Solana Pay Targets Korea as KSNET Starts 330,000-Merchant Trial

KSNET and Solana start two payment proofs of concept

KSNET said it signed the agreement at its Seoul headquarters on July 30. The company’s first project is narrower than an announcement that all participating stores now accept a Solana-based payment method: it is a technical test of linking a merchant-acquiring and payment network to the Solana Pay standard.

Solana Pay encodes a payment request in a URL that a wallet can parse, allowing a merchant to specify a recipient, amount, token and reference. The official documentation shows the standard can support SPL-token payments and payment references, but it does not itself solve a merchant’s identity checks, refunds, accounting or local-currency settlement.

KSNET said it will design AML controls around the integration and evaluate safeguards for digital-asset payment risks through a connection to existing won settlement infrastructure. It did not name a stablecoin, disclose a wallet provider, identify a pilot merchant group or give a timetable for consumer transactions.

Those omissions are consequential. A proof of concept can show that a payment instruction can be routed and observed, while a commercial product must also settle disputes, manage merchant onboarding and meet the requirements of the Korean payments and financial-crime regime.

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Solana cites 330,000 merchants but no launch date

In a separate announcement, Solana said KSNET’s network covers more than 330,000 merchants and processes around $4 billion in monthly payment volume. That scale gives the trial a more concrete search and reader angle than a developer-only integration, but it is a description of KSNET’s existing network rather than an onchain transaction commitment.

Neither the Foundation’s post nor KSNET’s release said what proportion of that network will enter the test, how many payment transactions will be processed on Solana, or whether the proof of concept will move customer funds on mainnet. There was also no disclosed commercial fee structure.

That distinction limits what can be inferred from the announcement. Large merchant counts can lower the distribution hurdle if an integration reaches production, but they do not measure merchant demand, wallet adoption or realized stablecoin payment volume.

The model is part of a wider effort to put token-based settlement behind familiar payment interfaces. Daily Crypto Briefs recently covered Hyundai’s planned USDT remittance work on Avalanche, another example of a consumer-facing payments company testing blockchain rails without turning the announcement itself into a measure of usage.

KSNET, founded in 1999, provides card payments, credit-information checks and payment-gateway services, according to its release. It said it has been building infrastructure connecting institutional payment networks and stablecoins, including an earlier technical verification project with Lambda256.

x402 test puts AI payments under a Korean compliance lens

The second project will examine whether KSNET’s internally tested AI-based payment system can add x402, a payment standard aimed at web services and AI-agent transactions. Solana’s products page lists x402 alongside Solana Pay and describes it as a way for websites and APIs to request payment before providing a resource.

KSNET said it will assess technical suitability before evaluating commercial feasibility for new AI-payment use cases. That is a meaningful constraint: the agreement is about the infrastructure and controls needed for automated payments, not permission for an agent to make unrestricted transactions on behalf of a user.

The company said the proposed design will consider AML requirements and internal standards intended to comply with financial-authority guidance. It did not disclose spending limits, liability rules, the identity model for an agent, or whether a future product would be available to consumers, merchants or only business clients.

Crypto-market sentiment offered a separate measure of the environment, not the pilot’s prospects. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index was at 28, or Fear, on July 31, while SOL’s price and volume data reflected a liquid but still risk-sensitive market.

The next evidence will be operational rather than promotional: a named pilot cohort, a settlement asset, a compliance framework, transaction data or a commercial launch date. Until then, the verified development is a two-part Korean payment trial with a large existing network behind it, not an activated 330,000-merchant Solana Pay rollout.