In what has become a staple of the Inside Bitcoins conferences, leading Bitcoin experts will be judging the demos of five companies from South Korea in this year’s Startup Competition. The event takes place at 3 p.m. Korea Standard Time on December 10.
The companies taking part are Bitholla, KoreanBuddy, WageCan, Epsilon Technologies and Coin Trade. The judges are Simon Dixon, Andrew “Flip” Filipowski, Hans Lombardo and Roger Ver.
As a whole, the South Korean bitcoin ecosystem is relatively small when compared to nearby countries such as China and Hong Kong.
“Bitcoin exchange in South Korea is present but is insufficient, bid/ask is very small in quantity yet to deal with large volumes,” said Mike Hwang, CMO of Coin Trade, one of the presenting companies, in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine . “Coin Trade has [a] plan to launch the global Bitcoin exchange platform service from this January 2016,” Hwang explained.
Like many other wallet/exchange providers, Coin Trade is attempting to create an onramp for those who have yet to own bitcoin, plus provide them with the ability to store their bitcoin in a secure wallet and trade it as they desire.
“In South Korea, there are two early movers that dominate the ecosystem, and they are Korbit and Coinplug,” Paul Bugge, co-founder of Bitholla, told Bitcoin Magazine . “Korbit is the most-used exchange, while Coinplug is providing multiple services such as Bitcoin ATMs and selling bitcoin through retail convenience stores. Aside from these two tech companies, the new batch of companies are small pre-seed startups like ourselves.”
Bugge explained that Bitholla is a social networking platform that first launched back in July 2015. “Since that time we have focused more on continued development of the product than pushing for traction,” he explained. “Using Bitholla you can set your own wallet, receiving payment address, make […]
