KG Inicis Signs MOU With Solana Foundation to Bring Stablecoin Payments to Korea's Largest Merchant Network

KG Inicis, the company that processes roughly four in ten South Korean online transactions, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Solana on June 22 at KG Tower in Seoul to test stablecoin payments across its merchant network on Solana mainnet.

The company's payment gateway handles more than 400 million transactions annually across approximately 190,000 merchants, according to a March 2026 Crypto.com partnership announcement. KG Financial — KG Inicis's parent entity — is the formal MOU signatory, with Solana Foundation President Lily Liu and KG Financial CEO Yoo Seung-yong signing the agreement, per The Elec.

Four Use Cases Under the MOU

The scope goes beyond a pilot checkout test. According to KG Inicis's official announcement, the parties plan to develop and test four distinct payment models on Solana mainnet:

• Online stablecoin checkout payments
• Recurring subscription billing
• Split-approval payments, where a single transaction is divided across multiple merchants
• Tokenized loyalty and reward programs redeemable across participating businesses

That last use case addresses a common friction point in Korean e-commerce: merchant loyalty points that are siloed within individual programs and cannot be used elsewhere. A cross-merchant tokenized reward layer on Solana would allow customers to earn and redeem points across all merchants in the network rather than accumulating fragmented balances.

The parties also framed stablecoin settlement as a way to cut costs and processing time for overseas merchants compared to traditional bank-intermediated channels. Discussions began in April 2026 and included joint proof-of-concept work that the two sides said confirmed commercial and technical feasibility before the MOU was signed, per The Elec. A commercialization timeline remains contingent on regulatory framework development in South Korea.

Part of a Broader Korea-Solana Wave

The KG Inicis agreement arrived one day after Toss Bank signed its own MOU with the Solana Foundation for a stablecoin cross-border remittance proof of concept. Where the Toss Bank deal targets the banking and remittance layer, KG Inicis addresses the merchant-payments layer: the infrastructure that sits between consumers and online sellers at checkout.

USDC (USDC) is the primary stablecoin running on Solana. South Korea is separately developing a stablecoin regulatory framework under forthcoming Digital Asset Phase 2 legislation, which has drawn participation from major Korean banks and fintech companies.

The KG Inicis network's scale gives the MOU immediate practical weight. A successful stablecoin checkout pilot across its merchant network would be one of the largest real-economy deployments of blockchain-based payments in Asia.