South Korea’s Popular Messaging Platform KakaoTalk to Launch Its Own Cryptocurrency

The very decentralized nature of the blockchain technology also known as the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has been quite appealing to big heads across different industries. Much recently, big tech giants like Facebook and Telegram are said to be probably working on ways to transform their platform into being completely decentralized.

According to the latest reports from Huffington Post Korea, Kakao Corp -  the parent company behind South Korea’s most popular messaging app KakaoTalk, is looking forward to creating its own subsidiary based on the blockchain technology.

Although the business plan remains quite unclear at this point in time, the new subsidiary ‘Kakao Blockchain’ will focus on developing new blockchain solutions and services. The publication has also reported that the company is planning to announce a detailed roadmap of its plans via a press conference scheduled on March 20, ahead this month.

Another Korean publication MT reports that along with the launch of the new Kakao Blockchain platform, the company is also willing and planning to launch a new cryptocurrency called ‘Kakao Coin’ through the means of an Initial coin Offering (ICO). However, as South Korea’s financial regulator has already banned ICO offerings back in September 2017, the company is looking towards overseas jurisdictions, Hong Kong and Singapore in particular.

The expected arrival of the new cryptocurrency ‘Kakao Coin’ will see its presence on other app platforms like KakaoTalk, Kakao Driver, and Kakao Games and will work as a direct substitute to fiat currencies.

The KakaoTalk messaging platform has a huge penetration of nearly 93% of South Korea’s population using the messaging service. KakaoPay - a mobile payment subsidiary of Kakao corp is also said to have a huge penetration and a dominant presence in the finch market of South Korea.

It is said that with the launch of ‘Kakao Coin’, users of KakaoTalk and KakaoPay will be using this cryptocurrency instead of fiat currency, for all the purchases made in the company’s applications. Kaka Corp. is already said to have ventured in the crypto space way back through the launch of its another subsidiary UpBit cryptocurrency exchange, currently supporting over 100 digital tokens.

It seems that Kakao Corp is very much following the footsteps of the global messaging giant ‘Telegram’. Telegram too has its plans on similar lines where it plans to launch an Ethereum-like complete ecosystem named as the Telegram Open Network (TON). The TON will host its own cryptocurrency known as ‘Gram’ along with the range of multiple other decentralized services just like Ethereum. Telegram, however, claims that its TON network will be much larger in capacity in comparison to the Ethereum network.