Kakaopay partners with Dinari, Ondo to explore tokenized Korean stocks

South Korea’s Kakaopay Securities is partnering with tokenization firms Dinari and Ondo Finance to explore bringing Korean-listed stocks onchain and distributing them to investors in international markets.

Kakaopay announced separate agreements with Dinari and Ondo on Tuesday, covering the sourcing of underlying Korean shares, tokenization infrastructure and their potential distribution outside South Korea.

Under the Dinari partnership, the companies will run a proof of concept using Dinari’s dShares model, which is designed to preserve applicable shareholder rights, including dividends and voting. Dinari offers 724 tokenized US stocks and ETFs through dShares, with the Kakaopay partnership exploring an extension of the model to Korean-listed equities.

Dinari CEO Gabe Otte told Cointelegraph that no specific Korean-listed companies have been selected for the proof of concept and that it has not set a public timeline for commercial availability. The proposed model would use locally listed Korean shares as the underlying assets rather than tokens that simply track their prices, he said.

Kakaopay’s agreement with Ondo will initially focus on establishing a framework for sourcing and custodying Korean-listed shares that could later be tokenized. Kakaopay would operate a foreign investor omnibus account to hold and administer the underlying shares.