Plume signs MOU with Shinhan Asset Management for won-based fund test
Regulation & Gov ·
The two parties will jointly explore putting a short-duration Korean bond fund onto a blockchain rail without opening it to public investors yet.
Plume has entered into a memorandum of understanding with Shinhan Asset Management to run a proof of concept for a tokenized fund denominated in Korean won, according to wublockchain.xyz. The underlying asset for the trial is a fund tied to ultra-short-term Korean won bonds, a low-duration instrument typically used for cash-management purposes. Rather than launching a live product, the effort is framed as a technical and regulatory dry run to see what it would take to move such a fund onchain.
The companies say the pilot will stop short of actual issuance or distribution to investors. Instead, it will be built inside a separate, isolated structure housed in a third jurisdiction outside Korea, with both contractual terms and technical controls designed to keep Korean residents from accessing it. That setup suggests the two sides are trying to sandbox the experiment away from domestic securities and fund-distribution rules while they figure out what a compliant version might eventually require.
The arrangement adds Shinhan Asset Management to the list of traditional finance players testing tokenization through Plume, and it comes from a partner base that already spans multiple markets, per the broader project tracking at leviathan.news. The move was also flagged directly by the network's own channel, at x.com, pointing to the same MOU and proof-of-concept scope described in the announcement.
The cluster around this news shows at least two distinct outlets covering the same MOU, both describing it as a proof-of-concept exercise centered on the ultra-short-term bond fund rather than a commercial rollout. That corroboration underscores the announcement's narrow scope: this is a controlled test, not a market launch.
What remains unclear is the timeline for the proof of concept, which third jurisdiction will host the isolated structure, and what regulatory findings would need to be satisfied before any product could be offered to actual investors, including whether a path to Korean-resident access is even under consideration. Also unresolved is whether other Shinhan entities or additional Korean asset managers plan similar pilots with Plume or competing tokenization platforms.