AS9636 NHNPAYCO-AS-KR NHNPayco

AS9636 (NHNPAYCO-AS-KR) is held by NHN Payco, the fintech subsidiary of South Korea's NHN Corporation and the operator of the PAYCO mobile-payment platform. PAYCO launched under NHN in 2015 and was spun out into its own company in 2017; the AS carries that company's own service infrastructure.

What it's used for

RIS sees one IPv4 prefix, 103.146.180.0/23, carrying 512 addresses, no IPv6, and 1 observed neighbour. That is a stub AS: a single announcement out through a single upstream. For a payments company this is a payment-service edge, not a platform network. What needs to be publicly reachable is the PAYCO app's API tier, merchant and PG-facing gateways, settlement and card-network interfaces, and the web front end. Card and payment processing systems are otherwise ruthlessly firewalled, so the routable surface stays small by design.

The interesting part is what the shape says about how the company is hosted. A single /23 and a single neighbour is not the profile of a business running its own data centres. Much of NHN's estate sits inside its parent group's own cloud and hosting infrastructure, and a small dedicated AS with provider-independent space is exactly what a payments subsidiary carves out when it needs stable, portable addressing for regulatory and merchant-whitelisting reasons while leaving the heavy lifting elsewhere. Merchants and banks whitelist IP addresses; owning the block means the company can move hosting without asking every partner to re-approve a new range.

Notable

• Single upstream, so there is no BGP-level redundancy on this AS itself.
• 103.146.180.0/23 is APNIC 103/8 space, issued long after the AS number was allocated.
• No IPv6 announced.