Original｜Odaily Planet Daily
Author: jk
Korea Blockchain Week was held in Seoul from September 1 to 7, 2024. This is an Asian blockchain event with tens of thousands of participants, second only to the upcoming Singapore Token 2049. Due to South Korea's policy support and extensive encryption foundation, the duration is also relatively long. This KBW can be regarded as an Asian blockchain event in terms of scale.
When they first arrived in Korea, most people who didn’t know Korean felt like foreigners in China: Korean was everywhere, but there was not enough translation between Chinese and English. Although many store clerks could speak some Chinese and English, it still took a few days to get used to the different map software, taxi software, and payment software. Many people joked that their dining options were mostly concentrated in McDonald’s and Burger King, because these two places not only had ordering machines in multiple languages, but also had the same choices as in China.
Korean participants usually prefer formal attire, and casual suit jackets are generally standard, which seems a bit too formal in the 29-degree weather in Seoul and the atmosphere of foreigners wearing short-sleeved shirts and shorts. At the same time, unlike the atmosphere of previous North American conferences, this Korean conference attracted many degen-type people. In almost every Korean-speaking side event, a group of uncles who trade in cryptocurrencies can be found enthusiastically discussing market dynamics and the trend of specific tokens, forming a unique landscape.
The grand occasion of this conference released on KBW official website. Source: KBW official website
In Gangnam District, the most prosperous area in Seoul, the advertisements of participating companies can be said to be overwhelming. Several large institutions invested heavily in publicity: XRP, Movement Labs, Babylon, Sui and other large institutions took turns to display on the huge display screen on Gangnam Avenue, the main road in Gangnam District, which is enough to show the local encryption atmosphere and large audience in South Korea. Although some traditional North American big projects appeared in South Korea, self-hosted wallets and North American Layer-1 public chains that were willing to pay a lot of money to buy booths did not appear at this conference.
XRP advertisement on Jiangnan Avenue.
Compared to the side events throughout Seoul, the booths at the main venue of KBW Hotel are mostly concentrated on some emerging projects, especially in the fields of infrastructure and AI. In terms of the types of projects participating in the exhibition in South Korea, there are relatively few Social projects, while there are relatively many DeFi and AI projects. The popularity of the Bitcoin ecosystem is still high, and many projects are built on Babylon. With the release of Babylon's main network, they have ushered in a new stage.
Some projects that are either Korean or have a broad market or involvement in Korea left a deep impression on people at this conference:
Sahara AI: Sahara AI is a decentralized artificial intelligence blockchain platform that aims to build an open, fair, and collaborative AI economy that benefits everyone. The platform allows individual developers and large enterprises to participate in the development and application of AI, ensuring that all contributors are fairly compensated while maintaining the sovereignty of data and models. Sahara AI protects individual privacy, promotes diverse participation, and drives innovation in the AI ecosystem through transparent on-chain attribution and governance. Sahara AI's core components include the Sahara blockchain, advanced AI infrastructure, a decentralized AI marketplace, development tools, and secure storage. Together, these components build a comprehensive, accessible, and secure platform that supports the collaborative development and deployment of AI. Through these innovations, Sahara AI is committed to breaking the traditional centralized AI model and giving users more control and value.
Kaia + LineNext combination: Kaia is a BFT-based public blockchain designed to meet enterprise-level reliability and performance standards. Kaia's design goals include achieving instant final confirmation of transactions, high-speed transaction processing capabilities, reducing the operating costs of blockchain applications, reducing the entry barriers for end users, and promoting technology adoption in various industries. The core specifications of the Kaia blockchain include 1 second block generation and confirmation time, a processing capacity of 4,000 transactions per second, about 1/10 of Ethereum's gas, and compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), supporting Solidity contracts. In addition, Kaia is governed by the Kaia Governance Committee composed of well-known global companies to ensure its transparency and reliability. Among them, Kaia will cooperate with Line, a popular chat software in Asia, to try to reproduce the glory of Telegram applets on Line.
In addition, old GameFi projects such as SuperWalk and Meme projects such as Shib set up booths and attracted widespread attention. The atmosphere of the on-site activities was very hot. It is worth mentioning that Sahara AI's way of attracting participants in the side event was quite creative: they invited former IZONE girl group member Kwon Eun-bi and Korean group Dynamic Duo to perform live, and the performance with a strong Korean wave flavor made the atmosphere on the scene extremely hot.
Sahara AI’s side event. Source: Sahara AI X
Unlike American conferences where everyone gathers in bars to drink and chat, Korean social styles are more Asian-style. Some participants revealed that sometimes they have so many social events that they may have to eat two dinners a day, plus a midnight snack. At the same time, the popular soju or fried chicken and beer culture in Korea makes many participants who have just arrived in Korea feel at a loss, so there are also "famous scenes" of participants falling drunk on the roadside. Someone on the X platform said frankly that the biggest gain from KBW is:
Source: X platform user @Carl0w0
KBW This conference still attracted large-scale participation from the crypto world across Asia and the Pacific Rim at a critical time when the market was volatile. It was not only worthy of participation from project parties from Asia, but also allowed the crypto world to see the confidence of the participants at this point in time.
