At Origin, we believe our community is just as important as the technology we are building. This is the reason why it is crucial for us to build and nurture meaningful relationships with stakeholders from around the world, including our developer partners, investors, and end users.

The Origin team wants to give a special thanks to our Korean speaking community. Just like our English speaking community, we value our Korean speaking community highly. South Korea is a very important market for many reasons. The country’s expertise and passion for technology have created a favorable climate for all startups in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industries. While other countries struggle to understand the benefits of this technology, South Korea has rapidly begun its adoption with nearly 30% of the working population investing in cryptocurrencies. More than 20% of all cryptocurrency trading volume around the world happened in South Korea so far this year; the country is the most active market for Ether trading in the world. In addition to the country’s ground-breaking speed of technological adoption and penetration within the mainstream population, we believe that there are many talented developers and entrepreneurs who will solidify the country’s leadership in the global blockchain industry. Our goal is to forge marketplace partnerships, recruit top software engineers, and grow our overall community presence in the next months and years in South Korea.

Throughout the year, Matthew Liu and Joshua Fraser, Origin’s co-founders, have visited the country numerous times and delivered keynote speeches at the Tokenized Conference and Blockchain Open Forum in Seoul. Our co-founders have repeatedly stressed the importance of the Korean market to the global blockchain community, and have promised increased community and business development efforts in the country going forward.

Matthew Liu (Co-founder) interview with TokenPost in Seoul

Josh Fraser (Co-founder) interview with Soso Lab in Seoul

Origin’s First Official Meetup in Seoul: Hashed Lounge

With Origin’s mission to expand into Korean market, we held our very first dedicated meetup in Seoul at Hashed Lounge this past month. Matthew Liu (Co-founder), Coleman Maher (Head of Partnerships), Mila Choi (Korea Community Manager) and I (Korea Community Lead/Finance) had the opportunity to further grow and nurture our relationships with developer partners, investors, and most notably — our community members in South Korea. As a proud Korean-Canadian myself, it has been my honor to lead Korean community development efforts.

From Left: Coleman Maher (Head of Partnerships), Kay Yoo (Author — Korea Community Lead/Finance), Matthew Liu (Co-founder) & Mila Choi (Korea Community Manager)

Below are some of my key takeaways from our recent meetup at Hashed Lounge:

My Takeaways

To show our appreciation for the Korean speaking audience, we decided that it would be best to introduce the team and our core mission in the local language. I delivered my introduction speech primarily in Korean. Although this was not a requirement by Hashed, it was a great opportunity for us to make a statement on how serious we are about developing our communities around the world and how much we value developing meaningful relationships in the most effective and comprehensive way for our audience. Let’s talk about Technology. We delivered a technical demo on our decentralized messaging product during our Hashed Lounge meetup. The demo was recorded in Korean to cater to our Korean speaking audience, and Matt, our co-founder, explained our product innovations in detail. At Origin, we strive to deliver meaningful information to the community and talk about real, technical product advancements to date. We will continue to openly show our community what we’ve been working on, not merely talk about our promised product roadmap. Based on our conversations with various investors, developer partners, and journalists whom we’ve had the pleasure of meeting, we have learned the importance of delivering our core message with local context that speaks to South Korea’s latest economic, social and regulatory environment — without losing our color, values, and focus on delivering our mission. For example, we have a mission to build a decentralized platform on blockchain that enables P2P marketplaces with an initial focus on the sharing economy. Therefore, it is imperative that we continue to analyze the state of the sharing economy in South Korea to ensure our platform fits into the country’s evolving economic models.

Matthew Liu (Co-founder) @ Hashed Lounge, Seoul

Kay Yoo (Author, Head of Korea Community/Finance) @ Hashed Lounge, Seoul

Special Thanks to our Developer Partners

We currently have two notable developer partners in South Korea. Executives at these two companies, San-Ku Jo (CEO, Wehome) and Jisoon Lim (CSO/Head of Product, Metaps Plus), both attended our meetup to commemorate our partnerships and share our vision with the wider community. It is an honor to have such great projects partner with us, and we sincerely appreciate their support in advancing our community development efforts in South Korea. For details on our partnerships, please refer to our posts about Wehome and Metaps Plus.

Special Thanks to our Investors

Furthermore, we have been fortunate to have great investors and advisors who believe in our mission and have supported us along the way. During our recent trip in South Korea, we were able to reconnect with many of them, and we look forward to having many more meaningful collaborations with them going forward. Notable Origin investors from South Korea include Hashed, Streami, Cypher Group, Metaps Plus and Bluepoint VC.

Final Remarks

On behalf of our entire Origin team, thank you all for your continued support. I would like to give a personal video thank you to our Korean speaking community here. We also want to extend special thanks to Wehome who warmly invited us to their meetup, Erica Kang (KryptoSeoul) who met us for a fun, interactive interview, and Steve Jang (Kindred Ventures) who gave us the opportunity to speak and participate at the Blockchain Summit in Seoul. We are truly excited to grow our community in South Korea. For those of you who want to know more about our Korean community development efforts and want to get involved, we want to hear from you. Please check out our social channels dedicated to Korean speaking community below.

KakaoTalk: To join our Open Chat, click this link or scan this QR code:

Origin’s Kakao Group QR Code

Telegram: We have created a separate Telegram group for our Korean speaking community members here.

Learn more about Origin: