Terry Kim spent years advising South Korea’s largest financial institutions on why they couldn’t move into digital assets. As a partner at Lee & Ko, one of the country’s premier law firms, he had a clear view of the problem: the infrastructure simply didn’t exist. So he left the firm to build it.

Let’s Meet Terry

Terry Kim is Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of BDACS, South Korea’s leading institutional-grade digital asset custodian. BDACS operates a regulated custody platform and issues KRW1, a Korean Won-pegged stablecoin built for institutional use. Together, they give Korean and inbound corporations, asset managers, and financial institutions a single, compliant, enterprise-grade venue to hold, settle, and move digital assets. BDACS currently holds the largest market share in Korea’s B2B custody sector and is backed by a combination of the leading global digital asset operator and one of Korea’s tier-one commercial banks.

Before BDACS, Terry was a partner at Lee & Ko, one of South Korea’s premier law firms, advising financial institutions and corporations on complex regulatory and capital markets matters. Across that practice, the same pattern kept appearing. Serious institutions were genuinely interested in digital assets, but they couldn’t move. The infrastructure they were being asked to trust wasn’t built to the standard they were required to meet. Commingled assets, weak controls, fragmented venues, no real regulatory perimeter.

“As a lawyer, I could see exactly why the deals weren’t closing. The missing piece was an operator with a compliance-first DNA and institutional-grade technology under one roof, the kind of counterparty I, as a lawyer, would have advised my most demanding clients to use. So with my co-founder Harry Ryoo, I left the firm to go build it.”

The Industry

For much of the past decade, the biggest structural barrier to institutional adoption of digital assets was custody itself. The original single-private-key model was a catastrophic single point of failure. One person, one place, complete exposure. It kept serious institutional capital on the sidelines for years.

The innovation that changed it was Multi-Party Computation. Under MPC, the key is shared across multiple parties: no complete key ever exists in one place, and a transaction requires authorized parties to collaborate to sign. At BDACS, MPC is combined with air-gapped cold storage to deliver what Terry describes as the hybrid, bank-grade architecture institutions actually require. The shift didn’t just improve security. As he frames it, it redefined what “trust” means in the digital asset economy: from “trust this person with the key” to “trust the math.”

The present-day development Terry finds most significant is the maturation of stablecoins from a trading utility into real financial infrastructure. KRW1, BDACS’s Korean Won-pegged stablecoin, is their direct bet on that thesis. The goal is to plug KRW1 into global networks like Circle’s Arc Layer-1 and StableFX, making Korean Won liquidity a fully interoperable component of the global on-chain foreign exchange market. Not digitizing the Won as a standalone exercise. Building the real-time settlement infrastructure for the next generation of cross-border trade in Asia.

Looking further out, Terry sees the next five years defined by traditional financial instruments: money market funds, bonds, real estate, private credit, migrating onto blockchain rails. The global digital asset custody market is projected to exceed $4.3 trillion by 2033. His view is that the majority of that value won’t come from native digital assets. It will come from tokenized traditional assets needing a regulated place to live. BDACS is already building a proof-of-concept for institutional tokenized money market fund access. That is the goal for BDACS: to be the regulated home for tokenized traditional assets in Asia.

The Turning Point

The hardest moment for Terry wasn’t stand-alone. It was when everything went wrong at once.

Investors who had committed backed out. Licenses took longer than expected. Regulation took longer than expected. Partners started to doubt the vision, and then Terry started to doubt his own vision. The bank balance was disappearing in real time. “When that happens, even the wins in front of you get clouded over. I couldn’t feel them anymore and I only saw the bad.”

What got him through was a principle borrowed from Bill Ackman: make small progress every day. Don’t try to climb out of the hole in one heroic leap. Make one small thing better today, then another tomorrow. After some time they start to compound, and one day you look up and the hole isn’t there anymore.

During his building journey, there were moments of fear. Terry is direct about that.

He shares: “Honestly? I’m not sure I can point to a moment in the last three to four years when I wasn’t a little bit scared. Scared about payroll. About a new competitor. About a regulatory change I didn’t see coming.”

Korea is a small country with an outsized appetite for digital assets, and the ground moves fast. What he describes is not the paralyzing kind of scared. It’s more of a low hum. In a strange way, he is equally scared of things going well beyond his wildest dreams, because the responsibility that comes with that is its own kind of weight.

The Lessons

The single most important thing building BDACS taught Terry is that he cannot be good at everything. As a lawyer, he could carry his whole practice on his own back: client relationships, research, drafting, advisory. You delegate over time, but for a long stretch you can be the entire show. Building a company doesn’t work that way. You cannot be in engineering and product and sales and compliance at the same time: not honestly, not for long. The lesson that stays with him is that you have to trust the people you hired to be better than you in their domain, and then get out of their way. That lesson sounds obvious on paper. Living it, actually letting go, is one of the harder things he has had to learn.

What he wishes he had known on day one is that everything takes harder and longer than you think. Harder and longer to build the product. Harder and longer to persuade regulators, legislators, prospective clients, and partners. Longer for the regulatory framework to crystallize. Longer for the market to be ready for what you have built. His advice: budget for patience. Patience is a strategic resource. Grit is what gets you to the end of the runway you didn’t plan for.

That, and build your support bench before you need it. Because, as Terry puts it, you cannot survive this alone.