Wavebridge, a digital-asset infrastructure company for institutional clients, said on Aug. 12 that it has completed a proof-of-concept (PoC) with BC Card, connecting overseas blockchain wallets to Korea’s card payment infrastructure. As a blockchain technology company and ecosystem builder on Base — the public blockchain network built by Coinbase — Wavebridge verified, in a test environment, the segment that receives and custodies users’ stablecoins and converts them into fiat before passing them into the card settlement process.
In the PoC, an inbound foreign visitor pays at a domestic BC Card QR merchant using dollar-based stablecoin (USDC) held in a Base-network wallet, while the merchant settles in Korean won exactly as before. To comply with the current regulatory framework, it ran on the Base testnet and pre-production verification environments.
Wavebridge, through the infrastructure it built on Base, provided the blockchain-based settlement and conversion technology, while BC Card provided the card payment rails and QR module. The user’s wallet runs on Base, the public blockchain network operated by Coinbase. Wavebridge was responsible for verifying the segment that receives and custodies users’ stablecoins and converts them into fiat before passing them into the card settlement process.
For a stablecoin held in a blockchain wallet to reach a merchant as a won-denominated settlement, it must pass through a separate conversion segment. The PoC connected this segment to BC Card’s existing settlement process and confirmed that it works in practice; in the test environment, Wavebridge verified the process of receiving the stablecoin corresponding to the payment amount from the user’s wallet, custodying it, converting it to won, and passing it into the card settlement process.
Blockchain transactions are hard to reverse once recorded. In this PoC, by connecting BC Card’s cancellation and settlement process with Wavebridge’s on-chain asset return, the parties verified a structure in which the stablecoin returns to the customer’s wallet upon cancellation or failure — resolving that limitation in practice. This confirmed that blockchain-based payments can support cancellations and refunds just like conventional card payments.
Inbound tourism to Korea is growing quickly. According to the Korea Tourism Organization, Korea welcomed 18.94 million foreign visitors in 2025, a record high that surpassed the previous peak set in 2019. Against this backdrop of rising inbound demand, the PoC confirmed the feasibility of using foreign-currency stablecoin held in overseas blockchain wallets on Korea’s card payment network. Should it move to a commercial service in the future, foreign visitors could pay at domestic QR merchants without a separate currency exchange, while merchants could accept the new payment method while keeping their existing terminal environment.
“For a stablecoin sitting in a wallet to reach a merchant as a won-denominated settlement, the conversion segment in between has to mesh with the existing payment infrastructure,” said John Oh, CEO of Wavebridge. “As a VASP whose notification has been accepted by KoFIU, we intend to operate the stretch from custody through fiat conversion in full compliance with applicable regulatory requirements as we move toward commercialization, and to widen the path that connects overseas wallets to Korea’s payment network.”
“This PoC is a meaningful case that actually implemented and verified that Korea’s card payment infrastructure can operate reliably even in a global stablecoin payment service,” said Young-woo Kim, CEO of BC Card. “In line with the KT Group’s ‘digital-asset-based digital finance platform’ strategy, we will keep strengthening our capabilities so that BC Card’s 3.5 million-merchant network and global settlement infrastructure become a core hub for global stablecoin payments.”
Building on these results, Wavebridge plans to advance performance testing in production blockchain environments and to establish an on-/off-chain risk-management framework, in line with the applicable regulatory requirements, as it lays the groundwork for commercialization.
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