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EY-Led Consortium Submits Bid To Help Develop South Korea's CBDC

A consortium led by Ernst and Young subsidiary in Hanyoung has made the first and only bid to construct the business model for the Bank of Korea’s Central Bank Digital Currency project.

Accordig to reports from local news outlet ZDNet Korea, the consortium which also comprises of Samsung SDS and Naver line may be chosen for the BOK’s CBDC pilot system design if no other company submits a bid before the deadline revised to October 29.

With the project estimated to have a budget of 800 million Korean Won, the job to be done as described will be to design the complete business model for the proposed Digital Won and industry experts as noted by ZDNet Korea noted that only a few companies have the required expertise to carry this out.

EY, renowned as one of the Big Four auditing firms with strong accounting and consultancy background will be in charge of designing processes for each task necessary for the operation of the CBDC as a whole, while Samsung SDS and Naver Line will collaborate in the form of system architecture. Should there be no more bid submissions, a technology evaluation will be carried out on the EY led consortium and a passing score would be needed to get approved for the project.

EY’s Blockchain Solutions To Be Tested on a National Scale

EY has registered and launched several blockchain-based solutions with the latest being an enhancement of its blockchain analytics tool, the Explorer & Visualizer solution to investigate on-chain data. The blockchain competence of EY would however be tested on a grander level should its aligned consortium win the Bank of Korea’s bid.

Ernst & Young has been exploring the boundless capabilities of blockchain technology for a while now and it made a foray into the public space with its solution for public funds management launched in October 2019 .

BSN Has Partnered with MetaverseSociety to Launch the South Korean BSN Portal Operator in November

On September 1, BSNbase announced that it has partnered with the Korean blockchain high-tech company MetaverseSociety to launch the Korean BSN portal operator in November, supporting Korean developers to quickly and efficiently build and operate blocks through its localized BSN platform Chain application.

This is the first time it has been established outside of China, the BSN portal operator. Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), backed by the Chinese government’s State Information Center (SIC) and Red Date, China Mobile, and China UnionPay, officially launched in April 2020.

The issue of high cost is hampering a global public infrastructure network establishment used to deploy and run blockchain applications across cloud services, portals, and underlying frameworks.

Currently, BSN has established or is establishing 128 public city nodes globally. By joining BSN, enterprises can spend 20% of traditional blockchain cloud services to complete on-chain operations and start operations.

The CEO of Red Date Yifan, added that:

“The BSN makes the cost of creating and running applications exceptionally low, with the added benefit of multi-frameworks and interoperability, and larger customer bases.”

The BSN project is currently split into BSN China and BSN International, led by Red Date.

David DoYoen Kim, CEO of MetaverseSociety, said that in the medium to long term, more public institutions and large companies will use private BSN and revealed that:

“BSN will strengthen trust and increase efficiency in the linkage and utilization of global blockchain-based systems.”

MetaverseSociety announced on April 27 this year that the MarX project, a Korean-based project aiming to capture the market of NFT and DeFi, is now fiercely expanding.

Crypto.com Appoints Former Visa Country Manager Patrick Yoon in Charge of South Korea Operations

Cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com appointed Patrick Yoon, former Visa country manager, as the general manager of the South Korea region to be in charge of South Korea and Mongolia market.

Crypto.com, a Hong Kong-based digital cryptocurrency exchange found in 2016, has experienced substantial growth in the past 12 months, adding more than 1,500 employees. Currently, it has more than 2,500 employees, and the Crypto.com user base has grown five times, more than 10 million, with a business scope covering more than 90 countries around the world.

Crypto.com stated that Patrick Yoon has served as the country manager of Visa Korea and Mongolia for the past three years and has played an essential role in expanding Visa’s partnerships, and has been cooperating with regulatory agencies and financial institutions.

Before joining Visa, Yoon worked at Standard Chartered Bank in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

Patrick Yoon said that:

”South Korean investors have been eager to invest in digital assets and cryptocurrency markets. I look forward to working with the talented team at Crypto.com to drive our business growth in Korea by meeting the needs of our customers and adhering with regulatory standards and practices.”

According to Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, Patrick Yoon’s rich career and extensive experience driving sustainable business growth with established financial brands will help crypto.com elevate in South Korea. New heights.

Recently, Crypto.com launched a new crypto taxation service for Australians, enabling their clients to import their crypto transactions to generate a report and file to the government.

South Korean Movie Industry Embraces NFTs by Offering Merchandise and Collectible Tickets

To attract more viewers, the movie industry in South Korea has gone a notch higher by incorporating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a marketing tool.

With NFTs taking the world by storm, the Korean movie sector has not been left out of this bandwagon since December 2021 by offering NFT merchandise and collectable tickets to a limited number of moviegoers.

For instance, Lotte Cinema and Warner Bros. gave out NFT merchandise to the first 30,000 people who purchased tickets during the release of “The Matrix Resurrections.”

A Lotte Cultureworks spokesperson said:

“All of the 30,000 NFT products were given out to the audiences. NFTs are trendy these days, so there is no reason not to do an event like this again.”

The spokesperson added that the NFT merchandise, which includes exclusive scenes of the movie and two signed posters, was sparking curiosity, thus attracting a larger audience.

NFTs are seen as a game-changer

According to Director Cho, NFTs are expected to be a stepping stone towards more revenue in the Korean movie business in the post-pandemic era. He stated:

“We anticipate NFTs to open up new possibilities in the film market, which has been stagnant due to the COVID-19.”

NEW, a film distributor, is eyeing to propel NFTs to an advanced stage, given that it announced the sale of 3,000 generative art NFTs developed using the IP address of upcoming film titled Special Delivery found on the leading NFT platform OpenSea.

With NFTs taking the form of digital images where the buyer owns the link of the image as proof of ownership, a University of Sussex expert recently opined that NFTs would be “everywhere in the future because anything requiring evidence of ownership will be an NFT”.

South Korean Regulators to Harden Punishments for Crypto Fraud Practices

The concern of not being able to curb the impact of an unfortunate incident such as the Terra-Luna incident to protect investors, South Korean legislators are now considering setting up law with the aim of toughening punishment of “unfair trade in virtual assets.”

This implies the push to ensure the “protection of investors” trading in digital currencies.

According to local reports, the Financial Services Commission is working with the National Assembly to pass a bill that involves monitoring and punishing unfair trade practices such as using unknown information, price manipulation, and fraud while supervising crypto exchanges.

As of now, there are already more than 12 different proposals regarding crypto and digital assets circulating in the National Assembly. However, because opposition parties would take a longer time to agree on such an extensive bill, financial authorities would be putting the legislation relating to the protection of investors first into consideration.

“In the US, since the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exercises a wide range of powers, it is possible to punish unfair trade in virtual assets without separate legislation, but in Korea, related legislation is absolutely necessary. In the future, virtual asset exchanges will also be monitored and supervised by financial authorities,” said an unnamed official from the National Assembly.

Though there are not yet details on the type of punishments that will be issued for these malpractices, however, predictably, the financial authorities might design the punishment to be similar to that of the traditional financial industry for the supervision and discipline to be in accordance.

That South Korea is mulling this legislation is evident that the country is interested in growing its digital currency ecosystem. To prove this, the country has disclosed its plans to provide digital identities encrypted by blockchain with smartphones to citizens in 2024 to facilitate its economic development

As Blockchain.News reported, the South Korean government stated that with the expansion of the digital economy, the digital identities implanted in the smartphone would be an essential emerging technology to support the development of data.

Bank of Korea Completes 2nd Phase of CBDC Simulation Test

The Bank of Korea (BOK) said that it has completed a 10-month CBDC simulation experiment research work on the 10-month central bank digital currency (CBDC).

According to Yonhap News Agency, the Bank of Korea (BOK) started a two-stage CBDC simulation experiment research work for10 months starting in August 2021. This digital won experiment realizes various policy support and payment service experiments such as central bank digital currency (CBDC) interest payment and redemption, freezing and collection, and inter-country remittance.

The report also tested its CBDC to buy non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

As the first stage, BOK created a CBDC simulation environment based on distributed ledger technology in the cloud from August to December last year, tested basic functions such as CBDC manufacturing, issuance, distribution, and redemption, and completed the first stage experiment in January this year.

The Bank of Korea completed the second phase of its retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) simulation in late June and shared the results of the experiment on October 7.

The central bank highlighted the performance issues of blockchain technology. The Bank of Korea found that the overall performance of the Ethereum-based blockchain was insufficient, including the scaling solutions and privacy technologies tested.

Experimental data show that a CBDC can process up to 2,000 transactions per second, however, the Bank of Korea said there are some limitations to processing transactions in real-time during peak hours. One of the tests simulated peak demand by sustaining 4,200 transactions per second (TPS) for 30 minutes. At this level of activity, users sometimes have to wait for up to a minute delay.

Chang Yong Rhee, governor of the central bank, said it might be better to use a standard centralized ledger database.

In addition to testing the possibility of CBDC’s extended functions such as offline transactions, digital asset transactions, and policy support tasks, it also tested the application of new technologies such as “zero-knowledge proof technology” (ZKP) and distributed ledger expansion technology to strengthen personal information protection possibility.

The Bank of Korea announced that, even after the research project is completed, it will conduct additional experiments in collaboration with 4 banks and 15 institutions, including the Korea Institute of Financial Telecommunications and Clearing, to more closely examine the already established CBDC simulations System functionality and performance.

According to the latest count, 109 countries are advocating for a CBDC. 11 countries have rolled out digital currencies across the board. The UAE is one of 14 countries where CBDCs have entered the pilot phase and are ready for launch.

South Korea seizes $104M from Terra's co-founder on unjust earnings.

South Korean authorities are continuing their efforts to bring closure to the victims of the year’s first crypto crash, which involved Terraform Labs. While the crypto exchange FTX has taken the spotlight away from other collapsed ecosystems, South Korean authorities are still working to help Terraform Labs’ victims.

Nearly six months after the Terra (LUNA) blockchain was formally shut down, officials in South Korea froze around $104.4 million (140 billion won) belonging to co-founder Shin Hyun-seong on the grounds that he may have made unlawful gains.

The assets of Shin, which are estimated to be worth more than 104 million dollars, have been placed under a temporary freeze after the Seoul Southern District Court gave its approval to a request made by the prosecutors.

The allegation concerned Shin’s alleged participation in the sale of pre-issued Terra tokens to unsuspecting investors.

According to reports from a local news outlet, the district court has placed a hold on the allegedly stolen monies until additional investigations can be conducted. This decision was made on the basis of the suspicion of benefitting from unauthorised LUNA sales.

Reports that Shin Hyun-seong, CEO of Luna, sold the company at a high point and realised gains or that he generated riches via other illicit techniques are not accurate, according to the company. The counsel for Shin was originally cited by Cointelegraph.

The preindictment preservation of the funds is a method for stopping criminals from getting rid of stolen money and forcing investors to suffer further financial harm or losses.

Shin is currently the subject of an investigation by the authorities in South Korea on two charges: making unfair profits from the issuance of in-house tokens LUNA and TerraUSD (UST); and leaking customer transaction information of Chai, a Korean payment app linked to Terra, to Terraform Labs. The first charge relates to the alleged making of profits from the issuance of in-house tokens LUNA and TerraUSD (UST).

As part of their investigation into the dissolution of the company, the prosecutors in South Korea issued a summons to the alleged co-founder on November 14 requesting that he appear in court.

The prosecution levelled the charge of price manipulation against Do Kwon, one of the co-founders of Terra, during the first week of November.

Bithumb Designates Velo Protocol's VELO as Investment Cautionary Cryptocurrency

Bithumb, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has designated Velo Protocol’s VELO token as an investment cautionary cryptocurrency effective February 22, 2023. The exchange cited lack of transparency into Velo’s business activities and failure to comply with previous improvement requests as reasons for the designation.

Deposits of VELO will be suspended starting at 4PM KST on February 22. Bithumb will decide whether to extend the cautionary designation in early March. During the designation period, Velo Protocol will have the opportunity to resolve the cited issues and request removal of the cautionary status.

Bithumb instituted its investment cautionary designation policy to protect investors by providing warnings about potentially concerning cryptocurrencies offered on its platform. Cryptocurrencies can be designated cautionary for reasons including lack of transparency, rumors of misconduct, technical vulnerabilities, and regulatory noncompliance.

According to Bithumb’s notice, the exchange has been unable to verify details of Velo’s business activities and development progress. Additionally, Velo allegedly failed to comply with all provisions of a previous improvement request. Bithumb now considers additional investor protections necessary.

Velo Protocol, developed by Velo Labs, issues VELO tokens on the Stellar blockchain. The Velo Protocol ecosystem aims to facilitate fast, affordable, and secure transactions. The protocol connects traditional financial partners and cryptocurrency providers to enhance liquidity and interoperability.

Bithumb stated its commitment to sustainable and systematic oversight of listed cryptocurrencies. The exchange aims to provide a sound trading environment through open communication and coordination with external experts and project foundations.