Song Chi-hyung
Song Chi-Hyung is the creator and current CEO of Upbit, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea. He is also the CEO of Dunamu. In October 2017, Upbit obtained money from internet giant Kakao Corp. and teamed with Bittrex, based in the United States, to trade what is now a total of 120 tokens from 214 markets. This was accomplished through Dunamu, which is Upbit's holding company
Song is an honors alumnus of the highly regarded Seoul National University, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in both economics and computer science. In the late 1990s, on the heels of a significant improvement in Korea's internet infrastructure, he abandoned his intentions to get an MBA and instead secured his first tech job at an information technology company.
By the end of December 2017, Upbit had reached a daily trading volume of as much as $4.7 billion on average and had reached as high as $11 billion in a single day.
Dunamu, which literally means "two trees", was established in 2012 by Song as a news aggregator but swiftly transitioned into the financial technology industry. It was in 2013 when it received the financial backing of $187,000 from Kakao's holding company, K Cube Ventures, and then in 2015, it received direct funding of $3.8 million from the company.
KakaoStock, a mobile stock trading app that currently has more than 300,000 users and utilizes Kaka's instant messaging base of 50 million, was developed as a result of the agreement between the two companies.
