South Korea Moves to Unify Crypto Law as Tax Repeal Fight Runs in Parallel

South Korea is trying to solve its crypto regulation puzzle with one bill instead of ten, while a separate fight over taxing crypto income plays out on a different track entirely.

One Bill to Replace Ten

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission is preparing a government-backed Digital Asset Basic Act intended to consolidate ten separate crypto and stablecoin bills currently sitting before lawmakers into a single unified framework. The proposal would cover stablecoin issuance and circulation, digital asset business licensing, exchange entry requirements, disclosure obligations, internal controls, and system-resilience standards all under one law.

Two disputes are holding up faster progress: whether won-denominated stablecoin issuers should be required to be majority bank-owned, and whether ownership limits should be placed on major crypto exchanges. Both questions get at the same underlying tension regulators everywhere face — how much of crypto’s financial infrastructure should be required to look like traditional banking, versus how much room to leave for crypto-native structures.

A Separate Fight Over Crypto Taxes

Running in parallel, South Korea’s National Assembly is considering an opposition-backed bill that would repeal the country’s planned crypto income tax entirely, deleting the provision that would tax income from transferring or lending digital assets. That tax is currently scheduled to take effect January 1, 2027, giving lawmakers a real deadline to resolve the disagreement one way or the other before then.

The tax repeal push and the Digital Asset Basic Act are moving on separate legislative tracks, but both reflect the same broader political reality: South Korea has an unusually large, highly engaged retail crypto trading population, and lawmakers on multiple sides are actively competing over how that constituency’s interests get represented in law.

What Happens Next

Lawmakers expect the Digital Asset Basic Act to pass sometime in the second half of 2026, though the specific ownership and licensing disputes could still shift the final shape of the bill. The tax repeal bill’s fate is less certain and depends heavily on which coalition has the votes when the Finance and Economic Planning Committee actually takes it up.

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