South Korea has suddenly become a player in this space, currently managing ethereum trading volumes of around $300 million, in comparison to GDAX’s $90 million, with many speculating what’s driving this interest.
It may well be Samsung, a giant global brand with around $300 billion yearly revenue and second only to Apple. With some seeing them as a driving force behind South Korea’s economy, contributing some 17% to the country’s GDP.
Samsung Data Systems (SDS), one of the many subsidiaries of Samsung focusing on consulting and research which has begun investing in smart cities and other new innovative tech, has now joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Kwang Woo Song, Vice President – Distributed Ledger Technology Business Group, Samsung SDS, stated:
“Ethereum is one of the fastest growing blockchain technologies, with potential to provide exceptional benefit to enterprises. We look forward to active collaboration with the members of the alliance, and believe that there will be significant synergy opportunity to drive the adoption of blockchain in the enterprise space.”
One area which blockchain tech could disrupt is gaming with talks that South Korea’s interest is driven mainly by their gaming and robotics industry. Samsung might be eyeing that area, as they sent out letters to their affiliates back in 2012 stating they were looking into the gaming “frontier.”
Moreover, Samsung announced in 2016 they were targeting the gaming industry with a new curved monitor which, they say, “are designed to match the natural shape of the human eye.”
With rumors flying out ethereum is being mentioned in gaming conferences, we might perhaps eventually get an actual announcement, but why would blockchain tech or smart contracts help in games?
According to FirstBlood, an ethereum based decentralized e-gaming platform with a current market cap of around $60 million, some of the reason for using ethereum’s blockchain technology are because:
“Smart contracts can be used for fast, secure and reliable processing of results and rewards from competitive eSports matchplays. Unlike existing platforms (which are both skill and game of chance-based), all of FirstBlood’s transactions are publicly verifiable, viewable, resistant to counterfeit, and not subject to the risk of institutional processing.”
Blockchain tech basically adds an inbuilt monetary aspect to games which is not walled off like current game tokens but can be easily moved in and out of the game. That could, for example, allow individuals to put up funds with the tournament winner being given it as a prize, on top of many other uses.
What uses Samsung has in mind, however, we do not yet quite know, but we are likely to find out in the coming months as the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance progresses further.
