Earlier this month, LiveCoinWatch sat down with EdenChain and its founder James Ahn to investigate into the upcoming initial coin offering (ICO) of the EdenChain blockchain protocol’s native token EDN, the applicability of the network in the finance sector, and how EdenChain is planning to ease the process of conducting ICOs in South Korea.
Over the past five months, the demand for South Korea-based ICOs and Asia-focused blockchain protocols has surged exponentially, mostly due to the success of South Korea’s ICON and China’s VeChain. The value of the two tokens ICON and VEN surged rapidly within a several month span and the growth of the communities of the two Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens outpaced most major cryptocurrencies in the global market.
Consequently, investors in the global cryptocurrency market began to explore and investigate into ICOs and blockchain networks in Asia that have the potential to evolve into major blockchain protocols in the mid to long-term.
What is EdenChain and its Major Advantage?
According to Ahn, EdenChain is a Programmable Economy Platform on which businesses and organizations can operate existing infrastructures in a decentralized manner by eliminating third party service providers and middlemen. Essentially, through the utilization of smart contracts, the goal of the EdenChain platform is to create independent tokenized ecosystems and ultimately develop a programmable economy wherein businesses can transact money and settle information without the involvement of costly service providers.
Similar to open-ended blockchain platforms like Ethereum and EOS, EdenChain’s blockchain platform HelloEden enables projects to launch tokens and conduct ICOs by solving technical difficulties and potential conflicts with local regulations. On the HelloEden blockchain platform, local media, law firms, and marketing companies cooperate with blockchain projects to ensure the success of ICOs.
Ahn emphasized that the three advantages of EdenChain is its ability to support ICO projects, provide a wide range of services to help local ICOs, and its basis in South Korea that allows the organization to target South Korea-based ICOs.
“The third merit of EdenChain over other blockchain platforms is that HelloEden is an ICO platform which solely targets the cryptocurrency market of South Korea. The South Korean cryptocurrency market has demonstrated immense interest and demand for the ICO market but has not been able to invest in major ICOs mostly due to the lack of knowledge of casual investors. HelloEden aims to collaborate with local businesses to help the South Korean ICO market grow rapidly,” Ahn told LiveCoinWatch.
Strong Team and Advisors
In an interview with Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times, South Korea’s second biggest cryptocurrency exchange Korbit CEO Tony Lyu stated that the South Korean finance and cryptocurrency market mainly move through word of mouth. Professional relationships are considered as an important element in any local business and the team of EdenChain remains as the blockchain platform’s strongest advantage.
Generally, the founding team of EdenChain consists of scientists, engineers, and developers from the country’s most prestigious research institutions, universities, and large-scale conglomerates.
Hokyun Kim and Brian Park, the two main blockchain developers at EdenChain, are former executives at SK Telecom, South Korea’s biggest telecommunications company that invested in Korbit.
Ahn explained that Kim has significant experience in hardware development and low-level programming, which will fill the gaps EdenChain may have in terms of security and technical difficulties.
Kangho Kim, the chief strategy officer of EdenChain served major investment firm Franklin Templeton, managing more than $1.6 billion. HJ Moon, chief of business development, served as a research analyst at Goldman Sachs and Barclays.
With some of the country’s biggest technology and finance conglomerates including Kakao and Bithumb eyeing potential ICO launches, the EdenChain remains confident that it can help the local ICO market of South Korea to match the growth rate of the western market.