Circle's Disparte says CBDC and stablecoins split roles in Korea

Circle chief strategy officer Dante Disparte told ChosunBiz in Seoul that CBDC and stablecoins should not be treated as substitutes. His point matters for high-risk PSPs because Korea is being framed not as a winner-takes-all market, but as a place where public digital money, bank deposit tokens, and private stablecoins may all coexist.

1. Disparte said CBDC is mainly a tool for domestic payments innovation, while stablecoins are “programmable money” used on the internet and across global financial networks. In his view, the key question for CBDC is not whether it exists, but what extra functions it adds that private financial companies do not already provide.
2. During his visit to Korea, Circle signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kakao group and Toss on payment infrastructure cooperation. Disparte also said Korea already has globally advanced fintech and real-time payments systems, which is why the CBDC discussion there is about function, not branding.
3. He said the digital money stack in the future is likely to include CBDC, bank deposit tokens and private stablecoins, with each serving a different role and remaining connected to one another. That is the model he described as desirable, rather than a direct fight between public and private issuers.
4. Disparte’s case for stablecoins rests on internet-native openness and programmability. He said stablecoins can combine with other services, be split into small units for real-time payments, and fit cross-border payments or transactions among artificial intelligence (AI) agents.
5. On the specific question of a won stablecoin, he said it would serve a different purpose from CBDC: a CBDC would modernize domestic public payments infrastructure, while a won stablecoin could connect Korea’s private financial ecosystem to the global digital financial network.

The Bank of Korea has recently accelerated experiments with digital money such as CBDC and deposit tokens, which is why some market participants have started treating private stablecoins and central bank-issued digital money as rivals. Disparte’s answer was basically: on paper that looks tidy, but in practice the market may end up with several rails, not one.