WEMIX: How Wemade Bet Its Future on a Coin, Lost It Twice, and Kept Going

In the autumn of 2021, a martial-arts MMORPG from Korea did something no one expected. Within a week of its global launch, MIR4 went from 11 servers to 38, and on Steam alone it peaked at 22,208 concurrent players. By mid-November more than 1.3 million people were playing at the same time. Many of them were not there for the sword fights. They were there for a rock called Darksteel, which the game let them turn into crypto.

That moment turned Wemade, a studio best known for a 2000s hit in China, into the most talked-about blockchain gaming company in Korea, and tied its fortunes to a single coin: WEMIX. Five years on, WEMIX has been delisted from Korean exchanges twice, lost about 8.65 million tokens to a hack and fallen more than 99% from its peak. Wemade is still launching games on it. This is how it happened.

From Legend of Mir to a crypto company

Wemade was founded on 10 February 2000 by developers of the original Legend of Mir, led by founder Park Kwan-ho. Its sequel, The Legend of Mir 2, became a phenomenon in China, where it was run by the publisher Shanda and turned Wemade's brand into one of the best-known Korean names in Chinese gaming.

By the late 2010s, though, Wemade was a company leaning on its Mir licensing income and old glory. Blockchain offered it a new story. WEMIX started as a token on the Klaytn network and later moved to Wemade's own chain, WEMIX 3.0, which also hosted DeFi and NFT services. The plan was a "platform" business: Wemade would make the games, WEMIX would be the currency, and other studios would join.

MIR4: the game that made the coin

MIR4 launched in Korea in November 2020 as a regular mobile MMORPG. The global edition arrived on 26 August 2021 in 170 countries and 12 languages, on mobile, Steam and PC, and it was different. Players mined Darksteel, swapped it for a token called DRACO, and could trade DRACO for WEMIX on Wemade's own exchange. Characters could be turned into NFTs and sold. In November 2021 Wemade opened XDRACO, a marketplace for in-game items priced in DRACO.

Korean players never saw any of this. The Game Rating and Administration Committee does not allow play-to-earn games, so the home servers had no crypto at all. The global version, meanwhile, rode the Axie Infinity-era wave. WEMIX hit its all-time high of about $24.68 on 21 November 2021, according to CoinMarketCap.

The first delisting: a supply problem

The good times did not last. In late 2022, Korea's major exchanges, acting through their alliance DAXA, decided to stop trading WEMIX. Their main complaint was that the amount of WEMIX actually in circulation did not match what Wemade had disclosed. Trading support ended in December 2022, after a court declined to block the decision.

It was a shock: a coin backed by a listed game company had been thrown off the market at home. Wemade worked its way back, and WEMIX returned to Korean trading in 2023, starting with the exchange Coinone. The episode also landed in court: Wemade's former chief executive Chang Hyun-guk was later tried over the circulation controversy, with a first-instance ruling scheduled for 15 July 2025.

The hack and the second delisting

The second blow came on 28 February 2025. At 1:47 pm, Wemade's monitoring spotted an unplanned outflow from a foundation wallet. An attacker had used Play Bridge, the service that moves tokens between chains, to pull out about 8,654,860 WEMIX. Over the next three days almost all of it was sold. Wemade's own reconstruction later traced the leak back to files uploaded to a shared repository in mid-2023, and an authentication key stolen from its NFT platform two months before the attack.

The hack itself hurt. The timing of the disclosure hurt more. Wemade went public on 4 March, about four days after the theft. DAXA put WEMIX on its caution list, citing the delay. Wemade answered with a buyback of about 10 billion won and a public apology in mid-March, but it was not enough. On 2 May 2025, Bithumb, Coinone and Korbit announced that WEMIX trading would end on 2 June 2025 at 3 pm. Wemade's shares fell sharply the same day.

Wemade fought the decision. It announced an injunction lawsuit, held an emergency press conference, and after the delisting went ahead it appealed and said it would pursue listings on major global exchanges instead. DAXA, for its part, said delisting is each exchange's own decision. WEMIX has now been delisted in Korea twice.

By the numbers

• 26 August 2021: MIR4 global launch in 170 countries.
• 1.3 million: concurrent MIR4 players by 12 November 2021.
• About $24.68: WEMIX all-time high on 21 November 2021 (CoinMarketCap).
• 8,654,860: WEMIX stolen through Play Bridge on 28 February 2025.
• 2 June 2025: WEMIX trading ends on Korean exchanges for the second time.
• About $0.116 and $58 million: WEMIX price and market cap as of 12 November 2026 (CoinGecko), about 99.5% below its all-time high, with about 500 million tokens in circulation out of roughly 561 million.

The comeback that never stops

What is remarkable is that Wemade has not let go. Its MMORPG Night Crows launched in Korea in April 2023 and topped the app charts; its global edition, built around WEMIX, reached about 440,000 concurrent players at its peak, according to Digital Daily. Then, on 28 October 2025, Wemade launched the global version of Legend of Ymir in 170 countries, excluding Korea and China. Its key currency, gWEMIX, exchanges one-for-one with WEMIX. The game drew about 130,000 concurrent players on day one and grew from 28 servers to 85 within a month.

WGC's take

WEMIX is the clearest case study of what happens when a game company treats a token as its whole strategy. When the coin was flying, Wemade looked like a visionary. When it was found wanting on disclosure, twice, the company's credibility fell with it. The games were never really the problem. MIR4, Night Crows and Legend of Ymir have all drawn big audiences abroad.

The question for Wemade now is whether it can be a game company with a blockchain, rather than a blockchain company that makes games. Its players, and Korea's regulators, are still waiting for an answer.

What to watch

• Whether WEMIX finds the major global listings Wemade promised after June 2025.
• How Legend of Ymir's global economy holds up through its first year.
• The outcome of the legal cases tied to WEMIX's circulation and disclosure history.

Token prices are volatile; this article is not investment advice.