Incheon e-Eum
Prepaid local currency card of Incheon Metropolitan City, South Korea, launched in 2019 to keep spending inside the regional economy. Residents charge Korean won onto the e-Eum card and earn cashback — at times up to 20% — when paying at local small businesses, driving adoption to roughly 2.6 million subscribers and over ₩2 trillion in annual payments, the largest of Korea's regional currency programs. Cashback rates ride the city budget cycle, making e-Eum a national test case for subsidy-funded local money at metropolitan scale.
Korea's largest local currency proves municipal money can reach millions — 2.6M subscribers, ₩2T+ yearly flow — while demonstrating the ceiling of subsidy-driven design: adoption is rented with cashback, and when the 2026 budget dried up mid-year, the engine stalled.
M69 Score
Scored against the Money2069 Manifesto — see methodology. Higher = more aligned.
Detailed Rating Breakdown
Issuance Model3x3.0
Debt-free prepaid issuance — supply is exactly what residents charge onto cards, fully elastic in both directions with refunds — but creation is monopolized by the city government and has no real-economy issuance rule beyond won deposits.
Spending Power Stability2x3.0
Perfect 1:1 won parity for seven years because balances are prepaid won; the benchmark is a single fiat currency, so purchasing power drifts with Korean inflation, and the mechanism only functions inside Incheon.
Fiat Independence & Interoperability2x1.0
Fully fiat in unit, backing, and rails; the program is a distribution layer on top of the won with no independence dimension at all.
Traction2x3.0
Massive verified adoption — about 2.58 million cumulative subscribers, ₩2.16 trillion paid in 2025, accepted across Incheon's small-business economy with heavy national media and policy attention. Capped hard by incentive-dependence: usage tracks cashback budgets, and the 2026 budget ran dry in six months, suspending cashback in July.
Sovereignty1.0
A government program on a proprietary operator platform: custodial balances, real-name registration, full transaction visibility, and unilateral city control over every parameter.
Governance3.0
Municipal governance is formally documented and budgets are public — genuinely transparent by stablecoin standards — but monetary parameters change at administration discretion, and the program's own mayor attributes the 2026 crisis to election-cycle budgeting.
Resilience2.0
Survived earlier cashback cuts and remains operational, but the model's core fuel is subsidy: the ₩258.1 billion 2026 cashback budget was exhausted by June, halting the program's main benefit — a live demonstration of its structural fragility.
Inclusivity3.0
Free to use with generous benefits that reach ordinary residents and small merchants rather than insiders, but participation requires Incheon residency and real-name bank-linked registration.