South Korean financial super‑app Toss has launched a three‑month technology verification program with Optimism and privacy specialist Sunnyside Labs to test blockchain infrastructure for won‑linked stablecoins and institutional payments.
Under a strategic agreement announced today, Toss — which serves roughly 30 million users and supports over 500,000 merchants — will run a proof‑of‑concept (PoC) with Optimism’s OP Stack and Sunnyside Labs’ Privacy Boost to determine whether public‑blockchain technology can meet South Korea’s regulatory and operational demands for payment services.
What the PoC will test
- Can financial institutions directly manage payment and settlement on a blockchain while satisfying customer ID and AML rules?
- Can sensitive transaction details be protected on a public chain while still allowing regulated parties to verify and audit activity?
- Can the infrastructure handle the high transaction volumes typical of retail payment services?
Technology partners and roles
- Optimism will supply the underlying blockchain infrastructure via its OP Stack, a modular framework for building application‑specific Layer 2 chains that rely on Ethereum for security and settlement. Layer 2 designs process transactions off‑chain and finalise on Ethereum to reduce costs and increase throughput.
- Sunnyside Labs, a core developer in the Optimism ecosystem, will integrate its Privacy Boost solution to address confidentiality concerns. Privacy Boost aims to hide transaction details and wallet balances from public view while enabling compliant institutions to validate transactions and meet regulatory requirements.
Why this matters
The project aims to combine Ethereum’s security guarantees with a dedicated network tailored to local currency payments, rather than relying solely on shared public infrastructure. If successful, the PoC could demonstrate a path for regulated Korean financial services to adopt blockchain rails for won‑linked stablecoins and high‑volume payments while preserving KYC/AML controls and data privacy.
Broader context
Optimism’s OP Stack is already powering more than 30 networks and has been adopted in institutional deployments by firms such as Bitpanda. Recent Optimism work includes a four‑week OP mainnet experiment exploring stake‑based transaction ordering alongside traditional gas‑fee mechanisms — part of the network’s broader efforts to evolve blockchain infrastructure for real‑world use cases.
Toss says it plans to gradually expand blockchain experiments across its payment and platform offerings, using this PoC to validate whether a dedicated, regulation‑friendly blockchain can support Korean digital payment services and interoperate with other ecosystems.
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