Visa Partners With Upbit Parent Dunamu to Explore Open USD (OUSD) Stablecoin Payments

Stablecoin Pact Signed August 28

Visa has entered a strategic partnership with Dunamu, the operator of Upbit, South Korea's largest crypto exchange, to jointly develop next-generation financial and payment services built on stablecoins and artificial intelligence. Dunamu's own announcement on August 28 confirms the agreement was executed with Visa Worldwide Pte. Limited, Visa's Asia-Pacific regional entity — a detail that anchors the collaboration's initial scope to the APAC market rather than a worldwide rollout from day one.

The structure of the deal pairs Dunamu's digital-asset technology with Visa's global settlement network, with the stated objective of connecting stablecoins to mainstream financial and payment infrastructure. According to the companies' announcement, the two sides will explore stablecoin-linked payment services across major global markets, pursuing greater efficiency in international remittances, payments and settlement alongside new user experiences. The collaboration is explicitly exploratory at this stage: both parties plan to flesh out the scope step by step while legal and regulatory requirements, technical feasibility and commercial viability are each assessed. No services, products or launch dates have been set. For Dunamu, the pact opens a settlement-rail path beyond exchange trading, giving the Upbit operator a route to embed digital-asset functionality into card and cross-border payment flows that Visa processes at global scale.

The market context explains why Visa wants a foothold here. CoinGecko data puts South Korea's active crypto user base at more than 16 million, one of the deepest retail pools in Asia — and Upbit, a fixture among the Best Crypto Exchanges by volume, sits at the center of it. Domestic conglomerates have moved in parallel: Samsung acquired a 4% stake in Dunamu in May, and on Thursday Mirae Asset outlined a $109 billion crypto business blueprint for DigitalX, the exchange it bought in July — a scale of ambition that shows how fiercely Korean capital is competing for digital-asset infrastructure, alongside tech giants such as Alphabet globally.

OUSD and Agentic Commerce Scope

On the stablecoin side, the companies will study business models around Open USD (OUSD), a US dollar-pegged stablecoin run by the independent company Open Standard under an open-standard framework, with a launch planned within the year. Importantly, Dunamu's announcement states that OUSD is not a committed asset: it is one of several candidates under review, with the final choice to weigh market demand, the regulatory environment, stability, and technical and business fit. Dollar-pegged tokens in this category compete directly with issuers such as Circle Internet Group, and settlement on public rails — the kind of infrastructure blockchain networks like the Internet Computer provide — remains the connective tissue the partnership is designed to probe.

The AI track is equally concrete. Visa and Dunamu will jointly examine services and business models that combine AI with stablecoin-based payment and settlement infrastructure, with a focus on agentic commerce: AI agents that search for products or services on a user's behalf and complete the purchase and settlement end to end — the transactional counterpart to the retail AI trading bot. The two companies also plan to study the technology, infrastructure and ecosystem development needed for AI payments. Dunamu CEO Oh Kyung-seok framed the thesis directly: “Artificial intelligence, stablecoins and tokenization are key trends reshaping how finance and commerce operate.” Visa's wider Asia push frames the deal: on August 24 it signed an MOU with Shinhan Financial Group covering stablecoin issuance, transfer and redemption tests plus AI payment models, and on August 25 it joined BLOOM, a Monetary Authority of Singapore-led initiative, with payments firm Nium as its first partner for a stablecoin-settlement pilot. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

What the Announcement Leaves Undisclosed

Our reading of the week: three partnerships in four days — Shinhan on August 24, BLOOM on August 25, Dunamu on August 28 — mark Visa as an incumbent building stablecoin settlement rails across Asia rather than testing in isolation. Anchored in the companies' own announcement, the Dunamu deal's concrete terms are scope-level: joint exploration of stablecoin payments and agentic commerce, signed through Visa's APAC entity. What was not disclosed matters just as much — no financial terms, no timeline and no committed stablecoin, with OUSD still only a candidate. Watch for a defined pilot before any measurable on-chain impact.