- South Korea’s blockchain sector will give consumers a reason to choose it only when users feel a 10x improvement over existing options.
- High-friction areas such as cross-border remittances, corporate settlement, micropayments for content, M2M transactions, tokenized memberships and phygital models could show the earliest utility.
- Mass adoption of blockchain in everyday life will be possible when consumer benefits, a structure for accountability and cross-platform interoperability are in place, and when companies have clear business incentives to participate.
Forecast Trend Report by Period
Jung Seok-moon, head of research at Presto Research
When people buy coffee with a credit card, they do not ask which payment network handles settlement. When they send money overseas through a mobile app, they do not choose the server architecture. The best technology usually stays behind the screen. Users do not care about the name of the technology; they experience a faster, cheaper and safer result.
Blockchain has not reached that point yet. Using digital assets directly still requires consumers to open a wallet, store a recovery phrase, and check the network and the token needed to pay fees. If they want to move assets across chains, they must go through another process. That may be routine inside the industry, but for ordinary consumers it amounts to a learning cost pushed onto the user by the service itself.
Financial institutions and platforms are now focusing on what they call “invisible blockchain,” an effort to push those costs behind the screen. A service shows a single balance while the system selects the appropriate network and payment route and handles fees on the user’s behalf. Companies are also testing ways to let users create accounts with email or biometric authentication and recover access when credentials are lost. A more convenient wallet, however, does not by itself guarantee mass adoption.
I believe the dividing line for blockchain’s everyday adoption lies less in the maturity of the technology than in the utility consumers actually feel. If users do not see blockchain as dramatically more convenient or advantageous than existing methods, there is no reason to choose it, even if the technology itself becomes invisible. That is why startups often talk about a “10x improvement.” Put differently, a twofold or threefold improvement is usually not enough to break established habits and change user behavior.
A recent analysis by the Korea Institute of Finance shows that gap clearly. Even if 90% of domestic merchants were assumed to accept a won-denominated stablecoin, the expected usage rate was only 4.4% without separate incentives. Credit cards already combine broad merchant acceptance with discounts, installment plans and dispute-resolution systems. Lower settlement costs for businesses alone do not prompt consumers to switch payment methods.
That is why early utility is more likely to emerge in areas with more friction than domestic retail payments. The greater the friction, the larger the benefit users can feel when it is removed. Cross-border remittances, corporate settlement, micropayments for content and machine-to-machine, or M2M, transactions are among the clearest examples. Visa said that as of March, its annualized stablecoin settlement volume was about $7 billion. At the same time, it emphasized that the technology would be connected in modular form rather than used to replace existing systems wholesale. The approach reflects a push for change based on proven demand while opting for incremental improvements grounded in market realities instead of trying to replace the entire payments market.
M2M payments make that potential even clearer. In today’s payment networks, which rely on multiple intermediaries, it is difficult to process transactions such as a sensor buying a single data point, a car paying instantly for the exact amount of electricity it has charged, or an AI agent paying a few Korean won each time it calls an API. Fixed costs are high enough that, for micropayments, payment fees and settlement costs can exceed the purchase amount itself.
Stablecoin-based protocols, by contrast, can sharply reduce the cost of micropayments by minimizing intermediary steps. The industry is already testing usage-based billing and real-time settlement. Even so, that does not mean a new market has already been established. Real-world issues still need to be resolved, including who will delegate how much payment authority to a device, how payments caused by malfunction can be reversed, and who should bear responsibility.
That is where identity technology takes on a larger role. Combining decentralized identity, or DID, with zero-knowledge proofs makes selective verification possible, such as confirming that a user is an adult without disclosing a full date of birth. South Korea’s mobile ID system shows that digital credentials can be applied to everyday services. But data sovereignty cannot be secured simply by putting personal information on a blockchain. The original data must be safely separated, users must control the scope of disclosure, and institutions must be in place to address loss and theft.
The same is true in loyalty, content and brand intellectual property. Tokenized memberships can let users redeem rewards across multiple platforms, automate revenue sharing for creators, and offer “phygital” experiences that connect physical goods with digital authentication. Pudgy Penguins, which started with nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, has shown that potential through efforts to expand its intellectual property across physical toys, major retail distribution networks and games. Korean Wave content, including K-pop, is also well suited to phygital models because purchase histories for albums, concert tickets and limited-edition merchandise can be linked to global fan memberships.
It is also worth revisiting failures. Some creator-coin and NFT-based fandom experiments failed to retain users as attention shifted away from the value of the content itself and toward token prices and short-term rewards. Interoperability for points across platforms is not something technology alone can deliver either. For companies to connect their customers with other platforms, share the cost of point settlement and exchange user data, they need a clear business incentive that justifies those trade-offs. Only when those interests align and an ecosystem and community take shape does blockchain have room to establish itself. Points and rewards that can be used across multiple platforms may be an asset for consumers, but for issuers they can also create accounting, regulatory and liability-management burdens. The benefits must outweigh those costs.
In the end, at least three conditions are needed for invisible blockchain to work in the real world. First is a benefit consumers can clearly feel. Second is a structure for accountability when something goes wrong. Third is interoperability linking companies and platforms. If even one is missing, a “frictionless experience” is likely to remain little more than a smooth on-screen demonstration.
South Korea presents both opportunity and a high bar. Mobile payments and digital finance are already highly convenient, making it difficult for the mere use of blockchain to become a competitive advantage. Instead, the technology will need to prove its utility in areas where friction remains high, such as overseas settlement, creator revenue sharing, fandom memberships and product authentication. That is also where the strengths of Korean industry, from content and brand intellectual property to sophisticated consumer-finance mobile apps, can come into play.
That is also why Eastpoint: Seoul 2026, the global conference co-hosted by Hashed, Bloomingbit and the Korea Economic Daily, is making blockchain in everyday life a central agenda item. What is needed now is not a longer list of future use cases. It is proof of which problems blockchain can solve with utility that is actually more than 10 times better than existing methods.
The question for judging blockchain’s mass adoption is not how many people have created wallets. It is how many people have gained access to better services without even noticing they were using blockchain. Mass adoption begins when people forget they are using blockchain at all.
Jung Seok-moon, head of research at Presto Research
