Hi everyone! I’m Sara, a 20-year-old college student at Yonsei University in Korea and an intern at VREX LAB, a startup focusing on VR/AR. I am currently living in Seoul but I actually come from a small and beautiful country in Central Europe. Moving here changed my life enough already, but there’s been something else that transformed my life even further — Ethereum.

Last December I caught one of my ‘sunbaes’ (a Korean word used to refer to upperclassmen) staring into a screen filled with colorful cats during one of our lectures. And then he told me he was actually making money by breeding these cats(CryptoKitties) and all I could think was HOW?! That set me off to the journey of exploring the crypto world. The more I learned, the more I was hooked, and eventually ended up working at VREX, which now developing a dapp.

A while ago, I learned that college students in Korea can nowadays use digital currencies based on a blockchain network called ‘ICON’ to purchase goods at vending machines on campus. It turns out, ICON is one of most successful projects to come out in 2017, having raised over $20MM within just 6 hours after starting its pre-sale. Since ICON’s mainnet launch in late January, a number of banks and other corporations have already started incorporating this new system.

The main objective of this article (and future ones) is to introduce multiple people and their work (if you like what you’ve read, subscribe to my newsletter and stay tuned for all my encounters). For this post, I want to share my chat with Henry Hyunil Lee, the head of global business development at ICON.

Henry hard at work at ICON HQ in Seoul

Q. Could you introduce yourself and tell me how did you ended up involved in ICON?

I started my career as an air force officer. Although I liked a lot of things there I wanted to pursue a career in finance and joined Deutche Bank’s M&A division as an investment banker. But eventually I wanted to do something that had more growth potential as an industry and joined a Fintech group where I met the co-founder of ICON, Min Kim.

I remember how he used to send me all these blogposts and videos about Blockchain, and eventually I got to see the whole potential of blockchain. That how I started working at the Loop, the company behind ICON. Regarding ICON, I head the global strategy, IR and partnerships. ICON itself is a smart contract platform with interoperability, and is applying blockchain to the real world in areas such as insurance, banking, higher education, and health care

Q. What is the U-Coin?

One of the first consortiums we introduced the blockchain to was a university consortium consisting of three universities — Sogang University, Korea University and Pohang University of Science and Technology. The ‘U-coin’ is the first product we offered to this consortium.

The U-coin is essentially a Korean fiat pegged cryptocurrency and the network is a permission based private blockchain, closed by nature. They allow students to use this U-coin to buy things on vending machines in and around campus. Such smart vending machines enable students to top up their cryptocurrency balance and take care of transactions, transfers, and other key functions.

Q. How do you plan on engaging more universities and college students?

As we move forward with the universities our plan is to have entire campuses on blockchain. We envision students using their own organic digital assets or cryptocurrency to pay for tuition, receive scholarships, upload academic credentials on the blockchain and to use that information at other universities outside of Korea, creating a blockchain based infrastructure around the world.

Q. You had a successful ICO in 2017. What do you want to achieve in 2018?

The two main goals are improving technology and strengthening our ecosystem. There are many things we plan to develop in 2018 but it would be mainly the year to solidify our network. That infrastructure would not be 100% mature by the end of the year but 2018 should be dedicated to improving the foundation of this network that would become the basic for all future applications.

It is important for projects like ICON to try and build the community or ecosystem that can support our development in a long term. As such, we recently actually launched a blockchain incubator providing support for 300 startups, projects or individuals and helping them try to build this ecosystem.

Q. There are many blockchain games launching this year and many of them have already proved popular. What are your thoughts?

I have actually never played any of these blockchain games, but I think gaming is a very interesting area for dapps and it makes a lot of sense. I think the reason why you see so many products is that they’re only linked with one network. If these blockchains can actually communicate with each other, there won’t be a need to have multiple similar dapps on different platforms. I don’t think there will be one main blockchain, but as long these blockchains can communicate with each other there won’t be a need for 1000 versions of the same dapp. If the game is good, it should be accessible beyond that one certain network.

Q. At what point do you think blockchain system will see this higher interoperability?

Right now, there are some different ways of creating interoperability between blockchains. For example, transferring certain assets from one blockchain to another, transferring consensus or certain results of a smart contract from chain to chain. There are different layers of interoperability that you can think about and from ICONs perspective what we are building right now is the most basic layer. In developing this protocol, we are working as a member of blockchain interoperability alliance with Canadian and Chinese blockchain companies.

Q. Now something a bit simpler, if you could create your own cryptocurrency what would you call it?

That is the toughest question I have actually ever received. I would create the LEE coin and all people with the surname Lee will receive airdrops.

Q. Do you any words of advice or encouragement for students interested in blockchain?

I personally think that the students in high schools and universities are the ones to bring out the true potential of these blockchain technologies. Our level of innovation is limited to the level of experience we have up to this point. It is important to be educating the younger generation who is learning about the blockchain to pursue and experiment in the blockchain space.

For Korean students in particular, blockchain is perhaps the first technology that could allow Korean companies and projects to have global dominance. I think, with so much interest in cryptocurrency and blockchain shown by everyday Koreans and with Korea being such an advanced IT nation, there are a lot of good factors that could add up to make Korea the number one country when it comes to blockchain. Seeing many universities talk to blockchain companies it is amazing how these students all around the world can be excited about certain things and are willing to hear about these new and different ideas. It is a sign that these people will be able to maximize the potential of this industry.

Me dreaming of hyperconnecting the world@ ICON

I was very impressed by Henry’s optimism about future technology and his belief in the power of students like myself to change the status quo. In fact there is already a club at Yonsei, the Yonsei Blockchain Lab, that holds regular seminars and meetups on blockchain.

I sincerely hope that students at many universities across Korea can hop on the train and learn more about blockchain technology. And for me, not wanting to forget my duties as a student, I got on the bus to head back and study for my exams.

*If you want to learn more about the VR/AR blockchain project I’m working on, please join our Telegram channel, Discord channel or visit our main project site.

**This article was originally published on besuccess.com., here is the English version and here is the Korean version.