A Unified Ledger in Practice: Lessons from Project Hangang (BoK)
Bank of Korea (BoK) Governor Hyun Song Shin presented a paper outlining the experiences and implications of “Project Hangang” at the ECB Forum on Central Banking in Sintra, Portugal. The paper argues that Hangang shows a unified ledger can implement tokenized reserves and deposits at scale while preserving a two‑tier monetary system and singleness of money, but only via specific architectural choices and unresolved institutional reforms. The project runs a permissioned digital currency system with wholesale central bank money natively issued on-ledger, burn‑and‑issue interbank transfers, and a strict separation of fungible currency tokens from a programmable voucher layer. Phase I demonstrated live retail and programmable public‑voucher use cases for around 80,000 users, but with crude, offline reconciliation to BOK‑Wire+ and pre‑funded liquidity. Phase II scales to ongoing operation and fiscal disbursements, while future work centers on tokenized government bonds, 24/7 intraday liquidity and cross‑border linkage via Project Agorá, contingent on clarifying the legal status of wholesale claims and the integrated liquidity framework. [ECB]
Financial Market Infrastructures Evolution in a Tokenized Economy (IMF)
The IMF published a paper by Cabedo, Mancini-Griffoli, Schar and Zhang that argues tokenization will reconfigure, rather than eliminate, financial market infrastructures by shifting deterministic lifecycle functions into smart contracts while preserving institutional responsibility for governance, legal certainty, and discretionary risk management. The paper maps issuance, clearing, settlement, and reporting onto single, common, and compatible ledger architectures, showing where atomic on‑chain execution can replace current post‑trade processes and where off‑chain or multi‑ledger coordination still dominates. It highlights new risks—smart‑contract design failures, oracle and bridge dependencies, governance concentration, and privacy trade‑offs—alongside persistent needs for central counterparties, depositories, and trade repositories to manage defaults, loss mutualization, finality, and supervisory access. The central unresolved issue is how law and regulation will define authoritative ledgers, recognize blockchain settlement, and specify accountable entities in hybrid FMI models. [IMF]
