[Inside Chodong] Machine Economy and the Digital Asset Basic Act

An era is coming when a few words will be all it takes to plan an overseas trip.

Enter only basic information, such as the dates and destination, and an artificial intelligence (AI) agent will use specialized travel-data AI agents to find the best combination, then complete the bookings through airline and hotel AI agents. All the traveler has to do is make the final payment.

A report by global asset manager BlackRock, "The Machine-Native Economy," predicts that AI will become an actor that makes economic decisions on behalf of people. Micropayments, including the fees exchanged between AIs, will have to rely on stablecoins. Using existing credit card networks could mean high fixed fees and settlement delays.

Meta's recently unveiled AI agent, Muse, showed that this new era may arrive sooner than expected. In addition to booking travel, sending emails and shopping online, it even found and canceled paid subscriptions users had forgotten about. For now, however, payments still use existing credit cards or digital payment services. Before long, M2M (machine-to-machine) micropayment services using stablecoins are expected to become part of the mix.

In its report, BlackRock redefined AI as "machine-native intelligence" and digital assets such as stablecoins as "machine-native money." The two industries are bound to go hand in hand. For AI agents working around the clock, seven days a week, through M2M transactions, existing bank and credit card payment networks are cumbersome because they charge high fees and delay settlement.

BlackRock noted that, as of last year, stablecoins' annual adjusted payment volume had already exceeded $11 trillion (approximately KRW 15 quadrillion), putting it on par with the scale of global payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard. To put it bluntly, stablecoins have already become a "reserve currency," at least in the AI agent economy.

The United States, with Wall Street's long-established giants such as BlackRock and innovative Big Tech companies such as Meta, is rapidly securing an early lead in setting global standards for the "machine economy." But the reality in South Korea, once known as an "IT powerhouse" for the past 20 years, is bleak. The Digital Asset Basic Act, or the second phase of legislation on virtual assets, which is expected to establish the legal framework for the settlement infrastructure, including the issuance, circulation, reserves and oversight of stablecoins, has been pushed down the National Assembly's list of priorities.

Some argue that the advantages of won-denominated stablecoins for micropayments are limited because South Korea has a dense card payment network. However, agents paying for overseas services and settlements between companies incur foreign exchange costs when converting through the U.S. dollar. Under the current regulatory vacuum, domestic companies face legal uncertainty when trying to commercialize new settlement services using stablecoins. As a result, overseas businesses could capture the entire market.

An era when a few words will be all it takes to plan an overseas trip is just around the corner.

If homegrown digital finance fails to take off in time, our economy will have no choice but to become dependent on foreign AI agents and overseas payment infrastructure. For South Korea to become an "AI powerhouse," the National Assembly must pass the Digital Asset Basic Act by the end of this year.

Jo Siyoung, Head of the Securities and Capital Markets Department

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.