NEAR launches Web3 regional hub in Korea

November 1st  2022, Seoul, Korea –  NEAR Foundation, the Swiss non-profit that oversees the governance and development of the NEAR protocol, today announced it has launched a regional hub in Korea dedicated to Web3  innovation, business development, education and talent throughout the country.

The hub will be led by entrepreneurs Scott Lee and Ben Kang – both influential figures within Korea’s blockchain community. Together they bring an impressive depth of knowledge in Web3, as well as a vast network within the ecosystem.  

Lee founded a Web3 start-up  and began advising a number of projects in Korea. Most recently, Scott was the Director of Business Development of Legendaries, a subsidiary of KAKAO Entertainment. Before joining KAKAO Entertainment, he led an accelerating division and company building team from SparkLabs and FuturePlay.

Kang began his career in financial services and worked in high profile roles at Merrill Lynch and Korea Stock Exchange. After joining Klaytn, Korea’s leading Layer 1, as a co-founding member, he leveraged his expertise to advise its token economy and corporate investments. 

The duo hopes to attract the best quality projects and the hottest developers in Korea to build on NEAR  and to help companies transition from web2 into web3, particularly those within the gaming industry. Korea is among the world’s top markets for gaming, ranking fourth worldwide for video games. It is leading the web2 gaming market, and many gaming companies are exploring the possibilities of web3, such as WEMADE’s P2E project, WEMIX, NetMarble’s MarbleX, and KakaoGames’ METABORA. 

To tap into this opportunity the hub and heighten awareness for NEAR in Korea, the hub will also play a proactive role in community building through meetups, hackathons and university relations, attracting high quality projects and heightening awareness for NEAR in Korea. 

“NEAR has gained wide support among the exciting Web3 community for its ease of use and impressive user interface, which has helped to democratise access to building and bring a mix of exciting talent to the protocol. Moreover, there is a significant number of JavaScript developers in Korea, and they can now easily build on NEAR,” said Scott Lee. “We want to use the hub to leverage that momentum and to attract an even bigger audience of builders by giving them the funding and the tools to create an inclusive and sustainable Web3 future for Korea.”

“We will focus on enhancing the overall NEAR ecosystem and attracting Web3 projects to onboard – and  also value campus blockchain communities, which will be the fundamentals of the NEAR Protocol.” said Ben Kang. “In order to do this we will work closely with the community to raise the profile of the NEAR and to shine a spotlight on the high level of scalability and usability that the protocol can offer creators.”

Korea has one of the most established Web3 ecosystems in Asia and one of the most active cryptocurrency economies in the world. This, along with a combination of highly creative local talent and a growing desire for developers to build sustainably and without limits, makes this country an ideal hub for NEAR. 

“We are thrilled to be growing the blockchain dev community in Korea as the talent there is world class and they have the potential to create some fantastic web3 projects on NEAR,” said Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation. “With a stellar leadership team at the helm of this exciting and inclusive hub, we are confident that we can deliver the necessary tools and opportunities to attract more of the best and brightest stars from the local community. Together we can give them the training and freedom to build sustainable and exciting web3 applications without limits.”

Internationally, the excitement continues to build around the potential of the NEAR blockchain. Unlike other networks, NEAR gives software developers easy access to create new crypto applications, from Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to decentralised finance products and launching new business models and consumer products.  

The NEAR blockchain is also much faster than Ethereum, the world’s most used blockchain. It acts as a bridge to other blockchains, allowing for the free flow of assets and communication between networks for the betterment of all.