According to South Korea, the plan is to streamline the investments into several different fields, with an overal aim to increase the country’s competitive edge in blockchain technology. The different fields include six blockchain pilot projects, focussing on the following:
-Online voting
-Easy real estate
-Electronic document distributions between countries
-Marine logistics
-Personal customs clearance
-Management of livestock records
Besides the above projects, the Ministry also plans to support private blockchain initiatives that improve smart city and smart factory projects. Great examples are blockchain-based safe school food distribution initiatives and blockchain systems for the used car industry.
South Korea’s ministry has also announced its intentions to support the development of BaaS, Blockchain-as-a-Service, which has emerged from the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model that a lof of software companies have been offering over the last 10 years. The Ministry of Science and ICT will provide 10 BaaS purchase vouchers that guarantee government payments to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on a yearly basis. With this, the Ministry hopes to assist companies specialised in the development of blockchain technologies.
After a lot of FUD around legislations, this of course can be seen as a HUGE positive move towards the development of blockchain initiatives and the cryptocurrency space in general. South Korea is seemingly loosening up and setting a rather friendly environment around blockchain and cryptocurrency, which will lead to faster developments and hopefully will also speed up mass-adoption.
