[Economy Pulse] The Paradox of Sovereign AI Using Dollars and the Crisis of Digital Financial Sovereignty

The year 2025 will be remembered as the year when productivity improved most dramatically in human history. The explosive advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has ushered in the era of 'AI agents' that not only assist with simple work but also make decisions and take action on their own. Now, AI agents write reports, code software, and even collaborate with each other to produce results beyond our imagination. However, behind this dazzling technological revolution, South Korea is quietly but surely losing its financial sovereignty.

The core of the AI agent economy is 'micro-high frequency payments.' For example, when an AI writes a report on behalf of a human, it pays 5 cents to view a single article and sends 10 cents to another agent for data preprocessing.

The problem is that the existing financial networks cannot keep up with this speed and cost. In the case of global payment company Stripe, the basic fee is about 30 cents. No one would pay a fee larger than the price of the information itself just to buy something worth 5 cents. For this reason, blockchain-based 'stablecoins' are naturally becoming the standard for transactions between AI agents.

This is not a prediction for the future, but a reality that is already unfolding. Coinbase revealed that its AI-dedicated payment protocol 'x402,' launched in May, processed over 100 million payments within just seven months of its release. In September, Google announced its AI payment protocol 'AP2,' with global payment giant PayPal joining as a key partner.

But there is a painful truth. Of the 20 core engineers who led the development of Google's AP2, two are developers from my company. AI agents around the world are making payments using technology developed with Korean participation, but the payment fees and data are flowing into the dollar ecosystem.

The Lee Jaemyung administration announced an ambitious plan to create a 150 trillion won 'National Growth Fund' to foster sovereign AI and join the world's top three AI powers (G3). However, as things stand, even if the brains are Korean, the blood flowing through the veins-money-is likely to be dollar stablecoins. We are now facing a paradoxical situation where Korean AI agents learn from Korean data and work for Korean companies, but payments must be made in dollar stablecoins.

While the passage of the Digital Asset Basic Act has been delayed for years due to concerns raised by the Bank of Korea, the opportunities that South Korea could have seized have slipped away like sand through fingers. This scene feels all too familiar. In February 2023, when the 'Tokenized Securities (STO) Guidelines' were announced, the Financial Services Commission suggested a limited introduction and explained that it was not appropriate to process transactions of listed stocks on the blockchain.

However, since last year, Robinhood and Bybit have been offering tokenized U.S. stocks with 24-hour fractional trading, and Nasdaq has submitted a regulatory amendment to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to enable tokenized securities trading, pushing for its inclusion in the institutional framework. In contrast, in South Korea, with no legislation passed even after three years, the STO industry, which had hoped for at least a limited market opening, is now on the verge of collapse.

Within the industry, there is a pervasive anxiety that, just as STO has wasted three years, stablecoins may also be subject to an indefinite wait. There is a growing sense of helplessness that not only the lack of government understanding of digital assets, blockchain, and new innovative technologies, but also outdated regulations designed to protect vested interests, are turning South Korea into a 'wasteland of innovation.'

Stablecoins are the most fundamental financial infrastructure that will become the lifeblood of the new era of prosperity opened by the AI revolution. Without an understanding of this, it will be impossible to prevent AI agents developed by Korean companies from working within the dollar ecosystem without ever having a chance at proper value capture.

In the AI era, national competitiveness depends not only on technological prowess, but also on who controls the digital financial infrastructure that underpins that technology. The passage of the Digital Asset Basic Act must be expedited before it is too late. In addition, regulatory sandboxes must be implemented as soon as possible to breathe life into innovation. During this process, unprecedented provisions such as the 'requirement for consortium banks issuing stablecoins to hold a 51% stake'-which has been repeatedly mentioned-must be carefully examined to determine whom such regulations truly benefit.

Furthermore, it is questionable whether South Korea can continue to respond to a rapidly changing future while maintaining the current positive regulatory system, where only what is explicitly permitted by law is allowed. With waves of innovation such as AI and stablecoins crashing in, it is unrealistic to expect government authorities to fully understand every area, devise appropriate regulations, and for the National Assembly to institutionalize them in a timely manner. Now is the time to consider a fundamental transformation of the national governance system before it is too late.

Seo Byungyoon, Co-CEO of DSRV Labs