검색결과 총 3건
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두나무 'UDC', 8년 만에 멈춘다…"다음 도약 위한 재정비"
[경제일보] 두나무가 국내 대표 블록체인 행사인 ‘업비트 D 컨퍼런스(UDC)’를 올해 개최하지 않는다. 2018년 시작 이후 매년 이어온 행사를 8년 만에 한 차례 쉬어가기로 한 것이다. 행사 규모를 키우는 것보다 UDC가 어떤 역할을 해야 하는지부터 다시 들여다보겠다는 판단으로 풀이된다. 19일 가상자산업계에 따르면 두나무는 올해 하반기 UDC를 개최하지 않고, 오는 9월 열리는 ‘KBW 2026 with Upbit’와 개막 행사인 ‘업비트 인스티튜셔널 서밋(UIS)’에 역량을 집중한다. 올해 KBW(코리아 블록체인 위크)는 9월 29일부터 10월 1일까지 서울 워커힐 호텔앤리조트에서 열린다. 두나무는 KBW의 최상위 후원사인 프레젠팅 파트너로 참여하며, 첫날 기관 투자자와 금융권 관계자 등을 대상으로 UIS를 개최한다. 이후 이틀간 메인 콘퍼런스가 이어진다. UIS는 일반 대중보다는 기관과 금융시장에 초점을 맞춘 행사다. 디지털자산 수탁과 결제 인프라, 토큰증권(STO), 실물연계자산(RWA) 등 기관 시장과 연결된 의제를 다룰 것으로 예상된다. UDC 대신 기관 중심의 논의에 무게를 두는 것은 디지털자산 시장의 관심사가 기술과 투자자 커뮤니티를 넘어 금융 인프라와 제도권 시장으로 이동하고 있는 흐름과도 맞닿아 있다. UDC는 두나무가 블록체인 생태계 확대를 위해 2018년 시작한 행사다. 초기에는 ‘업비트 개발자 컨퍼런스’라는 이름처럼 개발자와 기술 중심의 행사였다. 변화의 계기는 2023년 리브랜딩이었다. 두나무는 당시 UDC의 ‘D’를 개발자(Developer)에 한정하지 않고 디지털자산(Digital Asset), 탈중앙화(Decentralized)까지 확장했다. 기술뿐 아니라 정책·금융·경제·문화 등 블록체인 산업 전반을 다루는 종합 콘퍼런스로 행사 성격을 넓혔다. 개발자 중심의 기술 행사로 출발한 UDC가 디지털자산과 금융, 정책, 문화까지 영역을 확대하면서 참석자와 콘텐츠의 범위도 넓어졌다. 행사 규모가 커질수록 개발자와 업계 실무자, 투자자, 정책 관계자 등 서로 다른 수요를 하나의 행사에 담아내야 하는 과제가 생긴 것이다. 실제 UDC 2025는 ‘블록체인, 산업의 중심으로’를 주제로 금융·정책·기술·문화 등 다양한 분야를 다뤘다. 59명의 연사가 참여했고 1200명 이상의 참관객이 행사장을 찾았다. 누적 기준으로는 2만6800여명의 참가자와 1420개 기업이 UDC에 참여한 것으로 집계됐다. 두나무가 올해 UDC를 쉬어가는 배경에는 이런 행사 자체의 방향성을 다시 설정하려는 고민이 자리한 것으로 보인다. 업계에서는 UDC가 성장하면서 당초 개발자 중심이라는 색채가 옅어졌고, 다양한 이해관계자의 요구를 하나의 행사에서 충족하기 어려워졌다는 평가가 나온다. 두나무의 사업 환경도 과거와 달라졌다. 2025년 두나무 연결 기준 매출은 1조5578억원으로 전년 대비 10.0% 감소했고, 영업이익은 8693억원으로 26.7% 줄었다. 글로벌 경기 둔화에 따른 디지털자산 거래량 감소가 실적에 영향을 미쳤다. 다만 UDC 중단을 실적 악화에 따른 비용 절감으로 단순 해석하기는 어렵다. 두나무는 이번 휴식기를 ‘다음 단계의 도약을 위한 재정비’로 설명하고 있다. 행사를 없애는 것이 아니라 앞으로 어떤 형태와 주제로 다시 선보일지 고민하는 시간에 가깝다는 의미다. 오히려 올해 두나무가 선택한 행보를 보면 방향성의 변화가 읽힌다. UDC가 블록체인 생태계 전반의 담론을 다루는 종합 행사였다면, KBW와 UIS에서는 글로벌 기관과 금융시장에 초점을 맞춘다. 업비트는 올해 KBW에 처음으로 최상위 파트너로 참여하고 기관 중심의 UIS도 맡는다. 이는 국내 디지털자산 시장이 거래소와 투자자 중심의 초기 시장에서 금융기관과 자본시장, 글로벌 기관투자자 중심의 시장으로 이동하는 흐름과도 연결된다. 두나무 역시 행사 전략을 통해 시장의 무게중심 변화에 대응하는 모습이다. 두나무 관계자는 “UDC는 2018년부터 8년 동안 블록체인 산업의 성장과 함께 다양한 인사이트를 공유해왔다”며 “다음 단계의 도약을 위해 2026년 한 해 재정비 시간을 갖게 됐으며 재정비 후 더욱 의미 있는 모습을 보여드릴 예정”이라고 말했다. 한편 올해 UDC의 빈자리는 단순한 행사 공백이라기보다 두나무가 블록체인 산업의 변화 속에서 ‘어떤 행사를 만들어야 하는가’를 다시 묻는 시간으로 볼 수 있다. 내년 이후 UDC가 개발자 중심 행사로 돌아갈지, 기관·금융·정책까지 아우르는 새로운 형태로 재편될지가 관전 포인트다.
2026-08-19 18:23:45
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Lessons in Leadership from the Classics | Chapter 4: Nvidia
The Patience and the Ascent of Jensen Huang How the Alleyways of Korea and the Floors of Semiconductor Factories Forged the Aesthetics of 古枯孤高 [Economy Daily] At the beating heart of the civilizational upheaval we call artificial intelligence stands one company and one man: Nvidia and Jensen Huang. The world measures them in market capitalization and market share. But the deeper truth of great leadership outlasts any number. It is the power of time, long and unhurried. It is the discipline of subtraction. It is the courage of solitude. And it is, finally, the dignity that comes only from having endured. In the vocabulary of East Asian philosophy, these four qualities compress into a single phrase: 古枯孤高 — ancient (古), austere (枯), solitary (孤), elevated (高). Nvidia's rise is not the story of a stock that spiked overnight. It is the story of these four characters slowly calcifying into the bones of one man and the culture of one company, across thirty years of painstaking accumulation. 古 — The Ancient: Time as the First Discipline Every great enterprise, if it is truly great, eventually earns its face — but only through time. Jensen Huang had been walking this earth as a businessman long before the world knew his name. His relationship with Korea begins here, and it begins on foot. According to domestic industry accounts from that era, Huang made repeated visits to Yongsan Electronics Market in Seoul in the late 1990s and early 2000s — when Nvidia was still an obscure startup struggling to be taken seriously. He came not as a visiting dignitary but as a salesman: explaining graphics cards to shop owners, persuading assemblers, winning trust one transaction at a time. Huang himself has said his connection to Korea dates to 1996. He has spoken of how South Korea's explosion of high-speed internet, its PC-bang culture, and the nationwide fever for StarCraft formed a critical foundation for Nvidia's early growth. Korea, in those years, was the world's most electrified laboratory for digital culture — and the heat of its gaming rooms, the sharpness of its consumers, the velocity with which it embraced new technology, all of it nourished a company that had not yet found its footing. This detail matters enormously. The histories of great corporations are often rewritten to begin in gleaming boardrooms or on famous stages. But Jensen Huang's formation happened in narrow storefronts, surrounded by towers of component boxes, in a market where customers were price-sensitive and performance-obsessed and utterly unimpressed by brand mythology. In Yongsan, he did not sell a brand. He sold credibility. He sold product knowledge. He sold the felt experience of superior performance. The I Ching offers an image for this season of a man's life: 潛龍勿用 — "the hidden dragon does not yet act." The dragon submerged beneath the water has not yet ascended to the sky, but it is already gathering strength, already orienting itself toward its direction. Korea was that submerged time for Jensen Huang. It was where the dragon went quiet and grew. 枯 — The Austere: The Discipline of Withholding Austerity is not poverty. It is restraint. And few companies in the history of Silicon Valley have practiced restraint as rigorously or as consequentially as Nvidia. While its competitors raced to win the surface war — chasing specification numbers, upgrading the cosmetics of their products, playing to the gallery of consumer benchmarks — Huang kept his organization's attention trained on something less visible and far more consequential: the underlying architecture of computation, the logic of parallel processing, the infrastructure that would eventually become the indispensable engine of artificial intelligence. This is the aesthetic the Chinese literati call 枯淡 — a beauty that comes not from ornament but from essence. The Diamond Sutra puts it this way: 凡所有相 皆是虛妄 — "all that has form is ultimately illusion." In business terms: what catches the eye rarely determines a company's fate. What determines fate is the capability that cannot be seen. Nvidia understood this early. That is why the Nvidia of today rests not on the appearance of its products but on the depth of its software ecosystem, its developer base, and the intellectual architecture that competitors cannot easily replicate. This philosophy of austerity extends to Huang's understanding of human character. Speaking at Stanford, he told students that the most important trait for success is not intelligence but resilience — and went further, saying, "I hope you will have the experience of suffering and hardship." It is a startling thing to say, and deliberately so. His point is unambiguous: greatness is not the product of cleverness alone. Character is forged not in comfort but in friction. Huang speaks from experience. He has publicly described being bullied in an American boarding school as a boy, washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms at minimum wage. His philosophy of hardship is not rhetoric. It is autobiography. Most organizations today speak to their people endlessly about well-being and are afraid to speak about tempering. But Jensen Huang did not flinch from the uncomfortable truth: growth always requires some degree of resistance and endurance. He knows this in his body. 孤 — The Solitary: The Courage of the Unfashionable Conviction Solitude, properly understood, is not the condition of being alone. It is the willingness to choose a road that others have not taken — and to walk it long enough to find out whether you were right. Nvidia was, for a very long time, a company that received no particular applause. It was known as a graphics chip company, and in that category, it was formidable. But inside that public identity, Huang carried a private and lonely conviction: that the dominant paradigm of computing would shift — that the age of the general-purpose CPU would eventually yield to an age of accelerated computing. Markets demand the present moment. Leaders sometimes have to absorb today's contempt in exchange for tomorrow's vindication. Only those who sustain that solitude earn the right to the rewards of early arrival. The Analects of Confucius puts it plainly: 德不孤 必有隣 — "virtue is never truly alone; it will always find its neighbors." What appears solitary and eccentric at the beginning eventually draws its community. And in the story of Nvidia and Korea, this movement from isolation to alliance is almost perfectly illustrated. The partnership between Huang and South Korea has long since outgrown its origins in retail sales. SK Hynix began collaborating with Nvidia on High Bandwidth Memory in the uncertain early days of that technology — a bet made before the outcome was clear. That relationship has since deepened into something that resembles co-development more than supply chain. Nvidia has been advancing large-scale AI chip supply and infrastructure cooperation with the Korean government, Samsung, the SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group, and Naver. The lonely salesman who once walked the aisles of Yongsan is now at the table with the leaders of Korean industry and government, shaping the architecture of the nation's AI future. The solitary vigil became a strategic alliance. What was once walked alone is now walked together. 高 — The Elevated: Altitude as Accountability Elevation is not merely position. It is character — the capacity to see farther and to hold responsibility longer than others can or will. The Doctrine of the Mean speaks of 至誠無息 — "true sincerity never rests." This is, unexpectedly, one of the most precise descriptions of how Jensen Huang has run his company. He did not build Nvidia on a passing fashion. He crossed product failures, market cynicism, supply chain crises, and geopolitical headwinds, and climbed — slowly, deliberately, one foothold at a time — to the position the company occupies today. This is not a mountain ascended in a season. This is a summit reached in decades. Here, again, Korea re-enters the story. However regal the title "emperor of the AI era" may sound, the circuitry running through that crown is substantially Korean. Korea began as the consumption frontier — the PC-bang, the gaming market, the early adopter culture that gave Nvidia its first mass foothold. It has since become the strategic frontier: the partner in HBM and advanced memory, the co-architect of AI factories and digital transformation. Between the image of Jensen Huang persuading shop owners in Yongsan and the image of Jensen Huang discussing AI infrastructure with the heads of Korea's largest conglomerates, there runs a very long river. But the river is unbroken. What he first saw in Korea was not merely a sales opportunity. He saw a society with an extraordinary capacity for fast technical comprehension, for organizing technology into industry, for connecting the work of the mind to the work of the factory floor. That insight lives inside every partnership he has built here since. A Reckoning for Korean Business What, then, should Korean business leaders take from this? The lesson is not complicated, though it is demanding. Innovation does not arise from eloquent mission statements. It arises from time endured, from the discipline to discard the inessential, from the independence to pursue an unpopular answer, and from the accountability that eventually transforms all of it into something worthy of the word dignity. Jensen Huang's career is not a story of a man who happened to catch the AI wave at the right moment. It is a story of sediment — of years and decades of experience, discipline, and conviction accumulating until they were precisely aligned with the door that history opened. Which asks certain questions of Korean business. Do we still carry the original instinct of those years when we wrestled with the market on the ground floor — when we had no reputation to trade on, only our knowledge and our reliability? Do we have the austere courage to strip away what is not essential? Do we have the nerve to choose the lonely right answer over the popular wrong one? Management, at its best, is completed in the love of people, in the respect for the work done in the field, and in the refusal to defy the logic of time and nature. The tree that grows too fast is hollow at its core. The success that comes too easily has shallow roots. Nvidia — Jensen Huang's Nvidia — took the opposite path. It stood like an ancient tree, silent and unhurried, enduring the winds and the droughts, growing upward alone toward the high place it had decided, long ago, to reach. His success, for that reason, is not a flash of light. It is light that stays. That is the lesson of 古枯孤高. Only those who have endured long enough ascend high enough. Only those who have passed through austerity reach genuine depth. Only those who have borne solitude long enough find themselves, one day, at the center of their age. Jensen Huang's Korean story is one essential thread in that larger narrative. Today's glory is conceived in yesterday's alleyways. Even the history of the world's most powerful technology company is completed, in the end, only on the accumulated sweat and trust of human beings. He is demonstrating that, quietly, every day. The author is a contributing columnist covering business philosophy, technology, and economic history.
2026-04-22 11:57:23