Hana Financial picks Lambda256 as tech partner for blockchain remittance push with Dunamu

Hana Financial Group has selected Lambda256, the blockchain infrastructure arm of Dunamu, as the technology partner for its overseas remittance and payment project and has been actively advancing the initiative since June, it has been confirmed. This is the first time a domestic financial group has moved blockchain-based overseas remittances and trade payment settlements to the implementation stage alongside a specific technology provider.

Hana Financial chose Lambda256 as its technology partner and began building the blockchain-based overseas remittance and payment system in June. The project follows a blockchain remittance MOU signed in April among Hana Financial, POSCO International and Dunamu. Hana Financial completed an initial proof-of-concept before launching the full service build-out in June.

Lambda256, Dunamu's enterprise blockchain subsidiary, is serving as the technology provider responsible for implementing Hana Bank's overseas trade remittance operations on a blockchain. The company is developing smart contracts to process and record remittance transactions on Dunamu's enterprise blockchain, Kaia Chain, and integrating them with Hana Bank's existing foreign exchange and account systems. Lambda256 will also support blockchain wallet key management, node operations and a transaction monitoring framework. The project is essentially a systems integration effort to attach a blockchain remittance system to Hana Bank's existing operational structure.

In practice, when a domestic company wants to send dollars to an overseas counterpart, the money does not physically cross borders. Instead, the sending and receiving banks adjust deposit balances held at correspondent banks in the respective countries. Blockchain is used in this process to share records of remittance instructions, transaction status and fund attribution.

The structure closely resembles JPMorgan's Kinexys, which manages bank deposits on a blockchain ledger. Kinexys is an institutional blockchain infrastructure built by JPMorgan: when institutional clients move funds from demand deposit accounts into blockchain deposit accounts, companies holding those accounts can transfer digital deposits to one another in real time.

The collaboration extends the alliance Hana Financial and Dunamu have been building. Hana Bank acquired a 6.55 percent stake in Dunamu in May for about 1 trillion won ($702 million), becoming its fourth-largest shareholder, and has been aggressively expanding into digital assets — filing trademark applications for a won-denominated stablecoin, establishing a group-wide digital asset TF and leading the first stablecoin consortium among the four major banking groups. Ham Young-joo, chairman of Hana Financial Group, highlighted stablecoins as the group's top new business priority in his New Year's address this year, calling on the group to "become a market architect that proactively designs a complete ecosystem — from issuance to retail distribution, use and circulation."

Industry observers say Hana Financial's global foreign exchange network could prove a key advantage for the project. Blockchain-based overseas remittances require counterpart banks abroad to participate in the same network to be effective, but Hana Financial is relatively well-positioned to arrange in-house pilot counterparts by leveraging the overseas branches and local subsidiaries it acquired through its earlier takeover of Korea Exchange Bank.

"Most domestic tests so far have been conducted through platforms like Kinexys or Circle Payments Network," a financial industry official said. "KEB Hana Bank appears confident that it can run pilots on its own, without having to find external counterparts, thanks to the global network it inherited from Korea Exchange Bank."