Upbit Operator Dunamu and Visa to Explore OUSD Stablecoin Payments in South Korea

Visa and Upbit Operator Dunamu Sign Stablecoin Pact

Dunamu, the operator of South Korea's largest crypto exchange Upbit, has entered a strategic partnership with Visa to develop stablecoin and artificial intelligence payment services, with the agreement announced on August 28. The collaboration will examine payment and settlement models built on OUSD, an open-standard stablecoin, as well as new user experiences across payments and settlement. A second workstream targets agentic commerce — infrastructure in which AI agents, autonomous software assistants conceptually similar to the models developed by OpenAI, search for products or services and complete purchases on a user's behalf without human intervention. The deal positions Visa at the center of Seoul's push to build stablecoin payment rails in one of Asia's largest digital asset economies, a market with at least 16 million cryptocurrency users according to CoinGecko. “AI, stablecoins and tokenization are key trends that will reshape how finance and commerce operate,” Dunamu CEO Oh Kyung-seok said, per Korea Herald reporting on the announcement. The thesis has support from crypto-native investors as well: Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu has argued that stablecoins are the natural payment infrastructure for autonomous machine transactions. “It is going to be a long while before any bank opens a bank account for an AI agent. Crypto basically solves all of that,” Siu said recently — a framing that captures why payment incumbents are now courting exchange operators rather than banks for this use case.

OUSD Not Locked In, Deal Still Early

The blueprint was presented at Visa's global market support center in San Francisco and pairs Dunamu's digital asset technology with Visa's worldwide payment network, with stablecoin payments, cross-border remittances and AI-driven financial services named as the core exploration areas. Cross-border settlement is a segment where blockchain-based assets such as XRP and interoperability protocols like Synapse have long competed for share against legacy correspondent banking. Despite OUSD's prominence in the announcement, Dunamu stated that the token is only one of several stablecoin projects under evaluation and that no specific stablecoin has been locked in for this partnership — no product, blockchain or launch timeline has been finalized, and the collaboration remains at an early planning stage. The clarification carries added weight because earlier market reports had claimed an OUSD alliance whose members included Samsung and Dunamu, a rumor the Korean firms denied at the time; OUSD now appears in an official evaluation instead. The Dunamu agreement is Visa's second major Korean stablecoin partnership in a week, following a settlement-infrastructure deal with Shinhan Financial Group announced earlier this week. Corporate interest in the exchange operator itself has been building in parallel: Samsung said in May it had bought a 4% stake in Dunamu, and on Thursday Mirae Asset laid out $109 billion in crypto ambitions for Digital X, the exchange it acquired in July. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

Korea's Stablecoin Race Takes Shape

Our reading of the two announcements is that Visa is methodically assembling a Korean partner stack — a systemically important bank in Shinhan, now the country's dominant exchange operator — ahead of any formal won-denominated stablecoin framework, so that settlement rails are ready the moment regulation permits. What the companies have NOT disclosed matters as much as what they have: no blockchain choice, no go-live date, and no confirmation of whether OUSD becomes the actual settlement asset or whether traffic runs on public chains or layer-2 networks. COINOTAG notes that the agentic-commerce angle is the more speculative leg; the stablecoin remittance leg, backed by 16 million local users and fresh corporate money from Samsung and Mirae Asset, is the near-term story to watch.