There's a specific kind of frustration that anyone living abroad with family or friends in Korea knows well.
Your sister's birthday is Thursday. You're in Berlin, she's in Seoul. You want to buy her coffee — just coffee, a small thing, the kind of gesture that takes thirty seconds between friends who live in the same city.
Instead, you're staring at a wire transfer form, an FX spread, a Korean phone number verification requirement, a two-to-three-business-day estimate, and a fee that costs more than the coffee.
So you send a text that says "Happy birthday, coffee's on me next time."
And next time is a year away.
IQ — the issuer of KRWQ, the largest Korean won stablecoin in the world — has launched KRWQ Gifts, a service that closes that gap.
Pick a gift card. Pay in KRWQ on Base. It lands in the recipient's inbox in seconds, ready to use at a café, restaurant, department store, or cosmetics counter in Korea.
No Korean bank account. No remittance paperwork. No currency conversion eating the gift.
What You Can Actually Send
KRWQ Gifts launches with 90+ Korean brands and merchants — the names people actually use, not a token selection.
Lotte. McDonald’s. Paris Baguette. 7-Eleven. Starbucks. Daiso. GS25. And Olive Young, which for anyone building a K-beauty routine is less a store than a required stop.
Food and beverage, convenience stores, entertainment, retail, beauty. The categories where a gift card is genuinely useful rather than a thing that sits in a drawer.
Who This is For
We designed KRWQ Gifts around the moments people are already trying to have — not around a crypto use case looking for a reason to exist.
- Travelers heading to Korea. Load up on gift cards before you land, so your first morning isn't spent figuring out payment apps.
- Families spread across borders. Birthdays and holidays — Chuseok, Seollal, a random Tuesday, sent the moment you think of it, not three days later.
- Long-distance couples. Small gestures are the whole point. They don't survive a five-step remittance process.
- International K-pop fans. Sending something to your bias has historically required a Korean bank account, a proxy service, or a friend in Seoul. Now it only requires a browser.
Why the Korean Gift Card Market Has Been Closed to You
Korea's gifting economy is unusually developed.
According to Research and Markets, the country's gift card market will reach $8.03 billion in 2026, growing at a 7.2% CAGR to $10.6 billion by 2030.
But nearly all of that spending is locked inside Korea's domestic payment rails. Buying in usually requires a Korean bank account or a domestic wallet, which means that if you live outside Korea, one of the world's most sophisticated gifting markets has effectively been closed to you.
Not by policy. By plumbing.
KRWQ Gifts opens it, at no additional cost, to anyone anywhere!
The Stablecoin Part, Briefly
Every purchase settles in KRWQ — the first fiat-backed, multichain stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the Korean won, live on Base and other networks.
Here's why that matters in practice: the price locks at checkout.
From the moment you pay to the moment your recipient opens the gift, you're not exposed to exchange rate movement, and there's no conversion spread quietly shaving value off what you sent.
A ₩10,000 coffee card costs ₩10,000 worth of KRWQ. That's the whole mechanism.
Settlement takes seconds because it happens on-chain, not across a correspondent banking network that keeps business hours.
From the Team
"Sending money to Korea has always meant banks, remittances, and waiting — and that's if you had an easy way to send at all," - said Navin Vethanayagam, Chief Brain at IQ. "Korea has a world-class gifting economy, but overseas users couldn't participate in it. With KRWQ Gifts, anyone anywhere can send someone in Korea a gift they can actually use, in less time than it takes to read this sentence."
"This is what a stablecoin use case looks like when it works in real life."
To get started with KRWQ Gifts, check out: https://gifts.krwq.cash/
