Hana Financial, POSCO International, Dunamu Sign MOU on Blockchain Cross-Border Remittance
Lead. Hana Financial Group (086790.KS), one of Korea's four major banking holding companies, said Wednesday it signed a memorandum of understanding with POSCO International and Dunamu to jointly build a blockchain-based corporate remittance platform targeting deployment within 2026, according to The Korea Times and The Korea Herald. The agreement would route real-money cross-border transfers over Dunamu's GIWA Chain rather than the SWIFT messaging network, with POSCO International acting as the live test bed across its 51-country trading footprint.
What Happened
The MOU was signed at Hana Financial Group's headquarters in Seoul on April 29, 2026, with Hana Financial vice chairman Lee Eun-hyung, POSCO International CEO Lee Kye-in, and Dunamu CEO Oh Kyoung-suk attending the ceremony, per The Korea Times. Under the partnership, Hana Financial will handle the regulated banking layer — foreign exchange, remittance management, fund settlement, and payment execution — while POSCO International, Korea's flagship trading and supply-chain arm of POSCO Group, will provide live B2B transaction flows between its headquarters and overseas subsidiaries, The Korea Herald reported.
Dunamu, the operator of Upbit (Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange), will provide the underlying blockchain rails through GIWA Chain, its proprietary network designed for high transaction throughput and privacy-enhanced settlement, according to The Korea Herald and CryptoTimes. The three parties said they plan to establish a working real-time remittance platform within 2026, building on a proof-of-concept that Hana Financial and Dunamu completed earlier this year to validate GIWA Chain's security and reliability for sensitive financial transactions, The Korea Herald reported.
Why It Matters
The deal is the first concrete signal that a major Korean commercial bank, a top-tier trading house, and a domestic blockchain operator are willing to move corporate cross-border payments off the SWIFT messaging standard and onto a single-step, on-chain settlement layer in production — not just in a sandbox. Cointelegraph framed the structural shift bluntly: the system collapses payment instruction and fund movement into one real-time process, versus SWIFT's two-step approach. For Hana Financial, the partnership pulls the bank into the digital-asset infrastructure layer through a regulated FX channel, rather than through retail crypto exposure — a posture that distinguishes it from offshore banks that have so far limited blockchain remittance work to stablecoin pilots.
Business Impact
The immediate commercial prize is POSCO International's annual remittance flow. POSCO International processes roughly 40,000 overseas remittance transactions per year across 51 countries, according to The Korea Herald and CryptoTimes — the kind of recurring B2B volume that, if migrated to GIWA Chain, would give Hana Financial a defensible corporate-FX product and Dunamu its first large industrial reference customer outside crypto trading.
POSCO International is not new to blockchain finance. The company previously issued approximately ₩140 billion ($95 million, per Cointelegraph's conversion) in blockchain-based foreign-currency digital bonds with HSBC, and has worked with JPMorgan on blockchain-based global payment solutions, Cointelegraph and CryptoTimes reported. The Hana–Dunamu tie-up extends that playbook from one-off bond issuance to repeatable transactional flow.
No party disclosed transaction-fee economics, KRW commitments tied to the MOU itself, or revenue-sharing terms.
Industry & Historical Context
Korea's regulated banks have historically been cautious on chain-based settlement, with most prior projects routed through the Bank of Korea's central-bank digital currency (CBDC) trials or limited Won-stablecoin sandboxes overseen by the FSC (Korea's Financial Services Commission). A bank-led, corporate-grade remittance platform anchored to a private-sector chain is a different model.
Lee Eun-hyung characterized the arrangement as "a significant turning point where digital assets, industry and finance converge organically," per The Korea Herald. POSCO International's Lee Kye-in said the deal "establishes a mid- to long-term foundation with leading domestic players," per the same outlet. Neither executive set a fee or volume target.
The move also lands in a global context where SWIFT itself has been piloting tokenized-value transfer with major correspondent banks; the Hana–POSCO–Dunamu approach instead bypasses that messaging layer entirely for intra-group corporate flows.
What to Watch
- Pilot-to-production transition by year-end 2026. All three parties have publicly anchored to a 2026 launch, per The Korea Herald and Cointelegraph; any slippage past Q4 would signal regulatory or technical drag.
- FSC and Bank of Korea posture. Korea's regulators have not, in materials reviewed for this article, issued specific guidance on the GIWA Chain remittance design.
- POSCO International transaction migration share. The 40,000-per-year figure is the addressable pool; the disclosed share actually routed through GIWA Chain in the first commercial phase will indicate genuine adoption versus showcase pilots.
- Hana Financial's expansion to non-affiliated corporates. The MOU is bilateral on the corporate side; whether Hana opens the rails to other Korean exporters will determine whether this becomes a platform or a captive utility.
- Dunamu's institutional pivot. A successful deployment would mark Dunamu's first regulated-banking infrastructure win outside its Upbit trading franchise.
Sources: - The Korea Times — https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/business/banking-finance/20260429/hana-financial-posco-international-dunamu-team-up-on-blockchain-based-cross-border-payments - The Korea Herald — https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10728481 - Cointelegraph — https://cointelegraph.com/news/dunamu-hana-financial-take-blockchain-remittance-system-live-with-posco - CryptoTimes — https://www.cryptotimes.io/2026/04/29/posco-hana-financial-and-dunamu-partner-to-replace-swift-with-blockchain/
By LineVest Markets Desk — April 29, 2026
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
