Kaia Public Chain: The Rise of a Local Stablecoin Pioneer in Asia

Recently, the Kaia public chain has become a hot topic in the crypto market due to the strong performance of its token price. Since its official launch in August 2024, Kaia has been continuously making efforts in technical performance and ecological construction. Recently, its actions in stablecoins and payment scenarios have sparked widespread discussion among industry investors. Senior officials of the foundation have publicly stated that Kaia's "stablecoin summer" is coming, indicating that its fiat-backed token plan is entering the implementation phase.

With the new government in South Korea taking office, supporting the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the Korean won has become a new policy direction. The Kaia team has seized this opportunity and announced plans to cooperate with several well-known technology companies to launch a Korean won stablecoin. Once this news was announced, the prices of related concept stocks surged, and the Kaia token also soared from around $0.10 to a high of $0.17, reflecting the market's optimism about the prospects of domestic stablecoin projects in South Korea.

With the Favor of Policies, the Kaia Stablecoin Project Launches

After the new South Korean government proposed a policy to support the local currency stablecoin in 2025, Kaia quickly responded and announced the Korean won stablecoin plan. This news triggered a strong market reaction, with the prices of related concept stocks soaring, demonstrating investors' high expectations for the Korean won stablecoin.

The KRW stablecoin project proposed by Kaia is being promoted by several well-known technology companies and is currently in the planning stage, with the specific issuance timeline yet to be determined. With the existing digital wallet infrastructure and QR code payment systems, these partners are widely regarded as potential beneficiaries of the local stablecoin.

Currently, the South Korean government is formulating the "Basic Law on Digital Assets" and actively exploring a regulatory framework that allows private entities to issue stablecoins. The draft bill aims to relax the rules for cryptocurrency exchanges, permitting non-bank institutions and payment service providers to issue stablecoins. According to this proposal, the approval authority for stablecoin issuers will be under 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 issuance of legal currency is the prerogative of the central bank, and private institutions still face legal obstacles in issuing fiat-pegged tokens. The Bank of Korea has expressed concerns about these proposals, believing that indiscriminately issuing stablecoins denominated in Korean won could lead to "currency runs," thereby affecting the competitiveness of the won.

Nevertheless, the head of the Digital Asset Committee of the ruling party in South Korea stated that they would support private issuance and plan to clarify the legalization of stablecoins in the "Basic Law". The tech group behind Kaia possesses a large-scale payment and financial infrastructure, providing a convenient pathway for the practical use of future stablecoins.

However, the prospects of the Kaia stablecoin project still carry uncertainty. On one hand, issues regarding monetary sovereignty and anti-money laundering compliance still need to be addressed; on the other hand, the issuance and redemption mechanisms of the stablecoin also require validation. 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, although Kaia's stablecoin plan has sparked a enthusiastic response in the market, it still faces many challenges in obtaining regulatory approval and being successfully implemented.

Social giants join forces, potential user base is vast

Kaia public chain is a large blockchain network mainly aimed at the Asian region, formed by the merger of two well-known blockchain projects backed by major social platforms, officially launching in August 2024. Its goal is to reach hundreds of millions of Asian users with Web3 services through seamless integration with these two major social platforms.

The two major social media platforms are the most popular instant messaging apps in South Korea and Japan, respectively. One has nearly a 95% penetration rate in South Korea, with about 50 million monthly active users; the other covers 70% of the population in Japan and dominates markets in Thailand and Taiwan. Based on the distribution capability of over 250 million users from these two social media platforms, Kaia, positioned as a high-performance and user-friendly public chain, has long 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 several well-known investment institutions to support ecological incubation and market promotion.

Before the two merged into Kaia, these two blockchain projects were developed by different technology companies. One officially launched in 2019 and was an important representative of the Korean blockchain network, with its user base achieving an astonishing growth of 1,100% in 2023, reaching 873,000; the other launched in 2022 and provided an NFT platform within its social platform, accumulating over 5.6 million users and completing approximately 560,000 NFT transactions. After the merger of the two chains, Kaia inherited the DeFi, gaming, and other ecosystems from the former and the NFT, payment, and other application scenarios from the latter to achieve technological and user complementarity.

As a Layer 1 public chain compatible with Ethereum, Kaia technically inherits and optimizes the consensus framework of its predecessor project. Its consensus algorithm is based on the optimized Istanbul BFT, which enables rapid 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 adopts a BFT consensus aimed at enterprise and service scenarios, ensuring that once a block is produced, it is final and there is no traditional risk of block rollback.

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 identity and payment channels from two major social platforms, allowing ordinary users to use on-chain services without additional registration. Kaia also maintains equivalence compatibility with EVM chains like 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

When Kaia was first launched, user and funding metrics were still in the preliminary stage. By mid-2025, Kaia ranked approximately in the top fifty globally in DeFi TVL, reflecting the scale of its early-stage ecosystem. In terms of on-chain activity, Kaia's official sources 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 of launch, but the overall level is still far below that of mature mainstream public chains like Ethereum, Solana, and BNB.

Ecologically, Kaia has merged the application ecosystems of two predecessor projects, forming a comprehensive ecosystem covering multiple fields such as DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and Real-World Assets (RWA). According to official statistics, after the merger, there are already over 420 decentralized applications and gaming services that have been or are planned to be launched on the Kaia network.

In the DeFi space, Kaia has launched multiple decentralized exchanges and staking, 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 its predecessor project, 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 its official strategy, Kaia is gradually expanding from the gaming sector to financial services and general applications: by early 2025, it has launched a US dollar stablecoin yield product on one of the social platform terminals, 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 196 million users of a social platform, marking further expansion of Kaia's layout in the international stablecoin ecosystem. Overall, Kaia is accelerating the construction of a platform-level ecosystem, working with industry partners to promote the usage scenario of "message as entry, on-chain as payment."