South Korea's central bank digital currency, Project Hangang: nine banks, 500 thousand wallets, and an opposition leader's privacy warning — what is documented

A central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is money issued by a central bank in digital form. The phrase covers two very different designs. In a retail design, people hold accounts or wallets with the central bank directly. In a wholesale design, the central bank issues digital money only to commercial banks, and the public deals with those banks as before. South Korea's Project Hangang is the second kind. On 14 September 2026 it drew a public warning from the country's main opposition party. This article records both the warning and the project it is aimed at.

Crypto.news reported at 06:59 UTC on 14 September that Jang Dong-hyeok, leader of the opposition People Power Party, had issued a statement opposing the introduction of a CBDC. Two sentences are quoted verbatim.

The first: "I strongly oppose the introduction of CBDC until legal and institutional safeguards are perfectly established so that the public can feel safe."

The second: "While there is a view that CBDC is a new technology capable of enhancing payment convenience and efficiency, we should not rush into it solely because of its convenience."

According to the same report, Jang raised four questions: who would have the authority to track transactions, whether spending could be restricted, whether digital money could carry an expiry date, and whether consumers would keep the choice of how to pay. He did not, in the reporting we have seen, cite a specific provision of the pilot that does any of those things. The questions are about what a CBDC could be designed to do, not about what Project Hangang has been shown to do.

The Bank of Korea's project, as described by Crypto.news, is wholesale central-bank money supporting tokenised deposits issued by commercial banks. Consumers do not get a central-bank account.

Phase one ran from April to June 2025. Seven banks took part, with up to 100 thousand participants.

Phase two began in 2026. It expanded to nine banks, added peer-to-peer transfers and biometric authentication, and set a ceiling of up to 500 thousand wallets. The nine banks named in the report are KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Woori, Hana, Industrial Bank of Korea, NongHyup, Busan, BNK Kyongnam and iM Bank.

The report also cites a 9.6 billion won programme supporting deposit-token payments. At the exchange rates of mid-September 2026 that is a modest sum for a national payments experiment; we do not convert it, because the source does not, and the figure's purpose is scale rather than cost accounting.

The same policy roadmap pairs the deposit-token pilot with planned rules for won-denominated stablecoins. The Bank of Korea's position, as reported, is that regulated bank consortiums should lead won stablecoin issuance in the first instance. That is the point of contact between the two debates: a bank-issued tokenised deposit and a bank-issued stablecoin look similar to a user, and the question of which one the law prefers is, in practice, a question about who gets to run Korea's digital payment rails.

Readers who followed our record of the tokenised equities milestone on Base will recognise the same tension from the other side: private networks moving traditional assets on-chain, while public institutions decide how much of that to allow.

Three things are missing from the sources as of 14 September. A response from the Bank of Korea or the government to the opposition statement. Any published privacy-impact assessment of phase two, or a description of what transaction data the central bank sees under the wholesale design. And a date for any decision to move beyond the pilot; the reporting describes an experiment, not a launch.

The gap between "could" and "does" is where this story will be decided. A wholesale CBDC in which banks hold the customer relationship is, on paper, no more of a surveillance tool than the banking system that exists today. Whether that stays true depends on rules that, by the opposition leader's own account, have not been written.

Our company does not issue, hold or trade digital currencies, as the About page sets out. We document them. The Crypto Academy is where we teach the vocabulary of this field, so that words like stablecoin, tokenised deposit and CBDC stop being interchangeable; Market Observation carries the sourced market data behind the assets these policies touch. If the Bank of Korea publishes a phase-two report, we will read it and record what it says.

• Crypto.news, "South Korea CBDC plan draws warning over privacy risks", 14 September 2026, 06:59 UTC — Jang Dong-hyeok's two verbatim sentences, the four questions, the Project Hangang phase details, the nine banks, the 500 thousand wallet ceiling, the 9.6 billion won programme, the stablecoin roadmap and the Bank of Korea's stated position.

Educational content. Not investment advice.