What is Upbit?

Okay, I hit a massive brick wall trying to chase a random altcoin pump last night.

Seriously. I saw an absolutely insane volume spike on a specific token—almost 40% of the total daily trade action happening in one single place—and realized it was entirely localized to a South Korean platform. That immediately begged the obvious question: What is Upbit?

I spent an hour digging through their documentation. From what I gather, they launched around 2017 (backed by a tech firm called Dunamu), partnered briefly with Bittrex to share order books back in the day, and basically cornered the Asian fiat-to-crypto market alongside Bithumb. Great. Sounds highly liquid. But actually getting onto the platform to trade as a non-Korean resident feels practically impossible right now.

Has anyone here successfully created and verified an account recently?

I keep getting jammed up at the identity verification stage. It looks like you explicitly need a verified KakaoTalk account—and potentially even a local Korean bank account linked to your real name—just to clear Tier 2 KYC. Obviously, that excludes almost all western retail traders, right?

Here is a quick breakdown of my roadblocks. If I have this wrong, please correct me:

Is there some backdoor global version I am missing entirely? Or do overseas users literally just sit on the sidelines while local Korean traders dictate massive price swings through sheer volume? I badly want to tap into those deep liquidity pools without having to fly out to Seoul and apply for a residency visa.

Any workarounds—or just a harsh reality check—would be massively appreciated right now. Let me know.