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We went to Seoul on November 29, 2019, for the Klaytn TXGX 2019 event held at MOSS Studio, Seoul, South Korea.
GroundX, a subsidiary company of Kakao Blockchain, holds the blockchain forum TXGX annually.
The event is open to all Klaytn blockchain developers to discuss Klaytn and blockchain architecture updates that developed within the year.
Our team was able to talk with other Klaytn winners and GroundX CEO Jaesun Ha

Wons First Prize for the Klaytn Hackathon with Klaytn Champ

About 6 months ago, Caspar Oostendorp, Amadeo Brands, Roy Selbach, and Tracy Li joined the Klaytn Virtual Hackathon, a global event where developers created BApps for Testnet Baobab. As the first-place winner, we were invited to go to Seoul and join the TXGX Conference and present our winning project, Klaytn Champ. TXGX (organized by GroundX) is a blockchain forum and technical conference that aims to give in-depth presentations and discussions about the Klaytn blockchain platform and its roadmap. The conference lasted the whole day, with discussions regarding Klaytn history and architecture, account and transaction models, data layers, scaling, API service, etc. Its focus leans largely on the perspective on how Klaytn can tackle current challenges we’re experiencing.

Budding Blockchain Market in South Korea

Korea is a nation with a very strong digital engagement in their daily life. In fact, it has an extended global influence, particularly with K-pop and K-drama industry, on its neighboring Asian countries. With a strong entertainment and social media influence, South Korea may have the possibility of tapping a blockchain market potential and spread influence through Asia. While Facebook and Instagram are among the top social media platforms that Koreans use, KakaoTalk, the major local messaging app, was able to penetrate the industry and is dominating the local market. Unsurprisingly, i97% of smartphone users actively use KakaoTalk in Korea, which amounts to 50 million users. Also, Kakao Corp., the company behind KakaoTalk, has acquired a myriad of companies over the past few years to diversify its services. By setting a foothold in different industries, Kakao Corp. is one of the leading eligible companies to tap the potentials of blockchain in various markets. The company was able to set a strong foothold in most industries, like entertainment, banking, and transportation among other things.

GroundX and Klaytn

As mentioned earlier, GroundX is the company that developed the Klaytn blockchain platform and the blockchain subsidiary of Kakao Corp. Though it's considered a fork of Ethereum, Klaytn is more optimized to handle usability and scalability for mass adoption. Though Ethereum is the most used public chain globally, Klatyn was developed to address prescient challenges that Ethereum will and is experiencing.

During the TXGX event, we met the other winners of the hackathon. We had meetings with the key people behind GroundX. And we learned more about the platform’s architecture during these meetings and explored Klaytn’s possibilities together with our project. GroundX’s priority next year is mass adoption for blockchain. Klip, a blockchain wallet, will be included in all KakaoTalk mobile apps, immediately increasing potential blockchain users to tens of millions. Klatyn has features that particularly solve usability and scalability problems brought about by “older” blockchain platforms. That makes this public chain more plausible among other chains. These were discussed thoroughly during the forum. To give insight, we decided to note down important takeaways.

Most notable features and differences are the following:

Consensus model - Klaytn consensus is currently achieved by 13 “Core Cell Nodes”, run by some of the biggest enterprises in Asia. One of them is UnionBank, the nr. 7 bank of The Philippines. This architecture allows for a high TPS, while maintaining a level of independence. Klaytn intends to expand this core network over time.
Enhanced Account and Transaction model - Even with cryptography, private keys still have a chance to be exposed through social engineering or user negligence. To solve this, Klaytn’s account model has decoupled the key pair from the address, which makes the private keys changeable.
Fee Delegation - With fee delegation, transaction fees can be paid by service providers. End users may not worry about paying transaction fees. This greatly improves initial friction for new users to use the platform.
Role-based keys - This is an added security feature and at the same time, allows flexibility on how we can control our Klaytn account.

GroundX will also be releasing the Klip wallet next year and will eventually integrate with KakaoTalk. Besides this, a browser wallet extension is also under development.

The top 2 winning teams were able to have a casual but insightful discussion with GroundX CEO, Jaesun Han. The discussion revolved around current blockchain projects and the general blockchain outlook for Korea in 2020. According to him, Decentralized Identifiers (DID) and gaming will be the biggest use case in Korea for next year. NFTs have huge potential to drive adoption too.

“Watch out for South Korea in 2020.”, Mr. Han expressed.

This experience made us realize that the Korean blockchain market is a sleeping giant. They're only waiting for the right moment to wake up and embrace mass adoption. With Klatyn and Kakao, GroundX fits well to be in the first position of the protocol race in Korea.

What's Next for Klaytn Champ

During the trip to Seoul, we’ve learned a lot and have confirmed the potential & need for our educational tooling. As an organization who is primarily focused on education, we discovered that high quality blockchain development starts with a proper on-boarding flow & extensive knowledge support. We can’t wait to roll-out the next stage of our blockchain-based educational solutions.... There’s a lot coming up in the near future. Stay tuned!

Posted from the EOI Digital Transformation and Marketing blog : https://transform.eoi.digital/eoi-txgx-seoul/

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