An Intro to Korea Blockchain Week 2019
September 27th to October 4th, 2019
In recent years, South Korea has blossomed in education, technology, and innovation. Seoul is consistently ranked as one of the world’s “leading digital cities” and a “tech capital of the world”. South Korea has also been among the world’s most technologically advanced and digitally-connected countries.
Therefore, to me, it’s no surprise Korea is also a massive winner with blockchain innovation and startups.
This year Korea Blockchain Week runs from Sep. 27, 2019, to Friday, Oct. 4, 2019.
I’m excited to be there as WOM Protocol, our startup, syncs with Korea, which for us is also a place where social commerce and word-of-mouth are occurring in new ways due to digital transformation.
From meetups to global tours by startups to blockchain conferences, innovation in the blockchain space is very social. Blockchain Week, Korea really brings this together with the industry’s top speakers.
CJ, one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates, is developing a blockchain-based music copyright management system using AWS’ Amazon Managed Blockchain Service, according to local media. It’s not just startups in Korea that are integrating and innovating in Blockchain.
An innovative society like South Korea understands many of the use-cases of blockchain rather intuitively. It’s still early days however for blockchain products where in South Korea, just 1 in 4 blockchain products generates sales.
This is not unusual and demonstrates the still-nascent phase of blockchain adoption and implementation where startups must prove product-market fit and find investors in a constantly changing landscape of crypto regulation and ICO acceptance.
For info on some of the speakers, you can see their official blog that is hosted on Medium here.
Crypto Trader on YouTube gave this event some good coverage in 2018, you can catch a glimpse here.
In 2019, everyone from Nick Szabo to Vitalik Buterin will be there.
South Korea is small but its technology is big. Home to Samung and others, this is Asia’s largest blockchain weekly event, also known as Korea Blockchain Week (KBW2019), and it will be held in the upcoming days of September 27th to October 4th.
I’m pretty excited as always to attend this event.
The main conference of KBW 2019, known as D.FINE will take place between September 30th and October 1st at the Grand Intercontinental Seoul Parnas. D.FINE will feature a series of global blockchain industry experts under the theme, “The Real and the Virtual”.
In addition, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood will also make their appearance as speakers. It will be Gavin’s first time there.
Nick Szabo and Gavin Wood’s keynote and panel discussions are scheduled for the first day of D.FINE.
Hashed will also be there among many other old favorites.
Each year this positions South Korea with a bigger place in blockchain’s future. Along with Malta, Switzerland, Berlin and many other hot spots for blockchain innovation, pockets of the world seem to be ahead of the curve with regards to blockchain tech and the new doors they will open up.
For instance, we can expect Korea to be ahead of the pack when it comes to blockchain phone adoption and capabilities. An increasing number of smartphone manufacturers are combining their phones with blockchain services.
Nick Szabo, one of the forefathers and visionaries of cryptography will be more prominent than usual at KBW.
The D.FINE speakers' list is likely the best I’ve ever seen.
2019 feels different. It is the first Korean conference to be hosted by leading Korean media conglomerates such as Korea JoongAng Daily, Hankyoreh, The Seoul Economic Daily, The Financial News, and Block Media, alongside co-hosts FactBlock, Hashed, and Cointelegraph Korea. In addition, D.FINE is sponsored by major cities, Seoul and Busan.
Blockchain conferences are no longer fringe workshops for insiders, but with more mainstream media coverage can come more private investment and the best blockchain startups rising to the top in convergence with the innovation occurring within more established firms and their R&D.
Blockchain in Korea is intersecting importantly with more than one technology and is impacting the future of Cloud computing, Big Data and IoT. South Korea is thus uniquely positioned to find new use cases of blockchain in integrating these important core technologies.
I’m pumped that Nick Szabo, who invented the phrase and concept of “smart contracts” in 1994, along with Dr. Adam Back, who invented the “PoW” algorithm, applied in the cryptocurrency mining system, will present themselves for the first time in Korea at Asia’s largest blockchain event, Korea Blockchain Week (KBW2019).
I’m Melanie Mohr, CEO, and founder of both the YEAY app and WOM Protocol, and I hope to see you there at #KBW2019. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn here. I’m busy working to create products that will facilitate Gen Z creators to build the future.
At WOM Protocol we’re creating a brand new user-generated marketing channel that incentivizes and rewards honest word-of-mouth recommendations. We believe the future of marketing with blockchain, is Ad-Free.
