Opening Remarks

Transcript

Hello, I'm Youbin Kang, CEO of Nonce Classic. We lead the Ethereum Korea Consortium. It was launched with a grant Korea received from the Ethereum Foundation. Today, about 13 member companies take part, and it is co-run by Nonce Classic and ECK. Joining me today is the founder of Arcas Bridge, who also serves as the Ethereum Foundation's APAC policy lead, Adrian Li.

Hey Adrian, how does the Ethereum ecosystem work with this region? Thanks for the introduction, Youbin. My name is Adrian, Adrian Li, and I'm the founder of Arcas Bridge. But also, this is my fourth year actually working at the EF, although I've shifted to helping out part-time. So today I'm representing myself on a personal basis. But I think since I do still contribute as an APAC policy lead for the Ethereum Foundation, I think I can add a couple of thoughts here. My understanding of how the Ethereum Foundation works, as it relates to Asia and this kind of thing, is that instead of a lot of times directly engaging with a

lot of actors, we like to seek out like-minded, values-aligned individuals and organizations, like the Ethereum Consortium in Korea, to help run some of these programs and to push forward the adoption of public blockchains, because we see that as a very important thing, and it's very important also to seed and help the local actors, like yourself, Youbin, and everyone that's been a part of building this together. Let me briefly share what the Ethereum Korea Consortium has done over the past 12 months.

We held two closed-door policy roundtables, on July 21 and September 8. At the second, Assemblyman Min Byung-deok gave congratulatory remarks. We also published, in Korean, an Ethereum guide for governments and institutions. And since September, together with the EF's global policy strategy team, we've been leading Korea policy coordination. So, Adrian, when you see from the outside of Korea, during the one year, what kinds of things have been changed in Korea?

Yeah, I think Korea itself is a very dynamic place, of course. It's one of the largest retail markets for crypto, but outside of that, outside of crypto, manufacturing, technology and many other heavy industries as well. In terms of the digital asset space, there's been a huge amount of change, actually. Institutions, as in... you know, for example, a lot of the people here today, there's a lot more momentum and energy and money actually behind starting and continuing conversations. I think a year ago, a lot of the conversations were still trying to figure out, like, what is the blockchain for, and like, you know, that can be kind of surprising for some of us who've been in the space for a while.

But they're really diving into not just what are the options, but also, like, how are we gonna get there? How are we going to map our current existing systems to this new technology, and where those benefits are, and really seeking out those concrete use cases. I think we're really finally seeing that momentum come to light. And as someone who's been in the space for about 10 years now, I think there is really a step change that I've seen in the last 12 months. In particular, in Korea, the companies and institutions in Korea are really leading on this in the Asia region.

For the people in this room, why is Ethereum an institutional choice? Well, I think a lot of people probably know about this already. Ethereum being the longest-lasting smart contract chain, the most decentralized, the most robust. For institutions, it's really important that you have trust in the robustness and resilience of the technology that you choose. There's also the importance of vendor lock-in and all these other... you know, guarantees and uncertainties that you might have depending on what other competing technologies you choose. So Ethereum, I think, becomes a very natural choice for a lot of institutions, and you know, far be it for me to explain it to everyone here, but it's something that I think is kind of

on everyone's mind, and I'm sure we'll dig into a lot more of this as the talks go on. Let me add one point on the Korean context. Right now in Korea, KRW stablecoins, security tokens (STO) and RWA, CBDCs and deposit tokens, and digital identity are each handled in separate bills by separate ministries. But technically, all four call for the same thing: a trusted settlement and verification layer. Take a look at who's on stage today. The CEO of DB Securities is up right after this, and later, KB Securities, LG Electronics, Lambda256, Toss, Kyobo Securities and Hanwha Investment & Securities join us.

A year ago, the question here was: will Korean institutions use public blockchains? That question no longer holds. As today's agenda shows, the question now is how to use them. That's a really big part of why we're here today. There's been a lot of momentum and energy behind private blockchains, and that's been ongoing. And even some of the recent regulations have been pushing in that direction, especially in the Asia region.

And I think that's something that we're still trying to work out, and I think, you know, again, today's conversations are going to contribute to that. The issue really here is, you know, how institutions see public blockchains, because there are, like, certain considerations that are really important. You know, depending on where we're talking about, the different jurisdictions and different entities, they could be concerned about regulations. That could be a blocker. Another blocker could be privacy and the level of maturity of the privacy technology.

And these are all things that are to be sorted out, and I think some of these conversations need to continue for us to figure out exactly how do we map, you know, I don't want to say legacy, but existing, you know, regulations and existing systems onto this new paradigm, because I think the business case for it is clearly here. It's just a matter of how do we get there from here on out. And I think, you know, this particular event, thank you to all the sponsors and all the speakers, it's going to be a really important starting point for that. Well then, I hope you all enjoy today's event.

Thank you.