RelayNode - Seoul - April 6, 2020
Interview of dsrv labs, Binance KR and crypto based P2P lending getting banned
General election (legislative election) will be held on April 15, 2020 in Korea. We will have to see whether COVID-19 affects voter turnout. Additionally, people would be heading into voter booths without physically seeing candidates or attending candidate rallies. These are certainly strange times.
Interview of dsrv labs
Today I am back with my interview series with Korean blockchain projects! I have not been able to meet up with other projects due to obvious circumstances. While these may be infrequent, I will try to keep up with these interview series.
I bring today an interview with Jiyun, the CEO of dsrv labs. I was extremely excited for this because dsrv labs is the most technically advanced team here in Korea. They have been researching and developing a whole suite of technologies, but are now doubling down on a few key products to offer to other projects.
Background of Jiyun and how he got into this space
Jiyun has extensive experience working as an engineer at one of the top mobile phone companies. Being an engineer at heart, he always had passion to learn new technologies. As such, seeing the rise of blockchains, he became curious and started to go through codebases of Bitcoin and Ethereum. He studied the ins and outs of all codebases (even contributing to some libraries), but came out of it with more questions. He wondered how blockchains could be useful.
His viewpoint started to change as he came across one of See Eun (CEO of nonce)’s early videos. See Eun envisioned blockchain to be eventually used by all 6 billion people. Jiyun had a passion for developing products that will be used by millions. This was one of the reasons why he was working in the mobile phone industry in the first place. He realized that blockchains at the moment were just too early and needed more time to mature. He wanted to keep contributing to this space and eventually see blockchains being used by billions. He went all in.
What is drsv labs and how did it come to life?
Jiyun simply started to code and talk with other blockchain enthusiasts. He was willing to be flexible and adapt to wherever the path led him as he devoted all of his time to blockchains.
His approach to deciding what to code was methodical. He acknowledged that it will take a long time for blockchains to become used popularly. Getting to that point required a lot of experimentation. Jiyun concluded that tackling problems that throttled these experiments from continuing was essential in advancing the ecosystem.
Hearing his observations, vision and passion, some senior level developers started to work closely with Jiyun. These collaborative sessions eventually led to the official founding of dsrv labs in April 2019. The team had one goal: they will tackle and build businesses around the prolonged problems that deter the continuation of experiments in the blockchain ecosystem. Their products will build the public’s trust in digital assets.
What problems have dsrv labs tackled so far?
The first problem they saw was the huge information gap between retail investors and bigger funds. They built out nonceData: a database that provided key on-chain data and exchange price information that anyone could use. Experiments around Proof of Stake blockchains were gaining steam. The team realized that professional validators were key to ensure these experiments continued on these networks, therefore they built out a validator service on Terra, Celo and Coda. Seeing that visual on-chain data was not available for many of these new protocols, they also created dashboards with key on-chain metrics for Terra.
They finally came to the critical problem that keeps crippling the blockchain industry from being taken seriously: wallet hacks and key losses. The dsrv labs team has developed a unique solution to these problems that can layer on top of existing security systems and would supplement these existing measures. They have already implemented this solution on Bitcoin and Ethereum and are now working to implement it on newer networks. The team has been pushing this product as it had the strongest product market fit and positive feedback from blockchain companies.
Jiyun’s thoughts on the Korean blockchain scene
There are a lot of projects that are working extremely hard. Jiyun hopes that 2020 will see key developments from these teams that have devoted so much to start shipping and bringing blockchain closer to mainstream adoption. He emphasizes that now is the time to collaborate amongst all blockchain projects and build up the future.
Jiyun wanted to give a special shoutout to Terra. He believes Terra has showcased how blockchains can be used by real people and set up a playbook for other projects who may be looking to do the same. He also gives Terra a lot of credit for their will power to grow the pie of our industry.
That’s a wrap from Jiyun! dsrv labs has been approaching difficult problems methodically and executing seamlessly since being founded. Their team members are talented, kind and passionate about this space. And most importantly, they all have a lot of fun working in this space. Keep an eye on this team as they start making their moves.
Binance enters South Korea
Binance announced this week that they would enter the South Korean market by launching Binance KR on top of Binance Cloud. The exchange will be open for trading from Monday, April 6, 2020, 10AM local time (3 hours after this newsletter hits your inbox). Along with this launch, they have also launched BKRW, a stablecoin that is pegged to the Korean Won. The exchange will support Korean fiat on ramps which could help accelerate its growth.
This is not a huge surprise given that Korea, while volume has dwindled from all-time highs, still accounts for a significant proportion of cryptocurrency trades. Binance will finally be joining other major exchanges like OKEx and Huobi who have already launched in Korea the past two years. A few of the past Binance meetups in Korea attracted huge crowds, so it will be interesting to see what sort of volume Binance KR will manage in the next few months.
Crypto P2P lending (most likely) banned
A new law will come into effect this August banning P2P lending platforms that let users leverage high risk assets, like cryptocurrencies. I want to clarify here upfront that there are some conflicting accounts I am reading about how this law should be interpreted for crypto lending companies. Some say this would apply to all crypto lending, while another says this would only apply to P2P companies, so would exempt institutional crypto lenders. One thing is for certain, this definitely would make any Korean projects trying to launch a decentralized lending platform think twice.
Events this week
Nothing is on schedule for this week in Korea.