Ethereum (ETH) Co-Founder Lubin in Partnership Talks With Korean Financial Institutions

Consensys Opens a Korean Front

Joseph Lubin, chief executive of Consensys and co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), confirmed on Sept. 30 that his company is in active discussions with South Korean financial institutions over a collaboration in digital assets — while ruling out any near-term plan to open a MetaMask or Consensys office in the country. Lubin delivered the remarks in an on-site interview at Korea Blockchain Week 2026, staged at the Grand Walkerhill Seoul in Gwangjin-gu, his first return to the Korean market in seven years. He cast the outreach as part of an institutional pivot: Consensys has spent more than a decade building core Ethereum network infrastructure, and its financial-institution business, he said, is expanding rapidly as regulatory clarity first established in the United States spreads globally. The conversation also yielded a concrete datapoint on Korean demand. Lubin said he met Tiger Research the day before, and that the firm told him MetaMask is the most used and most trusted wallet in Korea, holding a considerable gap over the second-place wallet. Even so, a local base “is not going to happen right now,” he said, noting that Consensys runs a deliberately small global office footprint and already employs Korean-speaking staff. He described Korea's blockchain community as exceptionally active and retail-centric — the same market where KDDI recently launched an Ethereum wallet inside au PAY — and said Consensys will keep engaging local developers and influencers. The MetaMask separation, he explained, followed a year in which the retail wallet and Consensys's institutional protocol business diverged, each needing its own leadership, talent and capital priorities. He reframed MetaMask's traditional-finance expansion as institutions arriving on the stack — commodities, currencies, foreign exchange, stocks, bonds and prediction markets — turning the wallet into a “personal money operating system.” On the protocol layer, he argued that Ethereum, built for more than 12 years and operating without interruption for over 11, will extend its Layer 1 trust base to Ethereum Layer 2 networks, including private, Ethereum-based L2s run by financial institutions and, eventually, governments.

Rayls Builds Bank-Grade EVM Rails

While Lubin worked the halls in Seoul, a separate announcement underscored the same institutional demand from the infrastructure side. Rayls, a firm building blockchain infrastructure for regulated finance, has put its Sovereign platform at the center of a push to move banks and securities firms on-chain. Sovereign is an EVM-compatible blockchain that each institution deploys and operates inside its own environment — on-premise or in a private cloud — keeping the ledger, transaction data and keys under the institution's direct control. That design answers the constraint that has kept traditional finance off public blockchains: client assets and data must be protected, and know-your-customer, anti-money-laundering, trading-restriction and audit requirements preserved. On a Sovereign ledger, institutions can issue and transfer tokenized deposits, securities and receivables, and run payment and settlement workflows, with smart contracts automatically executing trading conditions, asset freezes and transfer limits. Rayls designed the platform to integrate with existing core-banking, KYC and treasury systems, so institutions can migrate assets and workflows in stages rather than replacing their stacks — a privacy-preserving approach that rhymes with what projects like Aztec are testing on an Ethereum Layer 2. The architecture is deliberately three-tiered: each institution's own Sovereign ledger; a private network linking institutions for interbank trading and settlement; and a connection to a public chain for assets that need outside investors and on-chain liquidity. The company's own announcement frames Sovereign not as a wholesale replacement for legacy finance but as a staged route for regulated institutions to reach on-chain markets, landing amid rapid growth in stablecoins, tokenized securities and real-world assets. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

Institutional Ethereum's Next Test

Read together, the two stories trace a single arc: the institutionalization of Ethereum. Lubin's on-record remarks in Seoul and Rayls's official announcement both treat the EVM standard as the landing zone for regulated capital — one through a consumer gateway in one of Asia's most retail-active markets, the other through bank-grade private ledgers. Lubin's own words at KBW state that Ethereum has been built for more than 12 years and has run without interruption for over 11 under its proof-of-stake security model — a durability claim institutions now appear ready to price. Our Ethereum coverage will track whether the Korean discussions harden into a signed deal, and whether any bank puts a Sovereign-class ledger into production.