South Korea, the country which is enormously involved into cryptocurrencies market has recently announced that it considered digital currencies as an asset. Interestingly, the country revealed that the Korea University is one of 17 universities that Ripple will be funding in the UBRI.

South Korea has always been a centre of attention in world of blockchain and crypto. Recently, the Korean government has been criticized for its strict crypto regulations. However, which had also affected crypto firms to operate their business within the nation.

Though the South Korean regulations on cryptocurrency exists on regular bulletins, but it doesn’t appeared to be sticky. For instance, back in September, the country as 2017, imposed a ban on ICOs and asking to migrate their operation to other countries. But then again announcing the lifting a ban on ICOs during May 2018.

Seeing the scenario, Ripple, the US based cryptocurrency company urged the Korean government to go easy on regulations on the crypto market.

Recently, in an interview with The Korea Times, the senior vice president of global operations at Ripple, Eric van Miltenburg said that governments need to be more focused on the positive impact of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Particularly, he underlines;

“We just think it needs to be a regulation that bounces, that needs to protect consumers. Thus without stealing or prohibiting innovation. But a more powerful approach was looking at specific use cases. And applying regulations in areas that would allow protection for users. So, I think that philosophy would certainly pertain to regulations in Korea as well”.

Recently, Ripple announced that it is donating more than 50% million to 17 universities under “University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI)”. However, the UBRI program partnering with universities to support technical development, academic research and blockchain innovations, crypto assets and payments.

Moreover, the list of schools is yet to be released but few among 17 universities includes MIT and Princeton in the United States, University of Pennsylvania, the University of Waterloo in Canada, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and and the Australian National University.

However, the Ripple is already in partner with Korea University which has blockchain security study centre. Therefore, the centre is more focused on studying the security of blockchain technology algorithms.

Van Miltenburg also said that they are looking for schools already engage in blockchain industry. Also he points, to help those professors within such universities that have seen the potential of blockchain adding,

“We wanted to help accelerate what those faculties and administrators are trying to do”.

Does South Korea need crypto friendly regulations that benefits promising technologies? Lets discuss on Twitter and Telegram.