The Age of the Agentic Economy: A Strategy for the Korean Won Stablecoin

刻舟求劍 (Gakjugugeom). A man drops his sword from a boat and cuts a notch in the gunwale to mark where it fell. The boat drifts on, the notch stays where it was cut, and the sword is never found. The boat has already moved, but the rule remains fixed at the mark. In Korea, the debate over a won stablecoin has centered on two questions. Who will issue, and how will it circulate. Both questions matter in themselves. But measured against a world in which countries are already transplanting new financial infrastructure through a wide range of rules and experiments, neither can be treated as the question that decides whether a Korean won stablecoin succeeds. The question this report puts lies one layer beneath them. Who owns the chokepoints of digital settlement, and in what currency are transactions settled once they pass through. The first concerns ownership of the settlement infrastructure. The second concerns the standard currency that will circulate on top of it. The task facing the won is not to push dollar stablecoins out of the general market. Given network effects, that path has little prospect of success. What matters instead is to target the narrow positions the dollar cannot structurally fill, namely cases where the counterparty to settlement belongs to the Korean economy and cases where regulatory compliance becomes an asset rather than a cost. The instrument for doing so is not whether issuance is permitted but how the licensing regime is designed. The stage on which the default settlement currency is hardening fastest is the agentic economy, in which artificial intelligence agents carry out payments on their own without human intervention. Over the past year, 98.6 percent of the payments executed by agents settled in a single dollar stablecoin. That convergence is not a technical inevitability, however. It is path dependence shaped by initial conditions, and it is not yet complete. The window for the won to secure a place of its own is open here, and it narrows with time. This report analyzes the value structure of the settlement layer and the dynamics of settlement currency in the emerging agentic economy, and on that basis sets out directions for institutional design that Korea might consider.