Upbit Announces Planned Partnership with The Optimism Foundation on GIWA Chain. Korea's Largest Exchange Is Picking a Side on Infrastructure.
Through the partnership with The Optimism Foundation, GIWA Chain plans to be the first chain on the Self-Managed tier of OP Enterprise. The bigger story is the pattern — major exchanges are increasingly choosing to own their infrastructure, and they're choosing the same stack to do it.
When an exchange at Upbit's scale signals it's building its own chain, the industry should read that as a pattern, not a one-off.
Today, Upbit — South Korea's largest digital asset exchange, operated by Dunamu — announced its planned partnership with The Optimism Foundation on GIWA Chain, a new Ethereum Layer 2 built on the OP Stack. GIWA Chain is currently live on testnet, with mainnet planned to follow. GIWA Chain plans to be the first chain to operate on the Self-Managed tier of OP Enterprise, the Optimism Foundation's managed infrastructure product for institutional operators. Both teams will mark the partnership at Consensus Miami on Monday, May 4, 2026.
The decision that's becoming routine
For the world's largest digital asset exchanges, whether to operate their own chain is no longer a technical question. It's a strategic one, about what an exchange owns and what it rents.
Shared blockspace is fine for most use cases. For exchange-grade workloads — institutional volume, compliance requirements, fee economics that compound at scale — it's a liability. An exchange on shared infrastructure can't control which transactions get included, can't set its own ordering rules, can't capture the fees its users generate, and can't guarantee the SLA its regulators require. Every one of those tradeoffs becomes more expensive as the exchange gets bigger.
Upbit serves more than 13 million registered users and ranks #2 globally by cumulative spot trading volume from 2020 to 2024 (CoinGecko). At that scale, the math stops working for renting someone else's infrastructure. Building your own chain becomes the logical next step.
That's not a hot take. It's what's already happening.
The pattern is getting harder to miss
The world's largest exchanges are increasingly reaching the same conclusion, and they're reaching it on the same infrastructure. More than 32 Layer 2 networks run in production on the OP Stack today, and the ecosystem processed over six billion transactions in 2025. The OP Stack has become the standard for exchanges launching their own chains, not because it was positioned that way, but because every serious evaluation seems to end in the same place.
An exchange building a production chain doesn't want to be the one proving whether the underlying infrastructure works. The OP Stack has the track record, the tooling, the ecosystem, and the security model. It works at scale, with the kind of uptime and forensic resilience that regulated operators require.
Dunamu's MoU puts Upbit among a growing cohort of major exchanges choosing the same foundation. What's distinct about Upbit's decision is the tier.
Why Self-Managed is the new frontier
OP Enterprise comes in two tiers. Fully Managed is the default for operators that want to focus on their product, their users, and their market while The Optimism Foundation handles the chain. Self-Managed is the opposite: the operator runs the chain's primary sequencer, controls configuration, and holds operational authority. The Foundation provides assurance, monitoring, engineering support, and a backup sequencer in the event of primary sequencer disruption.
Self-Managed is built for operators who can't cede operational control. For a regulated exchange serving Korean and global institutional users, giving up sequencer control over Upbit's chain was never going to be acceptable. But taking on the full weight of chain resilience alone, running the single instance of sequencer infrastructure that millions of users depend on, is a burden few single-operator chains can credibly sustain.
Self-Managed is designed to bridge that gap. Under the MoU, Upbit would run the chain. The Foundation would run the safety net. The operator keeps sovereignty. The user base gets resilience. Neither side has to compromise.
GIWA Chain plans to be the first chain to go live under that model. It won't be the last.
"Operating our own GIWA Chain is a strategic move for Upbit. Our goal is to provide institutional and retail users with a level of performance and compliance consistent with our existing platform. The Optimism Foundation's Self-Managed tier provides a suitable framework, allowing us to maintain operational control while building on established infrastructure. This approach aligns with our requirements for scalability and oversight."
Minseok Jung, Chief Operating Officer, Dunamu Inc.
"What we hear consistently from the largest exchanges and institutional operators is that they want to own the chain their users transact on, not rent it. Upbit going live on OP Enterprise Self-Managed is a clear signal about where the industry is moving. It also says something about where the trust is going: an operator at Upbit's scale isn't going to build on infrastructure that hasn't already proven it can carry the weight."
Jing Wang, Director, The Optimism Foundation
What this means for the industry
When Coinbase built Base, the industry debated whether exchange chains were a good idea. When Kraken built Ink, the debate shifted to whether they'd see real adoption. By the time the next wave of exchanges started to build, the question had changed again: not whether to build a chain, but how, and on what stack.
The answers are converging. Exchanges build chains. They build them on the OP Stack. And increasingly, they build them under a management model that matches their operational requirements — Self-Managed for operators with the capability and need to control their own sequencer, Fully Managed for operators who'd rather focus their engineering resources elsewhere.
GIWA Chain is the flag being planted for the Self-Managed tier. Korea's largest exchange, ranked #2 globally by cumulative spot volume from 2020 to 2024, chose Self-Managed because the model fits how a regulated financial institution actually wants to operate infrastructure. Other operators — exchanges, payment networks, regulated financial platforms — will watch how this plays out. Many will make the same call.
What comes next
Dunamu and The Optimism Foundation will sign the MoU in Miami on May 4. Definitive agreements will follow, with technical work running in parallel: architecture reviews, performance benchmarking, and security audits between the teams as GIWA Chain progresses from testnet toward mainnet.
For exchanges, fintechs, and institutional operators evaluating where to build: the OP Stack's track record speaks for itself. OP Enterprise's two-tier model means that "own your chain" and "don't run infrastructure alone" are no longer in tension. Self-Managed is the first product to put both in the same deal.
GIWA Chain is what that looks like at scale. From here, it's just a matter of who builds next.