New Korean Startup Market, Backed by Korea Exchange, Fueled with Blockchain

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Employees are showered with confetti as they celebrate the close of trading for the year in front of a screen showing the closing figure of the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) at the Korea Exchange (KRX) in Seoul, South Korea, on Monday, Dec. 30, 2013. South Korea's Kospi gained 0.5 percent to end the year with a 0.7 percent gain. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg

The Korea Exchange has launched KSM (Korea Startup Market) service that provides a marketplace where one can buy and sell equity shares of startup companies. Blocko Inc., a local Blockchain startup company, participated in the project and adopted the Blockchain technology in authentication of identity and documents. The KSM service has applied Blockchain technology by using Coinstack, a Blockchain-based development platform by Blocko.

Blocko has secured the highest number of client references within Korea as a startup by providing its Coinstack platform to Korea’s JB Bank, Lottecard, KISA, Paygate and others. Blocko raised a series A round funding of $1.3 million from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation in July 2016.

Won-Beom Kim, Blocko Inc. CEO, said,

“This is the first commercialization example in which Blockchain is applied to the Korean over-the counter stock market.”

He added:

“We are striving to advance our product by partnering with Samsung SDS, CISCO and others to apply Blockchain to a wide range of industries in the future, beyond existing uses such as bonds, promissory notes and points within the financial sector.”

Coinstack is serviced in two ways, Cloud and On-premise, and supports all types of applications and protocols available via Bitcoin Blockchain. Furthermore, Coinstack is a development platform that supports both Blockchain-based contracts and Ethereum-based smart contracts, enabling companies to easily apply Blockchain-based services.