₩33T
South Korea's voucher market moves ₩33 trillion a year on bearer certificates that work like cash. The structure allows resale and misuse by design, and anonymity makes abuse the default.
How SOOHO.IO is putting digital voucher fraud out of business.
South Korea's ₩33 trillion voucher market has a fraud problem. SOOHO.IO rebuilt the settlement layer underneath: onchain, merchant-settled, and impossible to game.
PaymentsDigital VouchersPurpose-Bound MoneySovereign L1
The scale of the problem
Billions owed
Merchants complete sales, then wait. Sometimes weeks, sometimes months. Platforms have failed to settle billions in merchant payments, and small businesses absorbed the losses with no structural protection.
Locked out
Foreign tourists in Korea could not use mobile payment systems without local banking infrastructure. Entire commercial districts were effectively closed to inbound spending.
A voucher the system has to ask permission from.
For decades, gift certificates in Korea have operated like cash. Once issued, the voucher has no memory of what it is for, who should use it, or when it should expire. The result is a ₩33 trillion market where fraud, delayed settlement, and fee extraction from small merchants are structural, not accidental.
SOOHO.IO's premise is that the voucher itself should enforce its own rules. This is infrastructure the company knows how to build: SOOHO.IO has delivered CBDC infrastructure for central banks and protects $2.4 billion in assets. Its voucher platform, Tiko Pay, uses the Purpose-Bound Money (PBM) framework pioneered by the Monetary Authority of Singapore to encode usage conditions directly into smart contracts. The voucher cannot be resold. It can only be used in the designated region, for the designated purpose, within the designated time window. When it is redeemed, the merchant is settled automatically. No intermediary, no delay, no fee stack.
Why a dedicated L1
A general-purpose blockchain is a public ledger. Voucher infrastructure serving regulated merchants and foreign tourists cannot be that. SOOHO.IO's L1 on AvaCloud is permissioned: validators are known, transactions are visible only to the right parties, and compliance is enforced at the network layer.
- Non-resellable. Smart contracts block secondary transfer by design.
- Auto-settling. Merchant payment is triggered at redemption. Settlement delays are structurally impossible.
- Per-purpose. Regional vouchers do not work at out-of-region merchants. The chain enforces it.
What it unlocks for payments
With a verifiable settlement layer, SOOHO.IO can onboard tourism operators, municipalities, and financial institutions without rebuilding compliance infrastructure for each one. The platform handles contracting, policy configuration, merchant registration, and settlement through a single self-onboarding flow.
The pilot across central Seoul processed more than 40,000 transactions and cut settlement costs 30 to 50% against existing models. Pilots in Malaysia, Japan, and Vietnam are in progress. When the contract and the settlement are the same thing, you stop managing the gap between them.
Results
Transactions
40,000+
Processed during the pilot across central Seoul
Settlement costs
30-50% lower
Versus existing settlement models
Expansion
3 markets next
Malaysia, Japan, and Vietnam pilots in progress