Ruling party lawmaker Noh Woong-rae hosted last week a policy discussion on how to activate so-called “K-Coins,” i.e., Korean cryptocurrency projects.
Noh noted that the growth of the digital assets market presents a major opportunity for Korea, a nation blessed with highly advanced information technology.
In particular, he said activating K-Coins was an absolute precondition to developing the digital assets market, and that existing problems facing said coins should be resolved through ICO manuals and specialized institutions.
As for what those existing problems are, they include:
- Korean crypto projects have held their ICOs overseas because ICOs are practically banned in Korea itself
- This means the economic benefits of local projects — taxes, job creation, human resource development, etc. — end up overseas, too.
- This also means that local crypto projects release white papers and other information in foreign languages such as English only, leading to information imbalances for local investors.
Interestingly enough, leading presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Democratic Party provided a celebratory address in which he lamented the system instability of the local digital assets market, warning that the ICO debate could no longer wait as a first step to turning Korea into a major power in the digital assets market.
Several experts presented at the forum, mostly presenting arguments we’ve discussed on this blog before.
Though the Korean government embraces blockchain technology, officials have been wary of cryptocurrency.
Should the Korean government adopt a more favorable stance regarding cryptocurrency — and there’s good reason to suspect it may, with Lee recently praising blockchain, the metaverse, NFTs and gaming (not to mention what he said above) and his primary competitor minting NFTs on the Craft Network and also calling for Korea to accept crypto as a reality — this could benefit a major “K-Coin” like ICON, perhaps (WARNING: rank speculation alert) by creating more opportunities to put the public chain to use in state projects.
By the way, another ruling party lawmaker just opened a website to take campaign contributions in crypto, a Korean first.
