Paycoin

Danal’s 2025 investor presentation traces the project to an internal blockchain initiative in April 2018 and the creation of PayProtocol AG in Switzerland that September. PCI issuance, Danal Fintech’s formation and Korean payment service followed in 2019; merchant payments began in April.

The corporate map matters. Danal is the listed Korean payments parent, Danal Fintech operated services in Korea, and PayProtocol AG is the Swiss project entity named in current site materials. A current Bithumb disclosure lists Danal Fintech and PayProtocol AG together as issuance and major operating parties. PCI ownership does not turn those companies into one legal counterparty.

PayProtocol describes its mainnet as Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned system chosen because payment records include confidential detail. Only approved participants can inspect that detail. This differs from an ERC-20 whose administrator and supply can be queried from a public contract.

The explorer exposes network activity, but the reviewed materials do not publish a current membership and authority roster. We cannot infer who can validate, issue, freeze or reverse PCI from an app balance or a block page. The disclosed 1.9 billion cap and lockup dashboard remain operator and exchange disclosures rather than an immutable public mint rule.

In April 2022 the FIU accepted the Korean PayProtocol corporation as a wallet and custody business. The company later sought to add trading because affiliates that had bought and sold PCI used for payments would be replaced by the reporting company itself. FIU treated even indirect crypto-to-money exchange as requiring a bank real-name account.

On 9 January 2023 FIU rejected the change report after that account was not secured by the deadline. It gave the service until 5 February to wind down with user and merchant protection measures. This was a precise business-model decision: it did not delete the permissioned chain, but it removed the regulated conversion route that had made PCI useful at Korean checkout.

On 31 March 2023, Korean DAXA venues announced that PCI trading support would end on 14 April. Their stated assessment was that domestic payment had been suspended indefinitely and the project had not resolved the investment-warning cause; the project’s explanations about overseas payment plans were not enough at that time.

Danal later recorded an impairment tied to the DAXA termination and falling PCI price. That accounting consequence is stronger evidence of business impact than a generic claim that regulation ‘hurt adoption.’ It also does not describe PCI’s current legal status in every country. Coinone later reopened PCI trading on 19 April 2024 after assessing that the overseas-payment structure no longer required the old Korean change-report route. That exchange decision did not mean FIU had accepted the trading change report rejected in 2023 or newly authorized that route.

The project shifted toward overseas payment. Danal’s chronology dates overseas PCI payment to July 2024 and a crypto Mastercard to April 2025. The current card FAQ says Fiat24 handles KYC and issues an Account NFT before the card can be used in eligible European countries. The card is therefore a regulated product relationship layered on top of PCI, not a right embedded in every coin.

On 21 August 2025 PayProtocol launched a non-custodial PCI wallet inside its app. Users create and manage the wallet themselves, and rewards moved to that route. An interface can show both service-controlled balances and user-held native PCI, but the key holder and recovery obligations differ.

By 2025 the domestic route had also changed shape. The current Wallet Pay page says a linked exchange automatically sells the selected asset and the merchant receives KRW, and a November notice announced app payments at Korean convenience stores. Those product announcements show a live use case; they do not by themselves prove a fresh FIU authorization for the Korean entity whose wallet-and-custody report was accepted in 2022.

A July 2026 whitepaper update still describes PayChain fee burns through governance-set ratios and explicitly says holding PCI alone earns no return, interest, dividend or fixed benefit.

The October 2025 rebranded white-paper announcement introduces PayChain, an EVM payment chain, plus a Pay-to-Finance model connecting settlement and stablecoin liquidity. The same notice says the existing Hyperledger mainnet will remain stable. It does not publish a completed migration block, canonical EVM PCI contract or conversion deadline.

PayProtocol’s current homepage reports 1.2 million cumulative users, 580,000 monthly active payers and more than $28 million paid through the first half of 2025. Those figures show how the operator frames the rebound. They do not tell a holder who controls Fabric membership, prove PayChain is live, or grant ownership of Danal, merchant settlements or app revenue.