Klaytn Foundation director calls South Korea one of the technology centers of the world during his visit to KBW 2022
By Shashank Bhardwaj
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 organized by FactBlock and co-hosted by Hashed in Seoul. The aim is 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 of 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, 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, emphasized the importance of making crypto transactions more affordable for a wider range of users. He also mentioned promoting the benefits of a decentralized financial system. He believes that due to layer-2 rollouts, transaction costs will soon drop to fractions of a cent, allowing crypto payments to “make sense” again.
He said: “So today with rollups, transaction fees are typically somewhere between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future with rollups with all the efficiency improvements that I talked about. Transaction costs could go down to $0.05, or maybe even as low as $0.02. So much cheaper, much more affordable and a complete game changer.”
1inch Network, decentralized 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 games 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 exchange, 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 many people who like games and many 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 use of Metaverse will be “easier” if Web2 companies integrate the technology into their products and services. During the visit to Korea Blockchain Week, he said, “If new ideas are combined with Web2 platforms such as [social media app] Cocoa, especially in South Korea, there is accessibility to these new ideas for new services that can be easier than just starting from scratch…Although difficult, adapting Web3 technologies to Web2 platforms can 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 hubs of the world.
The author is the founder of yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash
Image: Shutterstock
