Meet Kwak Jinyoung — The Vitalik Buterin of Korea
I am sure, you all have heard Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum. He is the man behind introducing smart contracts within a Blockchain and redefining the possibilities for blockchain technology. Kwak Jinyoung’s story is no different than Vitalik’s.
He is the man who led the team that developed Cyworld, Korea’s most popular social media network, at the start of the 21st century. But his dream always had been to create a globally renowned Korean company. He once said in an interview,
“Cyworld and Kakao all failed to become a global service, but blockchain has brought us a new opportunity”.
With that aim in mind, Mr. Kwak founded Sigmachain and developed Futurepia which is one of the fastest blockchain mainnets in the world. Recently, Mr. Kwak was awarded the “Blockchain Innovation Award” at the Global Economic and Cultural Development Forum in South, Korea.
Futurepia has recently launched its first-ever social media application based on blockchain called SNAC. SNAC is the reward sharing app that compensates not only content creators but also the content consumers. Since its beta launch, it has become quite popular and has started to gain attention across the world. Mr. Kwak added,
“ Recently we launched the beta version of our first DApp, SNAC, a reward-sharing social media platform. It’s like Kakao Messenger but based on blockchain technologies. On our platform users get rewards for their content. People will get more rewards for their content compared with the compensation they get from YouTube, for instance.”
After the launch of SNAC, Futurepia has signed MoU with DigiFinex, one of the top 3 exchanges, and was invited to the launch event of the DigiFinex Korea chapter.
Kwak Jinyoung wants Sigmachain to become one of the top most-valued companies in the blockchain space. While giving an interview to The Korea Herald newspaper, Mr. Kwak said,
We want to become one of the top 10 market cap companies with our coin SNAC, and host killer DAPPs to make Futurepia an active blockchain mainnet offering all the advantages of blockchain technologies. We are planning to list SNAC on cryptocurrency exchanges soon. In the past, people just invested after reading a white paper but these days, investors are interested in seeing real technologies. I hope investors vet more thoroughly.
We are also in negotiations with the local government to provide our technologies to build a smart city, for which blockchain technologies are crucial. We will continue our efforts to create an active blockchain ecosystem. To do so, we launched the Sigmachain Network Alliance in March with more than 100 partners from various sectors.
Under the leadership of Kwak Jinyoung, Sigmachain has also recently launched the “Sigmachain Network Alliance” — the largest blockchain alliance in South Korea. Almost 100 companies from various sectors in media, AI, Fashion, Healthcare and others are already apart of the alliance.
South Korea is a central hub of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, accounting for 30% of total cryptocurrency trading worldwide; several ground breaking projects have been launched from the country. Having the ‘Most Innovative Blockchain Award’ Sigmachain is one of those projects, thanks to the leadership of Kwak Jinyoung — the Vitalik Buterin of South Korea.
