What the deal looks like
Kresus Labs has raised approximately KRW 18 billion, or about $13 million, in a strategic investment from Hanwha Investment & Securities, marking a deeper move by a major Korean financial institution into blockchain infrastructure.
The investment follows a memorandum of understanding signed at Abu Dhabi Finance Week in December 2025 and is aimed at expanding Kresus’ enterprise digital wallet infrastructure, real-world asset tokenization platforms and on-chain financial workflows.
Kresus operates at the infrastructure layer rather than the application layer. Its products include MPC-based wallet security systems, seedless recovery technology and enterprise-grade wallet platforms designed to support both consumer-scale usage and institutional deployment.
Why Hanwha is betting on infrastructure
For traditional financial institutions, the conversation around digital assets has shifted. Instead of chasing trading volumes or launching standalone crypto products, firms are investing in core plumbing: custody, wallet security and tokenization frameworks that can plug into existing financial products.
Hanwha Investment & Securities plans to use Kresus’ technology to enhance its digital asset services and to develop tokenized products tied to real-world assets. That signals a focus on integration rather than experimentation, with blockchain positioned as a backend efficiency layer rather than a consumer-facing novelty.
Real-world asset tokenization has emerged as one of the few crypto narratives gaining consistent institutional traction. Bonds, funds, private credit and structured products are increasingly being tested on-chain, but only where custody, recovery and compliance standards are robust enough for regulated players.
Investor Takeaway
Where Kresus fits into the RWA landscape
Kresus has positioned itself around a practical problem institutions keep running into: wallets that are either too fragile for enterprise use or too restrictive to scale. Seedless recovery and MPC security aim to remove single points of failure without sacrificing control.
That matters for tokenized assets. Issuing a token is trivial. Managing access, recovery, permissions and lifecycle events at scale is not. Enterprise-grade wallet infrastructure is increasingly the gating factor between pilot projects and live financial products.
The partnership with Hanwha gives Kresus a foothold in one of Asia’s more conservative financial markets, where regulatory clarity is evolving slowly and infrastructure-first approaches are favored over aggressive retail rollouts.
What happens next
Kresus says the new capital will be used for product development, enterprise deployments and global partnerships. That points to a focus on scaling existing systems rather than pivoting into new consumer-facing lines.
For Hanwha, the investment supports its stated ambition to evolve into a specialized digital asset securities firm. Rather than outsourcing core capabilities, it is building relationships with infrastructure providers it can embed into its own product stack.
The broader signal is timing. Institutions are positioning now for wider RWA issuance, even if volumes remain modest in the short term. Wallets, custody and on-chain workflows are being locked in ahead of demand, not after it arrives.
Investor Takeaway
Kresus’ latest round highlights where conviction currently sits in digital assets: not speculation, but security, compliance and infrastructure built for institutions that expect blockchain to integrate quietly into existing financial systems.