Surf and Bithumb Jointly Launch South Korea's First AI-Powered Trading Experience Service

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Surf has announced a strategic partnership with Bithumb, one of South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, today. Surf's AI Smart Layer has been officially integrated into the Bithumb App, providing South Korea's first AI-centered trading experience to Bithumb's 8+ million users: real-time analysis and trade execution within the same interface.

Source: Surf

Bithumb Users Can Use Real-time AI Analysis to Research Digital Assets and Execute Trades Within the Same App

On September 1, 2026, Surf announced a strategic partnership with Bithumb, one of South Korea's largest digital asset exchanges. Surf's AI intelligence layer has officially integrated into the Bithumb App, providing Bithumb's over 8 million users with South Korea's first AI-driven trading experience: real-time analysis and trade execution within the same interface.

This integration has covered all of Bithumb's 450+ Korean won trading pairs. Surf has customized four features for Bithumb's trading process.

AI Score: Every listed token is scored and ranked using self-iterative scoring logic developed jointly by Surf and Bithumb. The system calculates real-time market data for each asset into four deterministic indicators: momentum, volume, stability, support, and resistance, weighted into an interpretable composite score. Users can see which assets are worth paying attention to on one page.

AI Research Report: Each asset has a real-time updated dedicated report, including price trend forecasts and explanations of causes, updated four times a day. Reports are only published after passing through a complete automated verification layer.

AI Queries: Surf transforms real-time market structure and fund flows into timely questions and macro interpretations that users can learn from and act upon.

AI News: Every morning, Surf links the latest market news with actual price trends, explains macro-level changes, and indicates what to focus on next. Each conclusion is accompanied by a source link.

Why No Korean Exchange Has Done This Before

From Telegram to Bloomberg Terminal, the trading industry has always rewarded those who adopt new technology first. Over 70% of global financial institutions have deployed generative AI capabilities, and exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and Bybit have also introduced AI features. However, in South Korea, one of the world's most active retail trading markets, no major exchange had made AI a core investment experience before.

Regulated trading platforms cannot directly deploy off-the-shelf models. In South Korea, content released by financial institutions is strictly regulated, with high stakes for non-compliance: no content can be construed as investment advice, competitors cannot be mentioned, and any illusory price or percentage will be simultaneously pushed to all users under the trading platform's brand. Training data for cutting-edge models is primarily in English, and Korean financial copy written in Korean may not resonate authentically with local traders.

Bithumb ultimately did not choose the cutting-edge AI lab but instead opted for Surf as the core development partner, with Surf building a bespoke engineering framework around the model to meet quality requirements. Every five minutes, market data, on-chain activities, news, and social signals are frozen into a timestamped snapshot, undergoing over 100 automated quality checks. The model strictly relies on this validated evidence for drafting, with no unverified content entering the prompt, and each output must pass through a zero-tolerance compliance rule check. Content is first generated in English, then translated into Korean, and the translation output is scored by an LLM evaluator. This evaluator is trained on human-annotated data from Bithumb and Surf's Korean annotation teams.

Since its launch, the system has processed over 500 million market and technical data points, executed over 2 million generation and validation tasks, completed over 3 million Korean quality assessments, and maintained a production API availability rate of over 99%.

"Surf is the most aligned partner for Bithumb's development direction," said a Bithumb representative. "Turning vast amounts of digital asset market data into intuitive insights digestible by retail investors requires both AI capability and the ability to distill social data, both of which Surf possesses. Our goal is to enable users to clearly understand complex market changes through data and also hope that the AI signals and analysis provided in this collaboration will help narrow the information gap faced by retail investors."

Surf CEO Ryan Li stated, "More and more financial assets are moving to the blockchain, from tokenized assets to various countries' stablecoins, making researching and mastering this market more challenging, while the demand to do this well continues to grow. AI is a tool that allows people to truly grasp this complexity, and few markets are as naturally suited to AI as digital assets. Together with Bithumb, we have proven that AI can provide a capability in a way that off-the-shelf models cannot, enabling a mature financial institution's customers to access this ability. We are advancing towards a simple premise: every institution ultimately needs its own intelligent layer, with its output determined by the team's business objectives and regulatory environment. Bithumb is just the beginning."

To celebrate this listing, Surf will provide Bithumb with 30,000 discount codes that can each be redeemed for a three-week Surf Pro subscription from August 31 to September 30, 2026. Users will need to log in or register for a Surf account to redeem the codes. For more details, please see the [event link].

About Surf

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Surf is an AI analytics tool designed for digital asset research. It consolidates information from 12 data domains into a reliable answer, compressing hours of research into a single query to help users make better investment and trading decisions. Built on real-time financial market data, Surf covers assets such as tokens, stocks, ETFs, while tracking 100 million wallet addresses and financial data from 4,500 publicly traded U.S. companies. Surf's investors include Coinbase, Pantera, and DCG, and it has answered over 3 million questions for more than 500,000 users in four languages. For more information, please visit the [official website].

About Bithumb

Positioned as a "Trusted Financial Partner," Bithumb was established in 2014 and is one of South Korea's leading digital asset exchange platforms, with approximately 8 million registered accounts, 820,000 daily active users, and a daily trading volume of around 22 trillion KRW. Bithumb's trading matching engine is designed for high concurrency, and its listing process is transparent and fair. The company is headquartered in Seoul's Gangnam District.