South Korean Banking Giant Buys $670M Stake in Upbit Exchange

Hana Bank has agreed to buy a 6.55% stake in Dunamu, the operator of Upbit (@Official_Upbit), for about 1 trillion won, or roughly $670 million. The deal, approved by Hana's board on Friday, is the largest crypto-related investment ever made by a South Korean commercial bank, and it puts one of the country's Big 4 lenders on the cap table of the company behind Korea's dominant exchange.

The transaction is a cash purchase of 2,284,000 Dunamu shares from Kakao Investment, which will see its stake drop from 10.58% to around 4.03%. Closing is set for June 15.

Who owns Dunamu now?

Once the deal settles, Hana will be Dunamu's fourth-largest shareholder. The top of the ownership stack stays unchanged:

• Founder and Chair Song Chi-hyung, 25.51%
• Vice Chair Kim Hyoung-nyon, 13.1%
• Woori Technology Investment, 7.2%
• Hana Bank, 6.55%

The buy uses only about 2.78% of Hana Bank's equity. Kakao Investment's partial sale yields the IT conglomerate roughly a 300x return on the 35.5 billion won it first invested in Dunamu after the exchange launched in 2012.

Why is a bank buying an exchange operator?

Hana isn't treating this as a passive equity bet. Alongside the share purchase, the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding covering won-backed stablecoin development, blockchain remittances, and a joint wealth management product that ties Upbit into Hana Financial's fund, pension, and trust infrastructure.

The remittance piece is already operational. Hana and Dunamu completed a SWIFT-style proof of concept on Dunamu's proprietary Giwa Chain (@GIWA_by_Upbit) in February, then signed a three-way deal with POSCO International in April to test cross-border settlements on live commercial flows.

In a statement from Hana Financial Group, Chairman Ham Young-joo framed the deal as a strategic push to build a "K-blockchain ecosystem" and accelerate domestic digital asset innovation.

What about the pending Naver merger?

Hana's entry lands in the middle of a separate structural shake-up at Dunamu. Naver announced in November 2025 that it would acquire Dunamu in an all-stock deal, originally targeting a mid-2026 closing.

That timeline has since slipped. After the Fair Trade Commission's antitrust review ran past its initial deadline, Naver Financial and Dunamu pushed the shareholder vote from May 22 to August 18, with the share swap now planned for September 30. The pending Digital Asset Basic Act has added further uncertainty to the deal structure.

The revised timeline still puts Hana on the books before the Naver vote, adding a Big 4 bank to the shareholder mix as one of the largest fintech deals in Korean history grinds through regulatory review.

How did the market react?

Korean retail did what Korean retail tends to do: pile into $XRP. The XRP/KRW pair on Upbit saw more than $330 million in 24-hour volume after the announcement, topping $BTC at around $217 million and $ETH at around $109 million on the same venue. XRP briefly took the top spot on Upbit's volume charts.

The regulatory backdrop

The buy comes with a ceiling already in place. In March, South Korea introduced a 20% ownership cap on crypto exchanges, including Upbit and Bithumb, which limits how deeply any single institution can embed itself in the sector. Regulators have also eased rules on the other side, with listed Korean companies now allowed to allocate up to 5% of their equity to digital assets. The pending Digital Asset Basic Act is expected to formalize stablecoin issuance rules, giving banks a clearer legal lane to operate in.

Hana is not the only Korean financial group moving into exchange equity either. Mirae Asset Consulting agreed in February to buy a 92.06% stake in Korbit for roughly $93 million, and Woori Bank partnered with MoonPay in April on a won-backed stablecoin. On the same day Hana announced its Dunamu deal, Yonhap reported that Korea Investment & Securities and global exchange OKX are in talks to each acquire about 20% of Coinone, mainly through new share issuance.

For Hana, the spend is a small fraction of equity for a large foothold in the country's most active retail crypto venue, with optionality attached to stablecoin issuance, remittance rails, and tokenized products. For Upbit, it adds a major lender to the shareholder base at the exact moment Korea's digital asset rulebook is being rewritten. The read from Seoul is straightforward: banks aren't just forming compliance partnerships with exchanges anymore; they're buying stakes in them.

Sources:

• Bloomberg Breaking confirmation of the 1 trillion won deal and Hana Financial Group statement.
• Blockhead Shareholder breakdown, MOU terms, and Kakao return figures.
• Cointelegraph OKX and Korea Investment & Securities Coinone talks, Mirae Asset/Korbit context.
• Seoul Economic Daily Naver-Dunamu merger postponement details and FTC review context.
• Korea Herald Earlier Hana-Dunamu MOU on blockchain remittance and Giwa Chain background.