South Korean Conglomerate Hanwha Set To Acquire A $50M Stake In UPbit’s Operator

The brokerage arm of the South Korean business conglomerate Hanwha Group is reportedly set to acquire a 6.15% stake in Dunamu – the operator of the popular cryptocurrency exchange UPbit. The deal will take place on February 22nd, 2021.

• According to the KoreaHerald coverage, Hanwha Investment and Securities has agreed to buy 2.06 million shares in Dunamu.
• The deal will become official later this month for a total price of 58.3 billion won ($52 million).
• The South Korea-headquartered financial service giant aims to enhance its long-term involvement with the rapidly expanding fintech field, as a spokesman from the firm asserted:

• “As we are focusing on developing more digital services, we anticipate to achieve meaningful results in fintech-related businesses. Since Dunamu already has a high-skilled innovative finance service, we decided to cooperate with the financial technology firm.”

• Founded in 2017, UPbit is a South Korean crypto exchange that made the news in a somewhat negative way in 2019 by becoming a victim of a security breach. 
• CryptoPotato reported at the time that undisclosed perpetrators stole around $51 million in Ethereum (ETH) and BitTorrent Token (BTT).
• Although the exchange resumed its services rather quickly and upgraded its security systems, it failed to retrieve the stolen amount. Just the opposite, as another report claimed that a portion of the funds was laundered. Additionally, the monitoring resource Whale Alert caught several batches of ETH transfers from the hack to unknown wallets.