AVAX jumps after landing $200B South Korean giant in tokenized securities launch

The AVAX token of the Avalanche blockchain got a shot in the arm today after $200 billion South Korean giant, Hanwha Group’s brokerage arm, Hanwha Investment & Securities, announced that its tokenized securities platform is ready.

The news, confirmed by Avalanche, advances a South Korea-wide push to roll out full-scale tokenized securities trading with rules set to take effect in February 2027.

AVAX traded around $8.06, up 5.24% over 24 hours, with a market cap of $3.48 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

When did Hanwha launch its tokenized securities platforms?

The tokenized securities platform that Hanwha debuted in early September has been in development since 2025, with blockchain firm FairSquare Lab handling the build.

The brokerage firm designed the system to pair Avalanche’s public infrastructure with enterprise blockchain Hyperledger Besu, which has extensive penetration across the local South Korean finance sector.

Tokenized securities record capital market instruments, such as stocks and bonds, on a distributed ledger. Avalanche acknowledged the funnel that the launch opens, writing how the launch puts it at the center of bringing “traditional assets into global onchain markets.”

Hanwha itself has not published specific details of the platform to public users.

South Korea is building toward a February 2027 deadline

South Korea’s National Assembly passed amendments to legally recognize distributed ledgers as securities registers in the country as of February 4, 2027. The new regime was locked in mid-January when regulators gave the green light to the changes to the Electronic Securities Act and the Capital Markets Act.

As Cryptopolitan previously reported, Korea’s top financial regulator, the Financial Services Commission (FSC), plans to integrate blockchain-based issuance inside the existing financial system in a three-stage rollout.

• The first phase covers privately placed money-market funds, corporate bonds for institutional investors, unlisted stocks issued through a trust structure, and publicly offered fractional-investment securities.
• Later phases will focus on widening coverage to all publicly offered securities.
• Finally, direct settlement infrastructure built directly on-chain so investors can clear tokenized trades using stablecoins.

The Korea Securities Depository is building its own infrastructure, which will connect to Avalanche, Hyperledger Besu, and Hyperledger Fabric. Avalanche was included in the buildout based on popular demand by firms in a tokenized securities working group, per a depository official speaking to Seoul Economic Daily.

Hanwha’s wider tokenization bets

The Avalanche platform is one piece of a broader digital-asset push. The Hanwha Group has accumulated a 9.6% stake in tokenization firm Securitize across three affiliates, making it the largest shareholder.

In July, the group’s securities arm put 30 billion Korean won, about $22.3 million, into Digital Asset, the company behind the Canton Network.

Cryptopolitan reported in February that Hanwha CEO Byung-ho Jang wants to remake the firm into a digital-asset-focused broker built around real-world-asset tokenization, with issuance, custody, and trading handled in real time on-chain.

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