MoonPay pursues stablecoin payments tie-up with Upbit operator Dunamu, eyes GIWA Chain link

MoonPay, a U.S.-based crypto payments company, is pursuing a strategic collaboration with Dunamu, the operator of South Korean crypto exchange Upbit, covering stablecoin payments and corporate treasury management. In a press release issued Oct. 20 (U.S. Eastern Time), MoonPay said the two companies will also explore linking Dunamu's layer-2 blockchain GIWA Chain with MoonPay's global network to broaden overseas market access. Financial terms and service launch dates were not disclosed.

Remittances, corporate treasury and GIWA: three tracks

MoonPay outlined three areas of collaboration. The first is cross-border payments and fund movement using stablecoins, tokens whose value is pegged to fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar. Drawing on each company's technology and infrastructure, the two will explore potential use cases for digital assets in cross-border payments and transfers, and examine the business potential of new financial service models.

The second is corporate finance and treasury management. The companies will jointly review ways to apply digital asset-based financial infrastructure to corporate finance and treasury operations and identify related business opportunities and usage models. The third is expanding the GIWA ecosystem. By linking MoonPay's global services and network with Dunamu's blockchain infrastructure, they aim to make services and digital assets on GIWA Chain more accessible in overseas markets and to jointly identify new business opportunities abroad.

MoonPay characterized the partnership as an exploratory effort to identify new business opportunities. The companies said they plan to firm up the technical and commercial potential of the three areas going forward. The press release carried comments from MoonPay only.

"For stablecoins to function as global financial infrastructure, it is important to have the technology and network to support not only cross-border payments and fund transfers, but also the real financial operations of businesses."

Bugeon Lee, Head of APAC at MoonPay

Earlier this month, MoonPay named a security partner for won stablecoins

Founded in 2019, MoonPay provides infrastructure connecting conventional payment networks with blockchains. According to the company, it serves more than 35 million customers in 180 countries and more than 1,500 enterprise clients with payments, trading and stablecoin infrastructure, and holds regulatory licenses and authorizations in multiple jurisdictions including the United States and the European Union. On Sept. 23, MoonPay said it had entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire North Capital, a private-markets infrastructure platform. North Capital supports capital raising, custody and secondary trading for private securities, including tokenized securities, and operates the alternative trading system (ATS) PPEX. MoonPay said it is building the regulatory foundation for tokenized real-world assets.

This is not MoonPay's first move aimed at South Korea. Nasdaq-listed BTQ Technologies said on Oct. 9 it had formed a strategic partnership with MoonPay Korea, MoonPay's Korean unit. According to BTQ, MoonPay Korea is building full-stack on-chain infrastructure for Korean won-backed stablecoins, covering issuance support, distribution, wallets, settlement and currency conversion through to last-mile delivery to users and merchants. BTQ will provide post-quantum cryptography to protect against the threat quantum computers pose to existing encryption, and the two companies said they plan to run a proof of concept (PoC) with Korean banking institutions.

After Hana, POSCO and Visa, now MoonPay

Dunamu has been expanding partnerships with financial firms around GIWA Chain. It unveiled the GIWA Chain testnet in September 2025 and signed a memorandum of understanding with Hana Financial Group that December to jointly develop blockchain-based financial services. In February this year, Dunamu said it had completed a proof of concept for overseas remittances that replaced the SWIFT messages exchanged between Hana Bank branches in Korea and abroad with blockchain messages on GIWA Chain. The test used BOJAGI, Dunamu's own protocol built on zero-knowledge proofs, which verify a transaction without revealing its contents, to shield the financial information of senders and recipients. At the time, the two companies said they planned to expand their cooperation to building deposit token-based overseas remittance infrastructure by the third quarter of this year.

On April 29, Dunamu signed a three-way MOU with Hana Financial Group and POSCO International to connect GIWA Chain with Hana's foreign exchange network and POSCO International's global supply chain. The three companies identified real-time overseas remittances on GIWA Chain, more efficient global treasury and payment operations, and new digital finance businesses as areas of cooperation, and said they would put POSCO International's trade data on GIWA Chain to make large business-to-business settlements more transparent. On Aug. 27 (KST), Dunamu announced a strategic partnership roadmap with global payments company Visa covering stablecoin-based payments, global remittances and "agentic commerce," in which AI finds products and completes payments on a user's behalf. The event was held at Visa's Global Market Support Center in San Francisco, attended by Dunamu CEO Oh Kyoung-suk and Oliver Jenkyn, Visa's President of Global Markets, and the two companies said they would also explore business models to expand stablecoin use based on Open Standard's OUSD. Dunamu said it would also flesh out its business with Visa in phases, taking applicable laws and regulatory requirements into account.