The five most preferred digital assets by South Korean investors are Bitcoin (BTC), Ripple (XRP), Ether (ETH), Cardano (ADA), and Dogecoin (DOGE).
South Korean investors reportedly own over $5 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC). Ripple (XRP) is the second most popular digital asset as locals hold nearly $4.8 billion in it.
BTC and XRP Lead the Way
South Korea’s leading crypto exchanges – Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, and Korbit – conducted a study to determine which digital assets are the most attractive to local investors. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization – Bitcoin (BTC) – places first as South Koreans have invested more than $5 billion in it. The native token of Ripple – XRP – ranks second with around $4.8 billion distributed in it.
The third and fourth places belong to Ether (ETH) and Cardano (ADA), respectively. Investors own approximately $4.5 billion worth of the second-largest digital asset and nearly $1 billion in ADA.
Interestingly, the first-ever memecoin – Dogecoin (DOGE) – rounds up the top 5. South Koreans hold almost $900 million worth of it.
The report noted that local investors traded over $7 trillion in digital assets throughout 2021. The figure is more than the entire amount traded on the main Korea Composite Stock Price Index and the transactions on the junior Kosdaq.
South Korea Takes the Crypto Path
Last month, the East Asian country held its most contested presidential election. In the aftermath, the candidate of the Conservative party – Yoon Suk-yeol – collected only 263,000 votes more than his opponent and became South Korea’s next President. What’s more interesting is that he is a keen proponent of the cryptocurrency industry and vowed to turn his homeland into a digital asset hub.
During his campaign, he promised to allow initial coin offerings (ICOs) and increase the minimum threshold for paying capital gains tax on profits from crypto investments. He vowed to change the law and ensure that those who generate revenues of less than $40,000 annually should be exempt from paying taxes. Currently, such taxation is imposed on investors who make more than $2,000 per annum.
Korea Blockchain Association – a lobby group for crypto exchanges – envisioned that the new leader of South Korea will positively impact the local digital asset ecosystem. Secretary-General Yoon Seong-han said:
“We definitely welcome his stance as he is confident about boosting the industry. As ICOs are banned now, we have no choice but to issue coins in Singapore and other countries. Ventures and startups will be able to raise money easily from investors [if the ban is lifted].”
BigONE Exchange’s Chairman – Anndy Lian – also welcomed the new President of the country:
“He understands the importance of crypto. He understands the future, and it is unstoppable.”
Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.
Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.
An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.
Billy Markus, the co-creator of Dogecoin, believes that the meme coin needs to market itself as a digital currency.
In the past, Markus had agreed that DOGE is “fast, scalable, and inexpensive.”
Dogecoin’s creator argues against it being a “shit token.”
Billy Markus, the co-creator of Dogecoin, took to Twitter today to suggest that Dogecoin needs to promote itself as a digital currency.
The American programmer argued that “if you want dogecoin to succeed, continue to be relevant, and have a reason and need to exist, utility comes from using it, accepting it, and showing others the benefits to do so.”
With that, Markus urged the community to contribute to the core development of the project instead of creating unnecessary hype. He commented, “speculation has brought attention. work brings utility.”
real talk:#dogecoin needs to market itself as a digital CURRENCY
there’s already infinite digital speculation and digital utility tokens and chains, and pointless speculation tokens are made daily
dogecoin is in the best position to be the most used for purchasing and tipping
In the past as well, Markus had stated that “hype doesn’t last,” but only “attracts get rich quick people.” Instead, projects need to focus on “lasting value,” the creator had reiterated.
Dogecoin, which was a bitcoin spin-off and arguably the first real ‘meme coin,’ had garnered attention after DogeFather Elon Musk fuelled its social media following. But along with that, Musk and Markus have often agreed over Twitter exchanges that DOGE is “people’s crypto.” However, the original meme coin continues to attract critics, especially as it stands as the twelfth-largest crypto.
Arguing against DOGE being just another useless meme token, Markus also commented that “it’s a satirical cryptocurrency made for sillies that randomly caught on.” And, in his opinion, the meme tokens of today “[have] no use case.”
As we recall, Markus considers that DOGE is “fast, scalable, and inexpensive,” in contrast to his definition of ‘shit tokens.’
Not recently. What matters imo is lowering fees, decreasing block time & increasing block size. A single layer network with exchanges as de facto layer 2 seems like the simplest solution for a medium of exchange.
When it comes to Dogecoin’s price action, it has recently enjoyed some recovery along with the broader crypto market. The coin’s major hike also came this week when Elon Musk asked his followers if a new social media platform is needed.
In response, Musk seemed to like the idea of Boardroom Capital chairman, who suggested buying Twitter and replacing the blue bird with DOGE. With that, Anndy Lian, Chairman, BigONE Exchange highlighted the impact of the Twitter exchange on Dogecoin’s value:
Anndy Lian: "Dogecoin continues to rally after Elon Musk's tweet on meme coin. This has triggered retail investor buying. Together with this trend, the number of long term holders of dogecoin rises."
In the past week, DOGE prices have gone up by over 17% and were trading at $0.1447 at the time of press. Despite that, it remains around 80% below its all-time-high valuation of $0.731578 reached last year in May.
Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.
Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.
An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.
The gaming industry is worth billions of dollars, predicted to generate $179.7 billion in 2020, with by comparison the global film industry reaching $100 billion in revenue for the first time in 2019.
According to Statista, over 2.7 billion people in the world actively or passively play video games, with China ranked first as the biggest gaming market just ahead of the US. In this dynamic market, the latest innovation, a crossover genre between crypto and gaming is a new breed of play-to-earn games or GameFi. GameFi is a concept that provides monetary incentives to gamers through a play-to-earn model, as opposed to the traditional “play-to-win” model that has been popular in the gaming industry.
How is the metaverse taking shape?
The Metaverse concept has also recently gained popularity, thanks in part to incorporating blockchain technology into GameFi, but also clearly driven by the growth of the gaming market. Not surprisingly tech titans dominated by gaming including Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony are joining forces to form the XR Association, which is aimed at bringing this concept of an ‘experiential reality to life.
Not to be outdone at the end of June Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a big bold play, basically laying out the future for Facebook in the metaverse, before changing the company’s name to Meta, reflecting the company’s growing ambitions beyond social media. Zuckerberg declared that “the metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy.” Microsoft, worth $2.5 trillion, and $731 billion Nvidia, quickly followed suit with their own metaverse visions, reported Forbes.
Of course, anyone who’s seen the movie The Social Network, or has seen recent evidence on how Facebook can do harm through manipulating its online users’ behavior, is certainly going to wonder if the metaverse is going to be safe with a giant like Facebook. As Tim Sweeney, the CEO of leading gaming company Epic, which has raised $1 billion to support their long-term vision of the metaverse, remarked:
“This Metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else. If one central company gains control of this, they will become more powerful than any government, and be a god on Earth.” And as UK-based blockchain startup Outlier Ventures pointed out, the need to have a crypto decentralized core is therefore paramount: “The defining characteristic of a true Metaverse is that it needs its own economy and currencies native to it, where value can be earnt, spent, lent, borrowed or invested interchangeably in both a physical or virtual sense and most importantly without the need for a government.”
According to metaverse proponents, the success of GameFi coupled with the growth of NFTs may provide the solution required to make a more inter-operable metaverse which is free from domination by the likes of Facebook a reality. It’s also worth noting that China has itself started to take the metaverse seriously, presenting China with
“great opportunities and revolutionary effects,”
Zuo Pengfei, a researcher at the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, argued in a September article. It’s interesting that more recently Zuo, agreed that the metaverse has “an inherent monopoly gene,” and that care must be taken to “avoid the metaverse being monopolized by a few forces”, according to a report in Quartz.
What’s also worth considering is that both Facebook, with its Novi wallet and cryptocurrency in the shape of Diem, and the Chinese central bank the PBOC, with its digital yuan, both have the DeFi capacity to monetize gaming in the metaverse to the tune of billions of dollars. So, any more decentralized version of the metaverse, reliant on using cryptocurrencies to power the virtual economy, needs to be aware of that reality from the get-go.
GameFi: Disrupting the online gaming industry
The play-to-earn model has shaken the online gaming industry, with traditional players looking to switch to GameFi projects like Axie Infinity. Cryptocurrencies have already been successfully integrated recently into virtual worlds created by companies such as Decentraland and Sandbox. For example, users in Decentraland can purchase virtual real estate such as theme parks and monetize them using cryptocurrencies.
BigONE believes that the rise in popularity of GameFi projects such as Axie Infinity played a significant role in GameFi’s mainstreaming. GameFi has been in the works since 2017, with the introduction of CryptoKitties. Still, it did not go mainstream until this year, with the popular game Axie Infinity reaching a market cap of over $1 billion in 2021. Before “play-to-earn,” gaming assets and tokens could not be used outside the gaming environment and had no real-world value. With GameFi, in-game purchases can now have real value and have applications outside of the gaming environment.
A key factor contributing to the disruptive power of GameFi is that it is built upon blockchain technology rather than traditional gaming apps built using Java and Unity frameworks. Plus, from a technical perspective, GameFi is generally easier to implement and develop. Such is the threat from GameFi that traditional gaming publishers such as Ubisoft and Epic Games have suggested that GameFi is the future of their blockchain-based games strategy.
BigONE believes that this is yet another indicator of GameFi’s meteoric rise and why it is the future of gaming. According to reports from the Philippines, Axie Infinity, the largest GameFi project, is a huge source of income for the people of the Philippines, paying some of the citizens more than the country’s average salary. In addition, reputable investment firms are beginning to invest more in GameFi initiatives, with Solana Ventures, FTX, and Lightspeed announcing a $100 million GameFi fund recently.
GameFi and the future of the metaverse
What’s clear is that whoever wins the battle to control the metaverse will need to use some kind of digital currency to power the virtual economy. The more monopolistic the approach the more likely this will result in something like a Novi, a dollar-based stablecoin as the de facto default currency.
Despite Zuckerberg’s awareness that by its nature the metaverse is inter-operable, rather than a ‘walled garden’, the amount of money and effort put into this virtual space shows that first-mover advantage will make a difference in the web3 world just as much as the current web 2.0 digital economy, where the likes of Amazon and Google reign supreme.
It’s up to the leading GameFi companies like Axie Infinity to show that the more choices there are for users to earn money from gaming or creating, the stronger the metaverse will be for all participants.
A more decentralized vision of the metaverse inspired by the likes of GameFi startups such as Axie Infinity would support the kind of metaverse that gamers, DeFi traders would welcome.
“While there is room for many different visions of the metaverse I believe GameFi is showing the way, with a decentralized model for gaming and earning money based on trading tokens and NFTs. This is the metaverse where people have greater choice and opportunity, to come together to form their own communities and economies.”
Anndy Lian is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur who is known for his work in the government sector. He is a best selling book author- “NFT: From Zero to Hero” and “Blockchain Revolution 2030”.
Currently, he is appointed as the Chief Digital Advisor at Mongolia Productivity Organization, championing national digitization. Prior to his current appointments, he was the Chairman of BigONE Exchange, a global top 30 ranked crypto spot exchange and was also the Advisory Board Member for Hyundai DAC, the blockchain arm of South Korea’s largest car manufacturer Hyundai Motor Group. Lian played a pivotal role as the Blockchain Advisor for Asian Productivity Organisation (APO), an intergovernmental organization committed to improving productivity in the Asia-Pacific region.
An avid supporter of incubating start-ups, Anndy has also been a private investor for the past eight years. With a growth investment mindset, Anndy strategically demonstrates this in the companies he chooses to be involved with. He believes that what he is doing through blockchain technology currently will revolutionise and redefine traditional businesses. He also believes that the blockchain industry has to be “redecentralised”.
