Hi readers,
Klaytn Meets series is back, and we’re going to introduce our sixth partner with a video this time.
Cosmochain is the beauty contents platform integrated into beauty-themed social network service ‘Cosmee’ with fully-functioning user incentivizing features serving over 10,000 DAU’s.
We sat down with Howon Song, the CEO of Cosmochain.
Klaytn: Can you tell us more about yourself and your existing business for our readers?
Song: I was originally a medical student. I worked at Asan Medical Center for about a year until I decided to pursue an MBA at Stanford. Afterwards, I founded a number of startups, including Trillionaire, which operates Huiseoul, exporting Korean cosmetics to China, and of course, Cosmochain. Oh, the very first startup I founded while I was a medical student at Yonsei was called Freemed, dedicated to providing medical volunteer services.
I’ve been in beauty-specialized consumer business since late 2014. We own a number of sub-brands and businesses including a basic cosmetics brand called ‘Reduire,’ a beauty creator training business ‘Influence Icon,’ a makeup line called ‘Unleash,’ a flower brand called ‘The Bburi,’ as well as ‘11th Street Thailand.’ For Huiseoul, we have about 3,000 sales associates and 3 million customers based in China.
Klaytn: How did you first collaborate with Klaytn?
Song: Very simple and straightforward. Kakao is Korea’s No.1 IT company, and when we first heard that Kakao was making a blockchain platform, we were hoping to have our DApp to be embedded. There was no reason not to join Kakao-backed Klaytn. No hesitation there. And besides, we consider technical support as number one priority, and that means communication between teams would be very important. In that sense, we thought it would be beneficial in many ways to work with a local platform.
Klaytn: We are very keen to know what your blockchain service is like and also how your token economy works.
Song: Put simply, we are applying token rewards algorithms to beauty service. Cosmee is a beauty review community with an objective of creating transparent, fair, and substantial beauty-related contents. Users upload their personal reviews on certain products by sharing their subjective opinions, or even some distinct characteristics. They can also react to other users’ contents by clicking ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes,’ or leaving comments. Sharing a certain Cosmee content to other platform too. These are all of the possible ways for users to receive reward. Their activities are recorded and accumulated via blockchain, which will be used as standards for providing fair rewards back to them with our token called COSM. Eventually, a virtuous cycle would be created in which users will be rewarded for their participation and these rewards would stimulate greater participation. And ultimately, these collected COSM tokens can be used towards purchasing products in our in-app marketplace.
Our service overcomes the limitations posed by conventional beauty communities or services, where only a few beauty influences gain profit by creating their ‘popular’ contents. Instead, we allow all participants to be able to benefit from their contents. Within our system, the beauty brands are also expected to gain practical and economic benefits by obtaining credible information and establishing their reputation as a result of users’ proactive and honest participation. The companies can execute more precise and efficient marketing strategies and product development. To date, we have collected over 15,000 DAU and over 1.5 million content.
Klaytn: You entered the blockchain scene quite fast compared to other beauty-related projects. What was the motivation behind this?
Song: The size of the cosmetics market is large to begin with, and the data created in the industry is unbelievably huge, which, unfortunately, is not being readily used. The cosmetics industry is already a high-margin industry, so the big-name companies did not necessarily have to go out of their way to utilize the created data. However, I saw countless possibilities for this huge data to be used for more efficient marketing and product development. And if combined with blockchain technology, this could definitely change a lot of things.
Moreover, as the beauty market skyrockets, many contents tend to be for advertising or marketing purposes only. Transparency, however, is especially important in this market because it is directly related to our skin and body. We seek to accumulate and share with our users only truthful information. Cosmochain will be the next beauty YouTube with clean and fair contents.
Klaytn: What would be the ultimate goal for Cosmochain then?
Cosmochain is, in essence, a comprehensive beauty platform that provides meaningful values across the whole beauty chain, ranging from product planning, producing, contents creating, and distributing, all the way to receiving feedback, based on data-driven customization.
The more meaningful DApps, like we, embedded in Klaytn, the more meaningful blockchain ecosystem will be created. We’re very much excited.
