes from initial card transactions through final merchant settlement.
The Shinhan Card-Solana MoU sits at the intersection of these two streams: a card issuer with deep institutional reach formalizing a payments-rail partnership with the blockchain network whose Foundation president has been visibly active in Korean institutional outreach.
Solana’s Korea Footprint
For the Solana Foundation, the Shinhan Card MoU is the second high-profile Korean institutional partnership in a week. On April 27, K Wave Media announced advanced discussions with securities firms and Solana to build a real-world asset and security token offering platform tokenizing Korean entertainment IP — films, K-pop memorabilia, and other entertainment assets—with a commercial launch targeted for July-August 2026.
That deployment is expected to use the Solana Developer Platform (SDP), which Solana introduced earlier in 2026 with two active modules: an issuance module for tokenized deposits, GENIUS-compliant stablecoins, and tokenized RWAs; and a payments module for fiat on/off-ramps and stablecoin transfers across B2B, B2C, and peer-to-peer entities.
The two partnerships—Shinhan Card on payments and K Wave Media on tokenised IP — give Solana a meaningful institutional presence on both sides of Korean digital finance. Lily Liu’s positioning as the architect-level counterpart in the Shinhan deal also matters: Liu has been one of the more vocal Solana Foundation executives on Asia-Pacific outreach, and her direct involvement at the CEO level signals the partnership is treated as strategically important within Solana’s institutional roadmap.
What’s Next
A Shinhan Card representative said the company plans to use the partnership to “rigorously verify the practical applicability of blockchain technology and proactively explore next-generation financial models,” with the goal of presenting “a safe and convenient payment environment in line with future regulatory developments.”
A Solana Foundation representative framed the partnership as combining “the trustworthiness of traditional finance with the efficiency of DeFi” while prioritizing “regulatory compliance and customer protection.”
