South Korea’s Shinhan Asset Management, which manages roughly 133.6 trillion won ($96.6 billion) and is a subsidiary of Shinhan Financial Group, signed a four-party memorandum of understanding with the Solana Foundation, tokenization platform Etherfuse and decentralized exchange Orca to run a proof-of-concept Korean won-denominated tokenized fund on a public blockchain for overseas institutional investors. The structure under review would let foreign institutions buy into a Shinhan-managed KRW ultra-short-term bond fund whose underlying holdings are issued in tokenized form, with partners examining know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering frameworks, security audits, blockchain operations, regulatory compliance and on-chain liquidity design; fund size, expected yield and a public launch date have not been disclosed. The company said it modeled the initiative after BlackRock’s tokenized fund BUIDL. National Assembly amendments passed in January 2026 and promulgated the following month established a legal framework for security token offerings and are scheduled to take effect in February 2027, prompting several Korean financial institutions to prepare tokenized securities services, while the Ministry of Finance and Economy launched a deposit-token pilot in April 2026. CEO Lee Seok-won said Shinhan aims to secure capabilities that can be activated when the system goes live and to lead KRW-based digital financial products. An RWA.io report cited in the announcement put the global tokenized real-world asset market excluding stablecoins at about $36.27 billion, up roughly 2,200% from 2020.