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First day takeaways from the Korea Blockchain week

Klaytn Foundation director calls South Korea one of the tech centres of the world during his visit to KBW 2022

Published: Aug 9, 2022 03:14:24 PM IST

Image: Shutterstock

The fifth annual Korea Blockchain Week (KBW 2022), one of Asia's largest blockchain events, began on August 7 in Seoul, South Korea. The event was attended by over 7,000 people. Over 120 industry leaders are scheduled to speak at the event. The event is hosted by FactBlock and co-hosted by Hashed in Seoul. It aims to bring together the industry's brightest minds to debate, redefine, and celebrate the future of finance.

The Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas will host the main-stage events KBW2022: IMPACT on August 8 and 9. Other events, such as Seoul Festa 2022: K-pop Festival, Solana Hacker House, Web 3.0 Dinner, Impact NFT Gallery, NFT exhibition, and so on, will take place on different days until August 14.

On the first day of the main stage event, Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin, 1inch Network's Sergej Kunz, and Klaytn Foundation's Sam Seo gave keynote presentations.

In his speech, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder and chief scientist at Ethereum emphasised the importance of making crypto transactions more affordable for a wider range of users. He also mentioned promoting the advantages of a decentralised financial system. He believes that due to layer-2 rollups, transaction costs will soon fall to fractions of a cent, allowing crypto payments to 'make sense' once more.

He said, "So today with roll-ups, transaction fees are generally somewhere between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future with roll-ups with all of the improvements to efficiency that I talked about. The transaction costs could go down to $0.05, or even maybe as low as $0.02. So much cheaper, much more affordable, and a complete game changer."

1inch Network, decentralised finance (DeFi) aggregator, has announced plans to expand its presence in Asia. Sergej Kunz, the co-founder of 1inch, believes that the popularity of blockchain gaming will contribute to this growth.

In a statement given during the first day of KBW 2022, he said, "As soon as people understand that they can [yield] farm, they can swap, they can exchange and get easy access to cryptocurrencies on Ethereum with a few simple EVM-compatible networks, the market will grow a lot…Here, there are a lot of people who like gaming and a lot of things like that, so I think the DeFi market can grow a lot in South Korea."

He also stated that 1inch is currently working on a collaboration with the metaverse-focused blockchain Klaytn Foundation.

Furthermore, Sam Seo, the director of the Klaytn Foundation, believes that widespread adoption of the Metaverse will be 'easier' if Web2 companies integrate the technology into their products and services. During his visit to the Korea Blockchain Week, he said, "If new ideas are combined with Web2 platforms like [social media app] Kakao, especially in South Korea, there’s accessibility to these new ideas for new services that could be easier than just starting from scratch…Even though it’s hard, adapting Web3 technologies to Web2 platforms could be a way to bring mass adoption."

He went on to say that, despite the Luna-Terra crash, South Korea was big on crypto and was one of the tech centres of the world.

The writer is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash