MoonPay is pursuing a strategic collaboration with Dunamu, the operator of South Korea's largest crypto exchange Upbit, covering stablecoin-based cross-border payments, corporate treasury management and the expansion of Dunamu's GIWA blockchain, the companies announced on Wednesday.
According to the release, the two firms will jointly look for business opportunities in using stablecoins for global payments and fund transfers, and review how digital asset infrastructure could be applied to corporate finance and treasury operations. The third strand links MoonPay's global services and network with GIWA, with the stated aim of increasing overseas market access for services and assets built within the GIWA ecosystem.
"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," said Bugeon Lee, Head of APAC at MoonPay. He added that the companies would "work together so that the GIWA ecosystem can expand into global markets."
The announcement is exploratory. The release describes plans to "identify" and "review" opportunities, and says the companies will firm up the technical and commercial potential of each area going forward. No financial terms, product launches, target markets or dates were disclosed, and the release carries no quote from Dunamu.
The GIWA element is the most concrete part of the deal for Dunamu. GIWA is an Ethereum layer 2 built on the OP Stack, and in May Dunamu and the Optimism Foundation announced plans for GIWA to become the first chain on the Self-Managed tier of OP Enterprise, under which Upbit would run the chain's primary sequencer while the foundation provides monitoring and a backup sequencer. The network is still not in production. GIWA said on X on Sept. 27 that its mainnet had not launched, and its developer documentation still lists only Sepolia testnet endpoints, with mainnet marked as under development.
That makes MoonPay a distribution partner for an ecosystem that does not yet have live assets to distribute. MoonPay says it serves more than 35 million customers across 180 countries and over 1,500 enterprise clients, with licences in jurisdictions including the US and the European Union, which would give GIWA-based services a route to users outside Korea's tightly regulated domestic market once the chain goes live.
The more immediate test is whether the payments and treasury work produces a named product. The release does not say which stablecoins such services would use, or whether Dunamu intends to route them over GIWA once the chain is live.
