Stablecoins Move From Crypto Side Hustle to Core Financial Infrastructure, Korean Book Says

Stablecoins are being pushed out of the “crypto side hustle” bucket and into the plumbing of modern finance, with a new Korean-language book arguing they’re less like speculative tokens and more like core financial infrastructure.

• Core thesis: stablecoins as a financial operating system, not just crypto assets
• Big claim: stablecoin payment volumes have reportedly surpassed Visa and Mastercard
• Korea focus: a KRW stablecoin could reshape payments, exchanges, and digital currency sovereignty
• Future angle: AI agents, programmable finance, and “algorithmic corporations”

Core Stablecoin — The Wealth Map Changed by PayFi and AI is scheduled to hit shelves in late May through Kyobo Book Centre, YES24, and Aladin. It’s co-authored by Jae-hyun Park, a former Samsung Electronics executive who helped develop Samsung Pay, and Ji-su Park, CEO of Sooho.io and an early contributor to Upbit’s development. That combination matters: this is not coming from the usual “number go up” crowd. It’s coming from people who understand payments, infrastructure, and the awkward little details that decide whether money moves smoothly or gets stuck in compliance purgatory.

Stablecoins are getting a new label: infrastructure

At the center of the book’s argument is a blunt reframe: stablecoins are “not an extension of crypto, but a redesign of financial infrastructure.” In plain English, stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to track the value of fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar or Korean won. They’re built to move value without the wild volatility that makes bitcoin a terrible everyday unit of account but an excellent monetary asset.

The authors go further, describing stablecoins as a “financial operating system” and a “core layer” that unifies “money, payments, settlement, and credit.” That’s a big claim, but it’s not coming out of thin air. Stablecoins are already being used for cross-border transfers, merchant settlement, treasury management, and tokenized finance. The punchline is simple: the thing most critics dismissed as “crypto trash” is increasingly acting like payment infrastructure. The joke’s getting old, and the rails are getting real.

One headline-grabbing claim cited in the book is that annual stablecoin payment processing has already surpassed Visa and Mastercard. That comparison needs a little caution. The metric matters a lot here: are we talking transaction count, total value settled, or some broader payment processing measure? Without that context, the number can sound more impressive than it is. Still, the broader point stands: stablecoins are no longer a niche settlement tool used only by traders on exchanges.

That’s a meaningful shift. A technology becomes politically and economically important the moment it stops being a toy and starts becoming infrastructure. Once that happens, the conversation changes from “is this cool?” to “who controls it, who benefits, and who gets screwed if it breaks?”

Why Korea is paying attention

The book’s Korean lens is where things get especially interesting. Korea has a mature fintech sector, strong retail awareness of crypto, and a regulatory environment that already shapes how digital assets interact with banks. The authors point to the Act on Reporting and Using Specified Financial Transaction Information, along with network separation requirements and bank-linked payment structures, as part of the system that governs digital asset activity.

For readers not living inside compliance manuals: those rules determine how digital money can interact with the banking system, what kind of reporting is required, and how much friction gets baked into the rails. Network separation, for example, is the kind of thing that sounds boring until you realize it can make integration between banking infrastructure and blockchain systems a bureaucratic headache. In finance, “boring” usually means “expensive and slow.”

That’s why a KRW stablecoin is such a loaded idea. The book calls it “a rare opportunity for Korea to secure digital currency sovereignty.” That phrase deserves unpacking. Digital currency sovereignty means keeping control over the money rails, settlement mechanisms, and infrastructure standards instead of outsourcing them to foreign issuers, offshore systems, or closed corporate platforms. If value is increasingly moving as code, then the people who design the code can quietly end up steering the economy.

A domestically backed stablecoin could strengthen Korea’s financial infrastructure and give local businesses a cleaner settlement asset. It could also reduce reliance on foreign currency rails for domestic commerce and cross-border payments. But the downside is just as real: it could undermine domestic exchanges, squeeze existing intermediaries, and concentrate power in whichever entities are allowed to issue and control the new token. Disruption is great until the middlemen notice their rent is disappearing.

Banks won’t die. They’ll mutate.

One of the more grounded arguments here is that banks won’t vanish. They’ll evolve. The authors suggest stablecoins and programmable finance will take over more of the settlement and transfer layer, but banks will still matter. What changes is the role. Instead of being defined mainly by branches, legacy payment systems, and slow-moving ledgers, banks may become infrastructure providers tied more closely to code, trust, and settlement access.

That’s a much more realistic take than the usual “banks are doomed” fan fiction. Banks are not going to be vaporized by a whitepaper. They do, however, face a serious threat if stablecoin rails become faster, cheaper, and more globally interoperable than traditional payment systems. If the new pipes are better, the old ones don’t get a participation trophy.

This is also where a lot of stablecoin hype runs into reality. Stablecoins still depend on trust, reserve quality, redemption access, and often the very banking system they’re supposed to disintermediate. That means they come with their own centralization tradeoffs. Freeze functions, blacklist controls, reserve opacity, and depegging risk are not hypothetical bogeymen. They’re part of the package in many stablecoin models. Convenient for compliance, maybe. Reassuring for users? Not always.

PayFi, programmable money, and Solidity

The book also digs into PayFi, shorthand for payments integrated directly into programmable finance. In simple terms, PayFi is what happens when payments are no longer just transfers from point A to point B, but programmable actions that can carry rules, conditions, and automated logic inside them.

That matters because programmable money can settle instantly, trigger automatically, and move across systems without the delays and manual reconciliation that plague legacy finance. It also means the attack surface gets bigger. If money is code, then bad code becomes a financial problem. There’s no free lunch, just faster lunch delivery with more ways for things to go off the rails.

The inclusion of Solidity example code is a useful signal. Solidity is the smart contract language widely used on Ethereum and similar networks. Adding code examples suggests the authors want readers to understand not only the policy and market implications, but also the technical architecture underneath stablecoins and programmable finance. That’s a good move. The future of money is not built on vibes alone, no matter how many conference panels pretend otherwise.

AI agents change the payments question again

One of the book’s most forward-looking sections deals with the AI agent economy. If autonomous software agents begin making purchases, managing treasury functions, or negotiating services with other machines, then payments have to be redesigned around machine-to-machine commerce.

That creates a mess of new questions. Who owns the wallet? Who authorizes the agent? How is liability assigned if it spends too much or sends funds somewhere stupid? How do you prove an AI agent is acting within permission? These are not science fiction edge cases. They’re real design issues as AI systems become more capable and more economically active.

The authors’ answer includes the concept of algorithmic corporations — entities that would hold wallets, allocate capital, and operate under defined responsibility frameworks. Think of them as programmable organizations built for machine-speed commerce. Not exactly the stuff of cozy boardroom chats, but absolutely the kind of thing that starts to matter when software is making economic decisions at scale.

That’s where stablecoins become more than just a payment tool. They become the settlement layer for autonomous commerce. If machines are going to transact, they need money that is programmable, fast, borderless, and ideally less annoying than legacy rails. Stablecoins fit that job much better than ACH, card networks, or some overloaded bank API held together by hope and regulatory duct tape.

Wall Street is already sniffing around

The book also references BlackRock ($BLK) and JPMorgan Chase ($JPM) pursuing tokenized U.S. Treasury initiatives. That’s an important reminder that traditional finance is not sitting out the tokenization game. It’s joining it, and in some cases trying to own the whole field before the decentralized crowd even gets the first base.

That’s not necessarily bad. Institutional involvement can bring liquidity, legitimacy, and faster adoption. It can also bring the usual baggage: control, gatekeeping, surveillance, and the kind of “innovation” that mostly serves the institutions themselves. Wall Street loves blockchain when it improves settlement or opens up new yield products. It loves it even more when the rails are programmable enough to lock users into its own gravity well.

The real tension: freedom versus capture

Stablecoins have enormous upside. They can lower the cost of payments, make cross-border transfers more efficient, expand access to dollar-like assets, and create a more open settlement layer for global commerce. For a lot of people, especially in countries with weak currencies or broken banking access, that’s not abstract tech talk. That’s freedom with a transaction receipt.

But the downsides are just as important. Many stablecoins are centralized, dependent on issuers, custodians, and banking partners. That means censorship risk is real. So is reserve risk. So is regulatory capture. If the “decentralized future” ends up being a new stack of permissioned rails controlled by the same handful of banks and compliance gatekeepers, then the revolution has been repackaged, not won.

That’s why the book’s argument that regulation should be designed rather than blindly prohibitive matters. Smart regulation can create clarity, safety, and interoperability. Dumb regulation just pushes activity into offshore corners, favors incumbents, and pretends that the internet can be put back in the bottle. Good luck with that.

“not an extension of crypto, but a redesign of financial infrastructure”

“a rare opportunity for Korea to secure digital currency sovereignty”

Stablecoins are “not ‘coins’ but a unified core layer for money, payments, settlement, and credit.”

Key questions and takeaways

What is the main argument about stablecoins?

Stablecoins are being framed as essential financial infrastructure, not just crypto assets. The point is that they now function as a programmable settlement and payments layer.

Why are stablecoins important now?

Their usage has grown enough that payment volumes are being compared to Visa and Mastercard. That signals real-world utility beyond speculation.

What could a KRW stablecoin change in Korea?

It could alter payments, settlement, and exchange dynamics while strengthening Korea’s digital currency sovereignty. It could also threaten some domestic intermediaries that depend on the current setup.

Why are regulators and central banks uneasy?

Because stablecoins can bypass traditional payment intermediaries and monetary controls, raising issues around compliance, reserve safety, redemption, and systemic risk.

Will banks disappear?

No. They’re more likely to evolve into a different kind of infrastructure provider, with code and trust taking over more of the heavy lifting.

How does AI fit into this?

AI agents may soon make purchases, manage funds, and handle payments autonomously. That requires new models for identity, wallets, permissions, and liability.

What are “algorithmic corporations”?

They’re proposed digital entities that can hold wallets, allocate capital, and operate under defined responsibility frameworks for machine-driven commerce.

Is regulation being rejected?

No. The argument is for regulation by design instead of blanket prohibition. That’s a more serious approach than pretending innovation can be banned out of existence.

What’s the biggest risk if stablecoins become core infrastructure?

Centralization. If the rails are controlled by a small group of issuers, banks, or regulators, stablecoins could end up reinforcing the same power structures they were supposed to weaken.

Stablecoins are no longer just a crypto market convenience. They’re becoming part of the financial backbone: settlement layer, programmable finance layer, and possibly the payment layer for both humans and machines. That makes them exciting, useful, and politically loaded all at once. Built well, they can expand access and efficiency. Built badly, they become a shinier set of rails for the old gatekeepers to control.