The South Korean administration is all set to double its attempts to test blockchain in the public sector by including more projects and hiking existing capitals for next year.
According to a leading Korean news report published on September 4th, the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) invested around 4.2 billion won to a total of six blockchain projects this year and is focusing on investing a total of ten billion won in twelve blockchain projects in the public sector for 2019.
This year, the blockchain pilot projects in the public sector were carried out for the first time to make the public services more efficient and encourage private investment by utilising blockchain technology to create new services and platforms.
Min Kyung-Sik, a representative of KISA blockchain, stated: “In the next year, we are considering expanding blockchain pilot projects in the public sector to 12, and plan to support more than three private-led blockchain national projects.”
In the mid-2018, six blockchain projects were chosen by the Ministry of Information and communication technology (ICT) from seventy-two project ideas submitted by forty-one organizations. The blockchain projects included real estate transactions, customs clearance, shipping logistics, online voting and cross-border e-document distribution.
Also, the KISA agency will enhance the blockchain pilot budget to more than ten billion Korean won for 2019, besides to the previously stated nine million dollars capital for both 2018 and 2019.
The agency further reported that for this year the government had distributed $3.76 million for the six blockchain projects with the three million dollars from the government and the remaining from private offerings.
Mr. Min further stated: “The blockchain public demonstration project started with the purpose of activating the domestic blockchain industry by acting as the primer of the blockchain spread in the public sector. We will not spare a lot of support to do so.”
The outcome of the recent blockchain pilot projects will be declared in November, after that KISA will conduct a blockchain hackathon by the end of this year with a purpose to select new tasks.
