Blockchain Revolution Series: South Korea Government’s Grant-In-Aid For Blockchain Based Start-Ups

South Korean government has made an announcement on their bet for the blockchain industry in the country with projects to allocate up to $3.2 million in funding to boost up the use of budding technology in the domestic start-ups.

On the 16th, NIPA (National Institute of Information and Communication Industry Promotion) and the Ministry of Science and Technology announced that it will carry out the 'Blockchain Technology Validation Support in 2020' project to foster specialized blockchain companies and vitalize the industry. The government selected nine internal and external projects to support a maximum of 450 million won each and a total of 3.9 billion won. The application period is from the date of signing the agreement to November 30th. 

Nine projects through free public offerings are under scanner of this project plan that gets grant-in-aid to each one of them up to 450 million won ($360,000) in funding.

About the program, Park Yoon-kyu, Minister of ICT, said the following:

"We plan to support domestic specialized companies to rapidly grow and activate the ecosystem in the early stage of the blockchain market."

Beyond blockchain as a technology, the project also buoys participation of start-ups to come up with the ideas of establishing new business models based on other budding areas like Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and big data.

In the Governance Council of Klaytn, which is the leading blockchain project led by Internet giant Kakao of South Korea has associated with Huobi Global. With such support from the government, start-ups most likely to leverage and optimally utilize the available resources.