South Korea’s government is betting big on blockchain.
The Ministry of Science and ICT announced Thursday that it will spend KRW 113.3 billion (about USD 101.4 million) over the next five years to secure nine key technologies in four strategic sectors with the ultimate goal of developing “blockchain technology for the data economy.”
The ministry plans to spend KRW 20.3 billion (almost USD 18.2 million) of that in 2021. Here’s a breakdown of how they’re spreading their money around.
The four strategic sectors are:
- Completely decentralized, high-performance consensus technology
- Smart contract security technology
- Blockchain technology for processing personal information and managing identity
- Blockchain data management technology for guaranteeing data sovereignty
And the technologies to be developed are, per sector:
Completely decentralized, high-performance consensus technology
– A decentralized consensus system for large-scale node networks
– Guaranteeing efficient transaction finality at the block level in large-scale networks
– Guaranteeing high-performance, large-scale transaction scalability
– Developing P2P network protocols for blockchain
Smart contract security technology
– Preventing errors and weaknesses in smart contracts through secure coding and making them safer for ordinary people to use
Blockchain technology for processing personal information and managing identity
– User ID authentication and management technology for using self-sovereign IDs
– Blockchain data encryption-based privacy protection
Blockchain data management technology for guaranteeing data sovereignty
– Technology for increasing the amount of data that can be processed through large-scale node management and distributed storage
– High-speed analysis of large-scale data in distributed storage
Nine consortiums and 53 institutions have been selected to develop the technologies. According to the ministry, industrial entities will participate with all nine of the consortiums. So the government hopes the new technologies will be put to actual industrial use, boosting the country’s technical competitiveness.
Indeed, the ministry said it won’t skimp on support to improve the competitiveness of South Korea’s blockchain technology.
