Visa, fresh from signing one of South Korea’s largest financial conglomerates to its stablecoin and AI payments platform, said the operator of the country's No. 1 crypto exchange will also explore using the framework as the global payments processor strengthens its digital asset offerings in one of Asia's biggest economies.
Upbit operator Dunamu plans to work with Visa to develop financial payment services using stablecoins and artificial intelligence (AI), the Korea Herald reported on Friday. The agreement follows a similar one, announced earlier this week, on settlement infrastructure with Shinhan Financial Group.
The deal puts Visa at the center of South Korea’s push to build stablecoin payment infrastructure. The country has at least 16 million crypto users, according to CoinGecko, which is proving to be an attractive market. In May, industrial conglomerate Samsung said it bought a 4% stake in Dunamu, and on Thursday, Mirae Asset set out the $109 billion crypto ambitions for the Digital X exchange it bought in July.
Visa and Dunamu said they will explore business models based on OUSD, an open-standard stablecoin, as well as new user experiences in payments and settlement. The collaboration also extends to AI-powered payment services and infrastructure for agentic commerce, in which AI agents search for products or services and complete purchases on users' behalf.
"AI, stablecoins and tokenization are key trends that will reshape how finance and commerce operate," said CEO Oh Kyung-seok, according to the Korea Herald
Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, recently shared a similar vision, saying he crypto and 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," Siu said. "Crypto basically solves all of that."