Ripple said this week it had partnered with Kyobo Life Insurance, one of Korea’s largest life insurers, to tokenize government bond settlement using the firm’s Ripple Custody platform, per a release shared with CoinDesk.

The arrangement is Ripple’s first with a Korean insurance institution and is positioned as a step toward compressing Korea’s standard T+2 bond settlement cycle into near real-time execution.

The announcement does not specify transaction sizes, a go-live date, or which Korean government bond series will be settled on-chain. Both parties describe the arrangement as a strategic partnership that will also “assess the technical and regulatory feasibility” of broader tokenized treasury settlement, language that typically indicates a pilot framework rather than production infrastructure.

Kyobo Life will also explore stablecoin-based payment rails through Ripple, the release said, without specifying the stablecoin or timelines.

The deal adds to a growing set of institutional tokenization efforts across Asia, where regulators in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore have moved faster than U.S. counterparts in building frameworks for regulated digital asset activity.

Korea has licensed payment providers for remittance since 2017 and has emerged as one of the region’s more active markets for regulated crypto adoption, with local exchanges among the highest-volume in the world and recent regulatory movement toward won-denominated stablecoins.

For Ripple, the Kyobo partnership extends a push into Asian institutional infrastructure that has accelerated since the SEC dropped its lawsuit against the company in 2024.

The firm has announced custody and payment partnerships across Japan, Singapore, and the UAE over the past 18 months, positioning Ripple Custody as a settlement layer for regulated financial institutions rather than a retail-facing product.

BitMEX Research has proposed an alternative to freezing quantum-vulnerable dormant Bitcoins, advocating a wait-and-see approach and a “canary fund” with a quantum bounty instead. 

BitMEX Research proposed a soft fork on Thursday that would only activate a full freeze of vulnerable coins if it is “proven that a quantum computer capable of stealing Bitcoins actually exists.”

The system uses a “canary approach,” creating a special Bitcoin (BTC) address using a “Nothing-Up-My-Sleeve Number” (NUMS). This is a cryptographic proof in which the private key is unknown, but it is a valid address that could theoretically be spent by a powerful enough quantum computer.

Users can donate BTC to this address as a bounty, incentivizing any quantum-capable actor to “ring the alarm” by spending from it. Only if someone spends from this canary address does the freeze automatically activate, as it proves the quantum threat is real. 

The solution provides an alternative mechanism to the BIP-361 proposal on Tuesday that suggested freezing dormant, quantum-vulnerable Bitcoin to prevent it from being stolen by bad actors in the future. 

BIP-361 drew significant community pushback, with some comments calling it “authoritarian” and “confiscatory.”

Canary watch state prevents automatic freeze

BitMEX’s proposed “canary watch state” would still allow old coins to be spent, provided malicious actors using quantum computers do not attempt to steal from the “canary fund.” 

Investors participating in the canary fund can use multisignatures and withdraw their BTC at any time, it explained. 

There is also a safety window where quantum-vulnerable transactions could still be allowed after the five-year mark proposed in BIP-361, but with outputs locked for a period. 

Related: Bitcoiners propose freezing quantum-vulnerable coins in BIP-361

“While this approach adds complexity and risk, given how controversial any coin freeze is, mitigating the impact of the freeze using this type of system may be worth consideration.”

BIP-361 is a rough idea for a contingency plan

Meanwhile, BIP-361 co-author Jameson Lopp has said his Bitcoin improvement proposal was more of a “rough idea for a contingency plan” than something ready to be proposed for activation. 

“I know folks don’t like it. I don’t like it myself. I wrote it because I like the alternative even less,” he wrote on X on Wednesday. 

He told Cointelegraph that it was a “rough sketch” to approach the issue of a “looming circulating supply shock” if quantum computing advances to the point that a post-quantum signature scheme achieves consensus for being added to Bitcoin.

Magazine: Nobody knows if quantum-secure cryptography will even work