Bank of Korea Governor Shin Vows Close Watch on Foreign Crypto Card Payments Estimated at $10 Billion

Shin Hyun-song Pledges Closer Oversight

Bank of Korea Governor Shin Hyun-song said foreign-issued crypto cards carry several distinct risks and promised closer oversight, speaking on Monday at the National Assembly Strategy and Finance Committee audit held at the central bank. His answer came in response to questioning from Democratic Party lawmaker Kim Nam-jun about the spread of these products in South Korea. Shin's core concern was structural: the entities behind the cards are all located overseas and the products are built mainly on dollar stablecoins, which places them outside the reach of domestic payment supervision. He told the committee he would monitor the sector closely, improve the information base available to regulators and pursue consultations with the related agencies. A crypto card is a payment card that draws on Bitcoin (BTC) or stablecoin balances instead of a bank account. Shin described the settlement chain: the cardholder's holdings are converted into legal tender at the checkout, so the Bitcoin (BTC) price at that moment determines the won amount the merchant receives, and an additional intermediary sits between the buyer and the payment network. That extra step, he said, makes the fees noticeably higher than on conventional payment methods, and he acknowledged the regulatory-arbitrage concerns raised during the session. The figures put forward in the same hearing showed why the central bank is paying attention. Kim told the committee that domestic stablecoin trading averaged roughly 200 billion won per day as of July, and that cumulative payments made with crypto cards on overseas platforms are estimated to have reached $10 billion, or about 1.341 trillion won. Against that scale, he argued, the actual volume of card-based payments inside South Korea is essentially unmeasured: neither the Bank of Korea nor the Financial Services Commission could tell the committee how much residents spend through these products. Kim said he had asked the central bank to hand over relevant data and was told it had no legal basis to do so. He also pointed to the marketing around the cards on social media, where promoters advertise 20% discounts on artificial-intelligence service subscriptions and $20 in monthly cashback, and where some posts pitch customs avoidance on overseas purchases as a money-saving tip. The dollar stablecoins underneath these cards settle on-chain through smart contract infrastructure that runs on foreign systems, precisely the layer domestic statistics do not capture.

Dollar Flows, Frozen Accounts and Customs Gaps

Lawmakers laid out the consumer-side exposure in detail. When a resident holds digital assets on a foreign exchange and pays with its card, the purchase may happen in Korea while the settlement is paid out in dollars to the card company abroad, leaving domestic consumption and money flows hard to trace; Kim argued that both Korean and foreign card spending must be captured in statistics and supervision. The model also differs from conventional rails such as Visa , where the acquiring chain sits inside a licensed jurisdiction and disputes have a domestic counterparty. Consumer protection is the sharper problem: if the overseas exchange or card issuer freezes an account or collapses into bankruptcy, a Korean user may struggle to recover funds at all, and losses from hacking, unauthorized payments or refund disputes may fall outside the protection of domestic financial authorities, since the assets sit in exchange custody rather than in a cold wallet under the holder's own control. Kim raised a customs angle as well: purchases of high-value goods, alcohol or luxury items abroad may not surface in domestic financial transaction data, opening a blind spot around customs declarations. He called the combination serious enough to demand a joint response from the Bank of Korea and the financial authorities.

A Monitoring Pledge Without a Data Mandate

The load-bearing fact in Monday's session is the admission, not the pledge. A monitoring commitment and inter-agency consultations address information flows, yet the central bank itself told the committee it lacked the legal grounds to hand over the data Kim requested, which means the oversight gap is statutory rather than organizational. The arithmetic behind the concern is straightforward: a $10 billion cumulative overseas payment figure against a domestic stablecoin market of roughly 200 billion won a day implies settlement is running on offshore rails that Korean statistics and supervision do not reach. The data-collection mandate, not the card itself, looks set to become the concrete legislative ask that follows this hearing.