Kakao Pay Securities Signs Ondo Finance (ONDO) MOU to Tokenize Korean Stocks

Ondo MOU Targets Overseas Distribution

Kakao Pay Securities signed a memorandum of understanding with Ondo Finance on September 29 to explore distributing tokenized versions of Korean-listed stocks to international investors, the brokerage's official announcement confirms. The cooperation spans three areas: building a framework for offshore circulation of Korean equities, joint research into the tokenization infrastructure that would support global distribution, and a shared task force to study retail-facing services for overseas individual investors. In the initial phase, the two firms intend to construct the scaffolding beneath any future token: Kakao Pay Securities would operate an omnibus account for foreign investors — a single account holding assets pooled from multiple participants — and handle sourcing, safekeeping and administration of the underlying shares, with secure custody arrangements spanning everything from omnibus accounts down to cold wallet storage. The parties will also jointly study issuance and redemption procedures and the reconciliation of balances between the original shares and their token representations. Any decision on commercialization, and its timing, remains open: the companies said they will weigh domestic and international regulation, supervisory guidance and investor-protection principles before deciding whether tokenized Korean equities reach the market at all. Kakao Pay Securities executive vice president Jeong In-young framed the gap the partnership aims to close, noting that global demand for exposure to Korean companies is rising quickly while channels open to overseas retail investors remain limited. By connecting Ondo Finance's distribution network — the firm describes itself as the world's largest stock-tokenization platform — with the brokerage's domestic market infrastructure, the partners aim to develop practical services for the international circulation of Korean equities. What was not disclosed matters as much as what was: the announcement sets no product design, no launch window and no list of eligible stocks, positioning the MOU as infrastructure groundwork rather than a product launch.

Dinari's dShares Model and Regulatory Tailwinds

The second MOU, with US-based tokenization infrastructure firm Dinari, attacks the same problem from the issuer side. Dinari's dShares model is custodial: each token is backed one-to-one by the corresponding original security and is designed to preserve shareholder rights such as dividends and voting — a structure comparable in spirit to wrapped assets like Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), which mirror an underlying asset on a different rail. The company operates as an SEC-registered transfer agent and in August made 724 tokenized US stocks and ETFs, including S&P 500 constituents, available to qualified US investors, with businesses able to access the system through an API; coverage extends to qualified investors across more than 85 jurisdictions, and execution is designed to preserve dividends, voting rights, corporate actions and NBBO execution with standard order types. The Kakao Pay Securities partnership would test whether that machinery can be applied to stocks listed on the Korea Exchange: the firms plan a framework for sourcing underlying shares, a proof-of-concept tokenization, and a joint task force covering the operational, technical and regulatory requirements of international distribution, including deployment of Dinari's partner network across the US and other overseas markets. The initiative remains at pilot stage — no spot trading market for tokenized Korean shares exists today. The regulatory backdrop is shifting in the experiment's favor. Korea's Financial Services Commission has said the domestic framework will move beyond fractional investment products to cover conventional securities such as stocks, bonds and funds, with amendments taking effect February 4, 2027 that treat security tokens as securities in digital form. In the US, the SEC's innovation exemption, introduced September 17, provides conditional temporary relief for trading venues handling tokenized NMS stocks through regulated automated market makers — the SEC's press release invites public comment on the framework. Market momentum is visible too: Binance Research estimates tokenized real-world assets at roughly $34.18 billion as of September 15, up 85.2% year over year, with tokenized equities surging 390.4% over the same period. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

Infrastructure First, Products Later

Read together, the two MOUs mark a deliberate move by a licensed Korean brokerage to position itself as the domestic custody-and-issuance node for a global tokenized-equity pipeline, rather than a crypto exchange bolting stocks onto its menu. The company's official announcement is explicit about the terms — two separate partnerships, a joint task force to be set up within the year, and shared research on issuance and redemption — and equally explicit about what remains undecided: whether Korean-listed stocks are ever commercialized as tokens, and on what timeline. For now, the deliverable is infrastructure and a proof of concept, with regulators in Seoul and Washington defining the lane these pilots must run in.