South Korea’s reputation as a trend-setter and leader in technological research is quickly spilling into the blockchain realm as nonfungible token (NFT) adoption has skyrocketed in the small East Asian country.
As of 2020, South Korea has been among the top-10 countries in the world in the Global Innovation Index by the World Intellectual Property Organization. That level of innovation is made apparent to global retail consumers by tech giants such as Samsung and LG and to gamers through game maker Krafton.
Those companies, and many like them, are now also delving into the NFT space by dropping new collections to customers and launching divisions of their company dedicated to developing NFTs.
There may be several reasons for the eagerness to expose retail consumers and the general public at large to NFTs that goes beyond just being a thank-you prize for a purchase. This is the idea presented by Strategy Lead at the Korea-based KlayChicken NFT project, Alex Lim. He told Cointelegraph today “NFTs are all the rage but a lot of people don’t even know why.”
“The NFT hype in South Korea stems from a mixture of sentiments… I believe that in the second half of the year, the time will come when the whole South Korean NFT industry takes a quantum leap.”
One reason that may contribute to this quantum leap is the lack of a tax on digital assets in South Korea. The crypto tax has been delayed until 2023, but president-elect Yoon Seok-yeol may push to delay that tax for yet another year to 2024.
Additionally, NFTs are not regulated as stringently as cryptocurrency is now. Although local financial regulators at the Financial Services Commission (FSC) are working to introduce new NFT rules, none yet exist. This has kept the market open to be filled by a litany of new marketplaces at exchanges such as Upbit and Bithumb and from other corporations such as gaming giant Krafton to profit from NFTs.
Co-founder and CEO at Korea-based blockchain ecosystem accelerator DeSpread GM Chung believes practical use-cases for NFTs will become…
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