When a central bank publishes a detailed technical paper on the future of monetary infrastructure and omits any mention of privacy, the absence itself is a design choice. The Bank of Korea's Project Hangang paper, released this week at the ECB Forum, describes how tokenized commercial bank deposits will settle against wholesale CBDC on a unified ledger operated by the central bank. It addresses technical architecture, programmability, and the preservation of the two-tier monetary system. Privacy is not mentioned once.
This matters to logistics operators because unified ledgers are not an abstract concept. They are the settlement layer your banks will use. Project Hangang has already completed Phase I trials with seven commercial banks, tested retail payments involving 80,000 users and 12,000 merchants, and is expanding to nine banks for Phase II this month. South Korea's government has announced plans to disburse one quarter of National Treasury Funds through this infrastructure by 2030. The architecture being tested today will shape how commercial payments settle tomorrow.
The BIS, which originated the unified ledger concept in its 2023 Annual Economic Report, was explicit about privacy requirements. That blueprint describes data partitions that ensure each entity "will see only transactions and associated data on their own partition." It calls out the need for encryption and privacy-preserving technologies, noting that "preserving strict confidentiality is a prerequisite if a unified ledger is to be a practical proposition." Commercial secrecy, the BIS noted, is "no less important" than personal privacy, businesses may be hesitant to participate unless they can protect confidential information such as transaction logs.
Korea's paper does not engage with these considerations. This is surprising given that the Bank of Korea itself published research in 2023 on privacy-enhancing technologies for digital currency. Deputy Governor Lee Jong-ryul has publicly acknowledged concerns that CBDC could allow the central bank to access personal information. Yet the Project Hangang paper, which discusses design tradeoffs in considerable detail, treats privacy as a non-topic.
For a freight forwarder or commodity logistics operator managing multi-corridor settlements, this omission creates two distinct risks.
The first is compliance exposure without recourse. Cross-border payments already face mid-transaction freezes when correspondent banks flag transactions for sanctions screening. Global correspondent banking relationships have contracted by roughly a quarter over the past decade, concentrating cross-border payment risk in fewer institutions, each screening more aggressively. A payment that passes at your bank can be flagged by a correspondent bank you did not know was in the chain, freezing funds for days or weeks with no clear escalation path. Blocking freezes funds in segregated accounts until regulators authorize release, sometimes months, sometimes years.
Unified ledgers are designed to address some of these frictions. Project Agorá, the BIS cross-border initiative involving seven central banks and over 40 financial institutions, aims to perform compliance screening at the start of the payment process and share results across participating banks. The promise is fewer redundant checks, faster settlement. But if the underlying ledger architecture does not include privacy partitions, compliance functions gain access to transaction-level data that was previously distributed across siloed correspondent chains. The same infrastructure that enables shared compliance also enables persistent surveillance.
The second risk is competitive intelligence leakage. Payment topology reveals commercial strategy. The values of shipments, the timing of payments, the identity of counterparties, the corridors you operate in, this is proprietary operational data. In correspondent banking networks, this information is fragmented across multiple institutions. On a unified ledger without privacy controls, it could be visible to the central bank in aggregate.
The BIS has been explicit that this visibility is a feature, not a bug, for certain purposes. Its 2025 Annual Economic Report describes how "the availability of standardised and consolidated unified ledger data, protected by effective privacy measures, could unlock even more benefits", including real-time visibility into market participants' financial positions for central bank policy operations. The question is who else can see that data, under what conditions, and whether commercial participants have any control over access.
Korea is not building this infrastructure in isolation. Project Hangang is designed to interoperate with Project Agorá, the BIS-led cross-border settlement initiative. Governor Hyun Song Shin, formerly of the BIS Innovation Hub, has stated the Bank of Korea plans to strengthen the role of the won in the digital payments environment through international cooperation. The architectural choices being made now will propagate across jurisdictions.
For logistics treasury teams, the operational question is not whether unified ledgers will arrive, the testing is already underway, the government adoption targets are set. The question is whether you will have any control over who can see your payment flows and under what circumstances. If the answer is that the central bank operates the ledger with proof of authority and no documented privacy partitions, then every cross-border payment you make becomes visible at the infrastructure layer.
This does not mean privacy protections are absent from Project Hangang. They may well be built in. But their absence from a paper that discusses design tradeoffs at length signals that privacy is not being treated as a first-order design consideration, or at least not one the central bank considers necessary to explain to market participants.
Logistics operators should be tracking these architectural decisions closely. The next generation of settlement infrastructure will not simply process your payments faster. It will determine who can observe them, who can freeze them, and on what terms you can contest those actions. The answers are being written now, in technical specifications that treat commercial confidentiality as an afterthought.
