Learning Klaytn — Klaytn Governance Council, Part 1: “The Kakao Ones”
After all the excitement we’ve had in the past couple of weeks, with our First Growth Campaign coming to an end, as well as the overwhelming success of our cooperation with SkyPeople on their Klaytn BApp, FiveStars, we thought our growing community might enjoy a relaxing read on one of the key players in the Klaytn Ecosystem - the Klaytn Governance Council.
As we’ve already covered in our introduction to Klaytn in the first installment of “Learning Klaytn”, the Governance Council comprises 30 members and due to the extensive number of partners sitting on it, we thought it best to split this into several parts, taking a closer look at a few of the enterprises each time. We hope you’ll enjoy this new sub-section of the “Learning Klaytn” series and we’ll push more materials between Governance Council articles to keep things busy.
First of all, let the picture above sink in for a bit.
Ok, you’re done? Impressive, isn’t it? Yes, we certainly agree with you there. This picture represents the current members of the Klaytn Governance Council, the multinational companies that operate the Klaytn consensus node network, charged with maintaining the security of its blockchain network. Their reported combined worth was estimated at more than $59 billion and each is a key player in their respective field.
“The Kakao Ones”
We’ll start off the series with the easy ones, companies associated with Kakao. As we all know, Klaytn is being developed by Ground X, the blockchain arm of the South Korean messaging giant Kakao.
It is therefore natural that its sister-companies are to support their blockchain efforts, but then again, it's not very common to see them do so in such numbers, as a total of five companies associated with Kakao sit on the governing council. This clearly showcases the commitment and importance of blockchain technology development inside the Kakao group.
While there is little need to introduce Kakao and Ground X themselves, let's take a closer look at some of the other companies from the Kakao corporation currently sitting on the council, starting with
KakaoPay
KakaoPay is Kakao’s payment service, launched back in 2014. The service is integrated in Kakao’s messaging app KakaoTalk and allows users to request and send money to their contacts. The service became so popular that it managed to reach 10 million users in the first two years since launch.
Realizing the finance sector’s potential, Kakao applied to launch the first online-only bank in Korea, K-Bank, in 2017, with KakaoPay handling the transaction services for the growing digital bank which issued its own debit card, featuring a series of fun and engaging card faces. Since its inception, KakaoPay added the option to send remittances, invoices, and complete online transactions on mobile and has managed to attract the attention of Ant Financial Services Group, the parent company of Alibaba’s digital payments giant AliPay, which invested USD200M into KakaoPay in 2018. According to Kakao, KakaoPay is used by more than 26 million people on a monthly basis, accounting for more than half of Korea’s 50 million population, and is installed on circa 99% of the smartphones in the country.
KakaoIX
If you liked that K-Bank card design, you’re gonna love KakaoIX. According to their own website “KakaoIX delivers innovative experiences in areas closely related to human nature. We strive to approach everyday life from different perspectives and with different ideas.” If you’re feeling a bit confused, maybe this giant bear inside their store will help clear things up a bit:
Still not sure what KakaoIX does? Well, it evolved from Kakao Friends, the emoticons used in, you’ve guessed it, KakaoTalk. Ryan (the giant bear), Muzi, Apeach, Frodo, Neo, Tube, Jay-G and Con outgrew their emoticon roles and pushed into real life with a line of merchandise sold in more than 30 stores, as well of course an online store with three flagship stores in Gangnam, Hongdae, and Busan. The line features more than 5000 items for everyday use, all sporting likenesses of the beloved emoticon characters.
While its style is obviously targeting the South Asian markets, the success of Kakao’s merchandise brand KakaoIX is beyond question, with more than 230 employees and more than USD90 million in sales. They’ve recently begun the push into the US market as well by starting to offer their products on Amazon. Considering that the US accounts for more than half of the global character market estimated at about USD110 billion, it would appear that KakaoIX is only getting started.
KakaoGames, or Kakao Games Corp, is Kakao’s video game publishing company, distributing video games on the global market — mostly North America, Europe and Asia.
After the merger with Daum Games after Kakao’s acquisition of Daum, the company grew to commands a staggering 550 million registered users worldwide. While mostly focusing on mobile games such as Lord of Dice, Friends Racing and Black Desert Online Mobile, the company’s best know title remains PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
Battlegrounds is one of the best-selling and most-played video games of all time. It has sold over 60 million units, in addition to PUBG Mobile having crossed 600 million downloads, with Kakao Games publishing its Korean version since 2017.
Kakao Page
Rounding off the list of Kakao’s companies taking part in the Kakao Governance Council, we have Kakao Page. Its a monetized content platform optimized for mobile devices, allowing users to create audio, visual and other content and upload it to KakaoPage, selling it directly to other users of the platform.
The revenue generated by the user’s content is shared between Google Play, Kakao and the content creator in a 2–3–5 ratio. Page launched in 2013 and was going through a rough patch in its first year, but the addition of several popular titles has seen it grow in popularity to reach more than 22 million users in 2019.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this short overview of the Kakao-related companies making up the Klaytn Governance Council. In our next installments, we’ll take a closer look at other council members, including such names as Samsung, LG as well as large cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance and Huobi, in an effort to bring the companies behind the council closer to our growing community! Stay tuned!
This episode was produced in close collaboration with Dapp.com
Dapp.com is an official Klaytn Ecosystem Partner & KlaytnCommunity Publishing Partner.
Dapp.com is the leading blockchain-based application and on-chain analysis platform. Offering a suite of metrics, market reports, and data insights into eleven different smart contracts platforms, Dapp.com is on the bleeding-edge of an emerging market for decentralized applications.
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