Crypto Giants File GIWA Trademarks-Countdowns, Rumors, and Mild Outbreaks of Hype 🦄

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What you absolutely, positively cannot not know:

  • Dunamu, proud progenitor of South Korea’s Upbit crypto exchange and possibly allergic to subtlety, has paraded trademark filings for “GIWA”. This has summoned the ancient, unruly spirit of Wild Internet Speculation.
  • A mysterious website, likely designed by someone who thinks ‘less is more’, boasts a countdown. It’s ticking towards an announcement so momentous that even household plants are on edge. Bonus: It lines up suspiciously with the legendary Upbit Developer Conference.
  • This dazzling move mirrors exchanges stumbling over themselves to make their own blockchains-see: Coinbase’s Base, OKX’s OKChain, Binance’s BNB Chain. Dunamu is, quite possibly, joining the ‘My Blockchain Is Bigger Than Yours’ club.

Dunamu-the company behind Upbit and, presumably, a legion of coffee-fueled patent lawyers-has lobbed several trademark applications at the internet, all under the cryptic moniker “GIWA.” There’s a logo, there are stylized letters, and somewhere out there a graphic designer is contemplating early retirement.

The rumor mill, powered by X (formerly known as “Twitter, why did you bother?”), is working overtime. A user claims that a friend heard a friend say at UDC that GIWA is going to be its own network-which is usually how epic adventures begin or embarrassing misunderstandings get public funding.

Since then, rumor after rumor has piled up like mismatched socks, while Upbit and Dunamu maintain the cryptographer’s sacred code: No Comment. Would Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork ever run out of rumors? Absolutely not.

There’s a website-of course there’s a website-which helpfully features a countdown and the words “Coming soon.” The countdown refuses to say what comes soon, but readers with spare time may enjoy watching it as a hobby. It conveniently lines up with the start of UDC in Seoul, so expect dramatic music.

What’s the trend? Crypto exchanges want blockchains, obviously. Coinbase knocked out Base; OKX unwrapped OKChain; Binance-never one to be upstaged-spawned BSC Chain, then rebranded to BNB Chain because acronyms are apparently fun.

To raise the stakes, Stripe and Paradigm released Tempo, a blockchain for “high-speed stablecoin payments”-maybe even for buying coffee at a speed impressive enough to get noticed by Anthropic, OpenAI, Revolut, and Deutsche Bank, who are all very excited in very official ways.

CoinDesk, armed with a sturdy keyboard, asked Upbit and Dunamu for comment. The silence, so far, is deafening-if not entirely unfamiliar to the genre. Stay tuned: something might happen, eventually. Or not. 🤷‍♂️

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2025-09-08 22:17