KT Corp. - South Korea’s Telecom Giant Launches World’s First Commercial Blockchain Network

On Tuesday, July 24, South Korea’s second-largest mobile carrier and telecom giant KT Corp. launched in what is deemed to be the world’s first commercial blockchain network. The company plans to use the blockchain technology to improve and streamline a range of its services secure data distribution and transactions, identity verification and authentication, as well as energy management.

Local publication The Korea Herald reported that the commercial blockchain network unveiled by KT Corp currently holds a capacity of handling 2500 transactions per second (TPS) and this will increase by four-fold by the end of the year to 10000 transactions per second (TPS). The company has also set an ambitious target to further increase this to 100,000 TPS by the end of 2019.

Seo Young-il, head of the KT Blockchain Center at KT’s Institute of Convergence Technology, told the Korea Herald that “The whole point of applying blockchain to networks is to address security and transaction issues by making the current networks more secure and trusted.”

The company officials also said that the telecom giant has developed their own engine to handle the processing of multiple blocks simultaneously. To attain this, the company will use its existing high-performance servers.

The company also said that it will overcome the limitations of private and public blockchains by introducing more transparency and security to its existing network. As a plan of its future expansion, KT Corp said that it will use the blockchain technology to spread its business in the emerging markets as well as in other developments like developing 5G network and artificial intelligence.

KT Corp will also collaborate with other global players to provide blockchain-enabled data roaming services. The company said that the use of blockchain technology will ensure that users get uninterrupted data roaming services without facing the hassles of low-speed internet connections.

One major reason of switching to the blockchain technology is security, says KT Corp. The company said that the highly encrypted blockchain technology mitigates the risks of hacking. Also, users can directly log on to the network using the blockchain ID instead of having a IP address with the credentials of userID and password being exposed to online thefts.

Kim Hyung-wook, head of platform business planning at KT said: “Like the internet has become today’s mainstream network technology, blockchain will be a new fundamental technology network. KT will contribute to enlarging the country’s blockchain market by taking the lead in building blockchain infrastructure.