South Korean City Of Seoul’s Mayor Reveals Plans To Use The Blockchain For Citizen Cards

Seoul Mayor Reveals That City Will Use The Blockchain In Citizen Cards

Park Won-soon, the mayor of the South Korea city of Seoul, has recently affirmed that the blockchain technology would be used in citizen cards in the city. According to the mayor, the city is embracing new technologies that are shaping the world, just like artificial intelligence (AI) and the blockchain tech.

The mayor spoke at the Korea Future Forum 2019 and Blockchain Tech Show event, which happened in the city recently. During the event, he spoke about the role of the distributed ledger technology (DLT) in order to store data, affirming that data has more value now than it ever had.

He affirmed that the city will implement the technology in order to collect more data from urban and administrative sources and that this will be used in order to enable new services like authentication systems and also to create tools that will ease the access to several services provided by the city.

Seoul has already started the change, in fact. According to Park, the authorities of the city have already provided several administrative services using blockchain technology before this new initiative. For instance, a mobile e-voting system was created, as well as a system for car sales.

Before today, Park has often demonstrated some confidence in the power of blockchain technology. Back in 2018, he worked to introduce a plan that would take five years in order to develop a powerful blockchain industry in the country. As a part of this plan, the city would invest $12 million USD on a $88 million USD blockchain fund for the growth of the industry.

As recently announced, too, the government of Metropolitan Seoul will invest $1 billion USD in fintech startups until 2022.

This makes South Korea one of the countries that are investing more in blockchain technology in the whole world. The regulation is also coming to the country in order to help companies to operate better there and several regulatory sandboxes are being created right now.