The Ethereum Foundation’s Enterprise Team visited South Korea from April 23 to May 1 to expand institutional partnerships with major Korean financial institutions, according to an interview with Mo Jalil and Tiena Sekharan, the team’s APAC Enterprise Leads, conducted on April 24. During their approximately 10-day visit, the team met with multiple major Korean banks, asset managers, securities firms, and custody providers to discuss blockchain adoption strategies.
Enterprise Team Background and Korea Visit
The Ethereum Foundation officially established its Enterprise Team in June 2023 to support institutional adoption of blockchain technology globally. Mo Jalil, who previously spent approximately 5 years at Goldman Sachs developing trading systems and derivatives technology before operating a startup in Silicon Valley for about 8 years, joined the Foundation in 2023. Tiena Sekharan, who worked on tokenization initiatives within JP Morgan’s blockchain team, joined the Foundation in January.
According to Sekharan, the team chose to visit Korea early in its operations: “We decided to come to Korea first, not the US or UK, to speak with traditional financial institutions. Many Korean institutions want to launch blockchain-based services, and we’re trying to help them.”
Korean Institutions and Contact Details
During the visit, the Enterprise Team contacted multiple Korean financial institutions. Sekharan confirmed meetings with “N Bank and K Bank” and noted that “banks, asset managers, securities firms, and custody providers” were engaged. Jalil stated that the visit included contact with “multiple major domestic financial institutions,” with several scheduled meetings involving “very large institutions.”
Korean Market Characteristics
Sekharan observed distinct features of the Korean market: “Personally, I believe Korean individual investors’ understanding of digital assets is higher than in Hong Kong or Singapore. Korea’s market is centered on individual customers, and institutions are somewhat conservative. Recently, institutions are rapidly expanding their interest, and the government and regulatory environment are gradually changing to support this. Policy is also moving in this direction.”
Shift in Institutional Interest Areas
The focus of Korean institutional interest has evolved significantly. According to Sekharan: “Initially, there was general interest in assets like BTC, ETH, and NFTs. But currently, the focus has shifted to stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and RWA (real-world asset tokenization). The key is the flow of traditional assets like bonds, money market funds, and real estate onto the blockchain. Institutions are now expanding their interest into more practical financial service areas like staking, validator services, and tokenized financial products.”
Rationale for Enterprise Team Creation
Sekharan explained the Foundation’s organizational decision: “Previously, we were research-focused, concentrating on technology development (speed, efficiency, decentralization, privacy, etc.). But as time passed, institutional demand increased rapidly. Institutions needed ‘guidance’ on which partners to choose and how to build systems. The organization was created to support this.”
Jalil added: “Each institution has different requirements, so a specialized organization was needed. Particularly as institutional interest increased sharply in recent 1-2 years, structured response became necessary. Institutions have moved from the experimental stage to actual service implementation, requiring structured support. They struggled with determining ‘who to cooperate with and which partners are trustworthy,’ so connecting them became necessary. The Enterprise Team was officially formed in June of last year within this context.”
Barriers to Public Blockchain Adoption
Sekharan identified a fundamental challenge: “For institutions, blockchain, especially public blockchain, is a very unfamiliar environment. It operates completely differently from how traditional finance works. Yet many institutions try to place the existing traditional finance structure directly on top of this new technology.”
She illustrated this with an analogy: “Email is a very efficient communication tool. But when email first came out, some people weren’t comfortable reading directly on screen, so they printed emails to read them. What if someone said, ‘Let’s send all emails to a central printer, print them there, put them in envelopes, mark them confidential, and deliver them to the person in charge’? That would have added unnecessary friction to a good technology, making it less efficient.”
Sekharan continued: “Something similar is happening with blockchain. Blockchain offers benefits like openness, privacy, accessibility, and prevention of vendor lock-in. But when institutions create private blockchains or keep adding unnecessary control mechanisms for familiarity, these advantages weaken. They’re making good technology worse by trying to maintain familiar structures.”
According to Sekharan, many institutions ask: “Can we call Ethereum Foundation if a problem occurs? Can Ethereum Foundation solve it?” However, she emphasized: “But blockchain doesn’t work that way. If someone can call and fix a problem, it means someone controls that blockchain. If a specific entity can fix the network, it also means they can control or change it. Therefore, the inability to call Ethereum Foundation to fix problems is not a weakness but a strength of Ethereum.”
Support Plans for Korean Institutions
Sekharan outlined the Foundation’s support strategy: “The Foundation plans to support institutions with global network connections, technical education, and project promotion. Most importantly, the core is helping global collaboration through connections with Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. Based on this, we plan to help Korean companies raise awareness in the global market.”
Global Regulatory Environment Evolution
Jalir noted positive regulatory trends: “In the past, regulations varied greatly by country, making global operations difficult. But recently, regulations are becoming increasingly similar, which is a key factor making global institutional adoption easier. Similar regulatory frameworks are forming in major countries like the US GENIUS Act, Europe’s MiCA, and Hong Kong’s licensing system, lowering barriers to entry for global companies.”
Enterprise Team Structure and Ecosystem Scale
Sekharan described the Enterprise Team’s organization: “It operates divided by regions: US, Europe, Middle East-Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Regional managers support various institutions like banks, asset managers, and manufacturing companies. A separate privacy and institutional support organization also operates. The team is relatively small, but including related teams like institutional privacy organizations, it’s about 11 people.”
Jalil provided context on the broader Ethereum ecosystem: “The Foundation has about 200 internal developers, but globally, more than 30,000 developers participate in the Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is not a single organization but an ecosystem composed of various companies and communities, and institutional collaboration is also performed in a distributed manner by multiple organizations.”
Current Stage of Blockchain Market Development
Jalir assessed the market’s maturity: “The past 10 years were an experimental stage, while the recent 1-2 years represent a transition to actual service implementation. Currently, less than 1% of global assets are on blockchain, still in early stages with significant growth potential.”
He emphasized a shift in perspective: “The question should no longer be ‘will blockchain be adopted’ but ‘when will it be adopted.’ More than 99% of global assets have not yet been tokenized on-chain, and I believe there’s a high likelihood that the financial system as a whole will eventually transition to blockchain-based infrastructure in the long term.”
Philosophical Differences Between Traditional Finance and Ethereum
Sekharan articulated the fundamental distinction: “Traditional finance’s purpose is profit generation and shareholder value maximization. In contrast, Ethereum is infrastructure based on philosophies of public goods, decentralization, and censorship resistance.”
Jalir added: “Traditional finance has multiple systems and ledgers complexly intertwined, but blockchain is a structure that can reconfigure them more simply and fairly. The Foundation’s core goal is to expand financial accessibility through global access and open-source structure.”
