[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Blockchain infrastructure company Optimism has disclosed partnerships with Dunamu's GIWA blockchain, Toss and DB Financial Investment as it steps up its business in South Korea.

Optimism plans to expand its on-chain finance infrastructure business for local financial institutions, fintech and digital asset companies.

Optimism OP Enterprise supports financial institutions and companies in running on-chain businesses that execute functions such as finance, transactions and payments on blockchains without building their own blockchain teams. Clients can receive end-to-end technical operations services, from sequencers to security patches and upgrades. They can also design compliance rules and fee policies tailored to their infrastructure.

Optimism is also speeding up cooperation with South Korean companies. Optimism signed a memorandum of understanding in May with Dunamu, operator of the Upbit exchange, to advance GIWA technology and lay the groundwork for global expansion. Through the agreement, the companies will review a domestic digital asset infrastructure business model based on OP Stack and jointly explore GIWA's potential for global expansion.

On July 8, it announced a memorandum of understanding with Toss and began a proof of concept on the feasibility of building won-based digital finance infrastructure. Over the next 3 months, the two companies plan to verify whether Optimism's open-source technology stack, OP Stack, can be applied to South Korea's digital finance environment and to check key requirements for building institutional financial infrastructure, including regulatory compliance, personal data protection and performance.

Optimism will also cooperate with DB Financial Investment in finding STO and RWA projects tailored to the Jeju area and developing global collaboration models. It plans to pursue a business model that combines DB Financial Investment's financial network and business capabilities with Optimism's Ethereum layer2 infrastructure to convert tangible and intangible assets linked to Jeju, such as smart farm and livestock assets and South Korean intellectual property rights (K-IP), into STO and RWA forms.

Optimism plans to actively seek cooperation opportunities with South Korea's financial sector and digital asset industry. It aims to identify use cases across regulated finance, including securities, cards, payments and fintech, and to support South Korean companies in building on-chain finance services that are both regulation-friendly and scalable.

Jing Wang (징 왕), CEO of OP Labs, said, "Korea has a changing regulatory environment and the scale of a digital asset market that can grow faster than any market we have entered." He said, "Optimism is building infrastructure suited to such a market." He added, "Regulated finance is also continuing to show a trend of choosing Optimism," and said, "It is 이어지고 있다 from Europe's Bitpanda, Kraken's 'Ink' in the United States, Japan's Mitsui, and now to Korea's Dunamu, Toss and DB Financial Investment."