Visa and Dunamu Launch Stablecoin Payments Partnership

Visa and South Korean company Dunamu, the parent of crypto exchange Upbit, have announced a strategic partnership around stablecoin payments. The companies plan to build joint products for cross-border transfers and settlements, and to explore how artificial intelligence could make purchases on its own using digital dollars. This marks one of Visa's first major moves into stablecoin settlement in South Korea, one of Asia's most active crypto markets.

Visa and Dunamu Strike a Stablecoin Partnership

Dunamu is the parent company of Upbit, South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange. According to a Friday announcement from Dunamu, Visa and Dunamu will combine Dunamu's digital asset technology with Visa's global payments network to test payment, remittance and settlement services in major markets.

Visa has been experimenting with stablecoins for several years. Back in 2023, the company launched a pilot for USDC settlement with select merchant partners. The partnership with Dunamu deepens that push, adding an Asian market and the technology base of one of the region's largest crypto exchanges.

Mastercard is moving on a parallel track: the company runs its own Multi-Token Network for settling tokenized assets, and it has now also joined the initiative around OUSD. Both leading payment brands are effectively testing stablecoin rails at the same time, just through different routes.

Dunamu CEO Oh Kyung-seok explained the partnership's motivation in the company's official statement.

"The spread of AI, stablecoins and tokenization is a key trend that will change how finance and commerce operate."

- Oh Kyung-seok, CEO of Dunamu, from the company's official statement, August 28, 2026

What Is OUSD, and Has Visa Already Picked a Stablecoin?

One candidate for the partnership is Open USD (OUSD), a dollar-backed stablecoin from the Open Standard project, unveiled in June 2026. According to Open Standard, more than 140 companies have already signed on to the initiative, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase and BlackRock.

Dunamu, however, clarified that OUSD is just one of several stablecoins under review and that no final choice has been made. The Visa-Dunamu partnership does not mean OUSD will automatically launch, but rather opens room to test different options.

The rise of OUSD also reflects a broader trend. After the US passed the GENIUS Act, which set rules for issuing dollar-backed stablecoins, large financial and technology companies started more actively launching their own or consortium-backed stablecoin projects instead of relying solely on USDT or USDC.

How Would "Agentic Commerce" Actually Work?

The second part of the partnership focuses on what's known as agentic commerce. This refers to a scenario where an AI agent searches for a product or service on its own, compares offers and completes the purchase on a user's behalf, without manual approval at every step.

Traditional payment rails aren't always a great fit for that model. Card transactions expect a human to confirm the charge, and international transfers can take days. Stablecoins, by contrast, settle almost instantly and cross borders just as easily, which is why Visa and Dunamu want to test whether AI agents can be paired with that kind of settlement layer.

Technically, that means a payment stops being a separate human action and becomes part of an automated flow. An AI agent gets a stablecoin spending limit, makes decisions within it on its own, and settles with the seller directly on-chain, without banking hours or manual transaction processing.

• Key point: an AI agent searches for a product or service without a human involved at each step
• payment runs through a stablecoin instead of a card or bank transfer
• settlement happens almost instantly, including for cross-border purchases
• Visa and Dunamu are still exploring the model, not launching a finished product

Why Is Upbit Staying Out of the OUSD Launch?

In July, Upbit itself said it would not take part in issuing OUSD, even though its parent company Dunamu was named among the businesses involved in the initiative. At first glance that looks contradictory, since Dunamu and Upbit are part of the same corporate structure.

In practice, it is more an example of how large crypto companies split roles within a group. Upbit, as a regulated exchange, is more cautious about direct involvement in issuing a new stablecoin, while parent company Dunamu can explore broader partnerships at the technology and infrastructure level without tying the exchange's own license to that work.

Upbit's caution can also be explained by South Korea's regulatory environment, where oversight of crypto exchanges has traditionally been strict. Direct involvement by a licensed exchange in issuing its own stablecoin draws heightened regulatory scrutiny, while a parent company's involvement at the technology-partnership level looks less risky.

That kind of caution isn't unique to Korea. In the US and Europe, regulators also watch closely for cases where a crypto exchange doubles as the issuer of its own stablecoin, since that combines exchange infrastructure and money issuance under one roof.

What Does This Mean for the Stablecoin Market?

Visa's interest in stablecoin payments is not news by itself, but the scale of companies involved, including Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase and BlackRock, shows that major financial players are preparing for a scenario where part of settlement shifts to digital dollars. For now, this remains mostly pilot projects and research rather than ready infrastructure for everyday users.

The cross-border remittance market has long been one of the main arguments in favor of stablecoins. Fees and timelines in traditional transfer systems run noticeably higher than blockchain settlement. If Visa manages to integrate stablecoin rails into its payment acceptance network, that could speed up the shift of part of this market toward digital dollars.

Neither side has given a specific timeline for launching pilot services or named the markets where they will start first. The first public details will most likely come within a few months, once the companies settle on a specific stablecoin and use cases.

While these experiments continue, established stablecoins like USDC already carry the advantage of deep liquidity and years of real-world use. In Ukraine, a similar dynamic has long played out in practice: USDT remains one of the most popular tools for transfers and everyday payments, and users convert it to hryvnia when they decide to sell USDT for hryvnia through an exchanger. If major payment networks do connect AI agents to stablecoin settlement, demand for that kind of conversion could grow even further.