What is GIWA Chain? Upbit's Ethereum L2, explained
GIWA Chain (기와) is an Ethereum Layer 2 network built by Dunamu, the company behind Upbit, South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange. It is an optimistic rollup on the OP Stack, developed in partnership with the Optimism Foundation, and it is widely described as the first self-managed enterprise L2 in the Optimism ecosystem. The name means roof tile in Korean: the traditional curved clay tile that covers hanok and palace roofs.
Where it came from
GIWA was announced on September 9, 2025 by Dunamu CEO Oh Kyung-seok at UDC, the Upbit D Conference in Seoul, a day after trademark filings had tipped the news. The reveal came with receipts: the GIWA Sepolia testnet was already running, with more than four million blocks produced before the name was even public. The testnet remains open today at giwa.io with a faucet, bridge, block explorer and developer playground.
The technology
GIWA is a textbook-modern OP Stack rollup with a few notable choices:
- 1-second block times — near-real-time UX, aimed at consumer finance rather than DeFi-only workloads.
- Full EVM compatibility — Solidity contracts deploy unchanged; the whole Ethereum tooling stack works.
- Superchain membership — built to interoperate with Base, OP Mainnet and the rest of the OP Stack family.
- Standard rollup fees — a small L2 execution fee plus the cost of publishing data to Ethereum.
Not a token play — an infrastructure play
No native token has been announced, and gas is paid in ETH like other OP Stack chains. Dunamu's stated focus is a Korean won stablecoin and regulated financial applications. The identity layer makes that credible: Dojang issues on-chain Verified Address attestations tied to Upbit Korea KYC via the Ethereum Attestation Service, and GIWA ID gives KYC-verified users free, non-transferable username.giwa.id names. It is compliance-first plumbing for bringing Korea's massive retail market on-chain.
Why it matters
South Korea is one of the largest retail crypto markets on earth, and Upbit dominates its KRW trading volume. An L2 born from that ecosystem starts with something almost no new chain has: an exchange with millions of verified users one integration away. When mainnet arrives (no date announced yet), the question will not be whether GIWA has users, but what there is for them to do.
Where GIWA.MARKETS fits
That last question is what GIWA.MARKETS exists to answer. It is the community launchpad building on GIWA from day one, independent of Dunamu: a fair-launch platform live on GIWA Sepolia with five launch modes, genesis tokens, the 8,888-piece on-chain TILES collection, the GONGSIN founding subjects, the ROOF POINTS staking vault and the GIWA QUEST game — all built to redeploy to mainnet at genesis. Read the full launchpad guide or the companion piece on the companies behind GIWA.
FAQ
- Is GIWA Chain live?
- The GIWA Sepolia testnet is live and public. Mainnet has no announced date.
- Is GIWA an Upbit product?
- It is built by Dunamu, the operator of Upbit — announced by Dunamu's CEO at Upbit's own conference.
- Does GIWA have a coin?
- No chain token has been announced. Gas is ETH; the strategic focus is a KRW stablecoin.
- What stack does it use?
- The OP Stack, in partnership with the Optimism Foundation, headed for the Superchain.