Upbit Brand Guidelines: Dunamu’s 2017 Seoul Exchange & a Pending Naver Deal

A Seoul software company opens an exchange.

Upbit is a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange run by Dunamu, a software company based in Seoul. Korean Wikipedia dates Dunamu’s start to 2012 and says that from 2014 it developed and ran Kakao Stock, a share-trading service linked to the KakaoTalk messenger, on contract, and describes it as a small developer before the exchange arrived; English Wikipedia names Song Chi-hyung as Dunamu’s founder. Korean Wikipedia gives the exchange’s English name as “UPbit,” while English Wikipedia writes it Upbit, the form used in this guide.

The exchange opened on 24 October 2017, English Wikipedia says, through a partnership with the American exchange Bittrex. Korean Wikipedia describes that tie-up as exclusive and says it let Upbit offer more than a hundred coins at a time when other Korean exchanges listed ten to thirty, without complicated extra steps for customers. Opening an account and logging in with a KakaoTalk account made sign-up simple, the same article adds, and the exchange supports Kakao Pay authentication to make account access easier. Companies in the Kakao group were among Dunamu’s shareholders, according to Korean Wikipedia, and won deposits and withdrawals ran through a partnership with the internet bank K Bank.

Growth came quickly. Korean Wikipedia says the newcomer rose to first place among the country’s exchanges by trading volume soon after launch. In December 2017 Dunamu named Sirgoo Lee, a former co-chief executive of Kakao, as its chief executive, with Song moving to the role of chairman, English Wikipedia says. The exchange then looked beyond Korea, launching in Singapore on 30 October 2018, in Indonesia in January 2019 and in Thailand in January 2021, according to the same article.

Certificates, licences and two hacks.

Upbit’s public record is shaped by regulation as much as by marketing. In December 2018, English Wikipedia says, it received Korea’s ISMS information-security management certification from the Korea Internet and Security Agency, together with certification to the ISO 27001, ISO 27017 and ISO 27018 standards for information security, cloud security and cloud privacy. When South Korea began licensing virtual asset service providers in September 2021, Upbit was the first exchange licensed under the new rules, according to the same article.

Two hacks sit in that record. On 27 November 2019 Upbit lost 342,000 ether from an online wallet and paused deposits and withdrawals for about two weeks, English and Korean Wikipedia say. Police recovered part of the stolen assets from an exchange in Switzerland in October 2023, Korean Wikipedia adds. In November 2025 Upbit announced a second loss, this time from its Solana hot wallet, and told users that funds had been moved to cold wallets, Decrypt reported on 31 December 2025.

Dunamu itself has grown beyond the exchange. Its website, under the line “Connect & Unlock Value,” groups its business into blockchain services led by Upbit and securities services under the Securities Plus name, which cover Korean and American shares and a platform for trading shares in unlisted companies. The site calls Upbit the country’s largest digital-asset exchange; that is the company’s own description. Korean Wikipedia notes that the exchange runs around the clock on computer and phone apps, with a lock-screen display and real-time alerts so customers can watch their accounts at any hour.

How crypto exchanges present themselves.

Crypto exchanges sell access to something customers never hold in their hands, so their brands are carried by screens, numbers and paperwork. Across the category, wordmarks appear in black, yellow, blue and bright neon tones, and the app screens that exchanges publish in stores and on their own sites put price charts, order books and coin icons at the centre of the picture.

Listing pages form a second layer. Each coin or token an exchange supports gets a page of its own, with a ticker symbol, a chart and a short description, and new listings are announced as news. Alongside them sit proof-of-reserves pages, where an exchange publishes snapshots comparing the assets it holds with what it owes customers, and security pages that explain how funds are stored, for example in internet-connected hot wallets and offline cold storage. The Journal of Accountancy noted in November 2026 that such a proof is a self-prepared, point-in-time comparison rather than an audit.

Regulation shapes the look as much as marketing does. Footers and legal pages list licences and registrations country by country, and the same brand can offer different products, or none, depending on where a visitor lives. Under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets rules, exchanges name the national supervisor that authorised them, and a market exit reaches customers as a dated notice with deadlines for withdrawals.

Two more channels carry the names further. Sports sponsorships put exchange logos on football shirts, tournament boards and arena signs, far from any trading screen. Help centres do the quieter work: guides to identity checks, deposits, fees and withdrawals, written for people new to the product. The guides in this collection look at how individual exchanges put those parts together.

A pending share swap with Naver Financial.

Ownership is the open question. Naver Financial and Dunamu reported a planned business combination to South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission in November 2025, structured as a comprehensive share swap under which Naver Financial would acquire all of Dunamu’s shares and Dunamu would become its wholly owned unit, DigitalToday reported on 10 November 2026. On 9 November 2026 the commission’s secretariat said it had received remedies from the two companies and had sent its examiner’s report to the full commission, which opened the formal review stage.

The examiners defined ten affected markets, according to the same report, including online payments, digital-asset exchanges, search portals, online advertising and online shopping, and also a won stablecoin market that does not yet exist but that both companies plan to enter. They found competition concerns where Upbit’s exchange business would meet the payment, search, shopping and data businesses of Naver affiliates. The deal was announced in November 2025 and had not been completed at the time of writing; until the commission rules, Upbit remains a Dunamu business.

For a design guide, Upbit shows how an exchange brand can be built on borrowed reach — a foreign partner’s coin list, a messenger log-in and a bank link — and then held in place by certificates, licences and a public record of incidents. The name itself is short and easy to say in Korean and English, and the app carries most of the brand: a list of markets, a price chart and an order button, with little room for decoration. Compare Bithumb, its long-time Korean rival, and Coinbase. For this guide we use a deep navy, a clear blue and white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Upbit’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.