A Basic Law on State Assets would put virtual assets and IP on the books beside land and buildings — with its start date and coverage still unsettled.
South Korea plans to bring cryptocurrencies and intellectual property inside the legal definition of a national asset, overhauling the 76-year-old system it has used to manage public property around land and buildings.
The vehicle is a Basic Law on State Assets. At a July 15 policy briefing, the finance ministry said it plans to formulate the bill. The law would govern public holdings now worth more than 1,400 trillion won, and officials describe it as a shift in the state's job — away from conserving, selling off or building up property, and toward what they call value creation.
Under the planned structure, patents, copyrights, the equity stakes the government holds in companies, and virtual assets would each get management suited to them. A finance ministry official said the scope of what counts as state property now reaches intellectual property and financial holdings. A task force drawing on both public and private members will steer the bill through the legislative process, and is expected to review how virtual assets should be written into the statute — an area the current rules have largely ignored.
The redefinition sits inside a broader effort to build blockchain into public finance. The government intends to pilot tokenized sovereign bonds in 2027, connected to the digital currency system run by the Bank of Korea. It has also said it would test tokenized deposits to cover day-to-day government spending, with full adoption targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026. And revisions to the Capital Markets Act and the Electronic Securities Act take full effect on Feb. 4, 2027, giving blockchain-based ledgers legal standing as valid registers of securities.
South Korea has begun folding virtual assets into the management of public wealth, a step that comes as lawmakers work to close the distance between the country and the United States, the EU and Japan on crypto rules and supervision.
Much of the detail, though, is still open. The task force and the ministries involved have yet to settle the date the new state-asset law would take effect, or precisely which virtual assets fall under it. The country's second round of crypto legislation has already slipped past the first-quarter deadline it set itself, held up by elections and a stalled National Assembly.
For participants in global markets, Seoul is offering a direction of travel rather than a finished regulatory blueprint: crypto threaded through sovereign bonds, treasury payments and the legal definition of national assets, while the central legislation on market structure remains in drafting.