Upbit, South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, is adding eight new trading pairs across four tokens: Biconomy (BICO), Bubblemaps (BMT), Nillion (NIL), and ETHGas (GWEI). Trading goes live at 13:00 KST on August 21, giving Korean retail traders direct access to these assets against both Bitcoin and Tether.

All four tokens already trade on Upbit's KRW market. The new BTC and USDT pairs are intended to deepen liquidity and widen the on-ramp for international traders who do not transact in Korean won. For those traders, Tether's USDT — the largest stablecoin by market capitalization — provides a dollar-referenced way to price and settle positions without converting into won at any point.

What's getting listed

The full roster of new pairs: BICO/BTC, BICO/USDT, BMT/BTC, BMT/USDT, NIL/BTC, NIL/USDT, GWEI/BTC, and GWEI/USDT. That is two pairs per token, each anchored to crypto's two most liquid base currencies.

Deposits for the newly listed tokens are already open, though each runs on a different chain depending on the project. BICO, NIL, and GWEI all use Ethereum as their deposit network, while BMT takes the Solana route — a distinction worth noting because exchanges generally cannot recover funds sent over an unsupported network.

The four tokens represent a diverse cross-section of crypto infrastructure:

• Biconomy (BICO) operates as a cross-chain interoperability protocol and gas relayer — effectively the plumbing that lets users interact with multiple blockchains without manually bridging assets or paying gas fees on every chain.
• Bubblemaps (BMT) builds data visualization tools for on-chain analytics, mapping token holder distributions and wallet clusters.
• Nillion (NIL) builds decentralized infrastructure for processing sensitive data without exposing it.
• GWEI, tied to the ETHGas project, focuses on Ethereum gas analytics and tooling.

Why Upbit listings matter more than most

Upbit is the largest crypto trading platform in South Korea by volume, a heavily retail-driven market where won-denominated trading has historically sat partly walled off from global venues. Korea's capital controls and won-only on-ramps have at times produced visible price gaps between local exchanges and international ones — the phenomenon known as the "kimchi premium" — and tokens quoted solely in KRW sit furthest inside that divide. Adding Bitcoin and Tether pairs integrates these assets into global order flow, making arbitrage easier and improving price discovery for tokens that were previously accessible only against the Korean won.

It is also worth noting what this batch is not: a fresh KRW debut. Upbit's won markets have historically concentrated a large share of global trading activity in the tokens the exchange lists, so this move is less a listing event than an infrastructure upgrade — connecting assets that already had won pairs to the BTC- and USDT-quoted order books that dominate volume on international venues.

Upbit has been on a steady expansion throughout 2026. The exchange added BTC and USDT pairs for CFX back in July and did the same for CAP earlier in August. This latest batch of four tokens continues that cadence of upgrading trading infrastructure for assets already listed on the platform.