Creating New Value Chains
Korea’s powerful startup companies with more than 10 million subscribers are starting to join the blockchain ecosystem in their bid to deliver value to their customers and expand their businesses by applying blockchain technology to their existing services.
According to the related industry on October 10, "Baemin," a successful food delivery service app operated by Woowa Brothers Corp., and "Joonggonara," a major marketplace platform for used goods in Korea, are planning to adopt blockchain technology.
Baemin joined the blockchain project “Terra” led by CEO Shin Hyung-sung of Timon. Terra is a project designed to set up a blockchain-based cryptocurrency payment platform. They are gathering partners from relevant fields to apply the cryptocurrency payment system, and the actual cryptocurrency is expected to be available within this year.
"Yanolja," a popular leisure platform in Korea, also decided to adopt Terra’s payment platform “Terra X.” Tera announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Yanolja for the development of a blockchain-based payment system. Once Terra X is interlocked with Yanolja, the payment proxy fee is expected to fall from 2-3% to 0.5%. Then, the rest of the proxy fee will be returned to customers through discounts.
Terra is building a "Terra Alliance" by inviting partners to its payment project. In addition, it is making efforts to establish cooperative relationships with other domestic startups.
Joonggonara joined "Actwo Lab." Joonggonara is a service with over 16 million active users (MAU) per month, and it is Korea's largest commerce platform with which about 200,000 used products are registered per day. Jonggonara plans to study a safe and transparent secondhand goods trading system with Actwo Lab based on distributed consensus and double encryption technologies.
“Kozaza,” which provides shared bed and breakfast services, and “Watcha,” which is a Korean version of Netflix, are also trying to adopt blockchain technology. Watcha is a video service that has over 4 million subscribers worldwide. Kozaza is preparing a blockchain technology-based shared bed and breakfast platform called “We Home.” We Home proposes a vision of connecting accommodations and users directly without intermediaries and paying the expenses with the cryptocurrency “Home.”
Battle Entertainment, which provides webtoon services, is conducting a digital content distribution project called Fiction Network. In particular, it presents a vision of maximizing profits by directly connecting creators and consumers in the webtoon field.