Restaurants that let customers place orders and complete payments through table-top tablets without staff involvement have been multiplying across South Korea. At the core of this shift is t’order, a table-ordering platform that has deployed close to 300,000 tablets nationwide and is regarded as the market leader by volume. The platform reportedly processes about 460 billion Korean won in monthly transactions, and its cumulative transaction value has surpassed 10 trillion won. The company has now disclosed that it intends to upgrade its commercial infrastructure with blockchain to address speed, trust, and cost inefficiencies in legacy payment rails.
According to the company’s chief executive, the initiative aims to address the structural limitations of conventional card and payment-gateway systems — specifically, latency, operational trust, and layered fee structures — by integrating blockchain into the mission-critical layer of order settlement. The announcement signals a transition from merely scaling device deployment to transforming the transaction backbone itself.
Data awareness seeded the founding — blockchain now secures its use
Before building t’order, founder Austin Kwon operated an overseas ecommerce business, during which he came to appreciate both the strategic value of granular behavioral data and the cost of failing to capture it. He later observed that brick-and-mortar restaurants, despite sitting on rich order intelligence, made minimal use of it for operations or optimization. This discovery led to the launch of t’order in 2019 with a model that installs unmanned ordering-and-payment terminals at each table and serves dynamic menu content in real time.
🇰🇷 Korea is about to get a payments upgrade.
t’order, the nation’s #1 table-ordering platform, is teaming up with Sui to roll out KRW stablecoin payments at scale.
300K+ POS devices. $4.3B in annual volume. Powered by Sui + Walrus for speed, security & onchain data integrity.… pic.twitter.com/kjqrjhF4LI
— Sui (@SuiNetwork) September 25, 2025
Measurable gains: instant approvals and fee compression
The firm is positioning blockchain as a lever to drive instantaneous payment confirmation and lower operating friction for merchants. Internal testing suggests that Sui’s settlement confirmation averages under half a second at the point of order — effectively collapsing the visible delay that currently can span 2–3 seconds or longer in card-based flows at the table.
The cost architecture is also slated for revision. Today’s card-plus-PG fee stack typically spans 0.8–2.5 percent. Under a blockchain-based design, the company projects that fees could compress to roughly 13 won per transaction, implying substantial cost reduction for merchants. The CEO projected that the aggregate fee savings could range between 58 billion and 150 billion won annually once scaled.
From feature to infrastructure: a new competitive moat
The move suggests that t’order is no longer competing only on user experience or tablet density but on the foundational integrity and economics of its settlement layer. By grafting blockchain trust guarantees and cost efficiency onto a network already processing hundreds of billions of won each month, the company appears to be building an infrastructural moat that could prove difficult for later entrants to replicate quickly. The development also positions the platform at the intersection of two persistent merchant priorities: faster cash certainty and lower payment leakage.
