The Future of Digital Assets and Capital Markets: Choices Facing the United States and Korea

Bitcoin's very first block carries a 2009 newspaper headline announcing a bank bailout. In the depths of the financial crisis — at the very moment when collapsing banks were being bailed out by taxpayers' money — Satoshi inscribed the headline permanently into the code. The message was unmistakable: If the institutions entrusted with our confidence could no longer be trusted, we needed a form of money that was trustless yet accountable. A ledger that could be maintained, not by a single bank, but distributed across participants, and secured through verification. That is how the digital assets we know today began, outside the fences of traditional finance. But over time, that philosophy faded. DeFi was spent as a meme for speculation, and what actually endured was the stablecoin: the dollar moved onto a blockchain. A technology built to challenge the financial establishment, in the end, seemed to be absorbed to make that establishment run faster. Today we are confronting something remarkably different. Today, on-chain prediction markets translate public sentiment into real, committed capital. Over the weekend, platforms like Hyperliquid determine reference prices for regulated markets before traditional exchanges open. Even major Korean stocks are traded around the clock on DeFi platforms through synthetic structures that bypass traditional custody. Traditional and decentralized finance have become strangely complementary—co-creating an entirely new financial ecosystem that neither could have achieved alone. Confronted with the same developments, Korea and the United States have arrived at strikingly different conclusions. Korea continues to regard them as innovation and risk in equal measure. The United States, through its most recent legislation, has moved beyond the containment of that risk to weigh a more fundamental proposition: that resilience derives not from the presence of a central controller but from the distribution of responsibility, and that such distribution can itself constitute a more durable foundation for trust. It is against the recognition of this transition that we convened this policy symposium with the Solana Policy Institute. Our purpose was to examine the diverging trajectories of the two countries and their differences, to understand how decentralized finance and public blockchains can be reconciled with existing regulatory frameworks.