Last week’s meeting between South Korean president Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been recorded on the ethereum blockchain, where the historic Panmunjom Declaration that the two nations signed will now be stored in perpetuity.
No, the governments themselves did not encode their peace agreement into the “world’s largest supercomputer,” but CoinDesk Korea reports that 27-year-old South Korean game developer Ryu Gi-hyeok published the Panmunjom Declaration on the ethereum blockchain in both Korean and English.
“Although I was not interested in politics, I was overwhelmed by watching the summit. I just thought it was too long for the South and the North to give each other one step and listen to each other,” Ryu told the publication, according to a rough translation. “After finding out what I could do as a developer, I found the Panmunjom Declaration from the Blue House homepage and recorded it on the Ethereum blockchain.”
“The Panmunjom Declaration, written in Ethereum block 551,7596, will not go away unless Ethereum is gone,” he added. “I wanted to keep the world record of North and South Korea in the world of Crypto.”
Many cryptocurrencies allow users to store data on the blockchain, though some — such as bitcoin — place tight constraints on how much data can be included in a single transaction.
In Ryu’s case, he was able to store each version of the peace agreement in a single Ethereum transaction by writing it to the input field of each individual transaction. He collectively paid about $10 in gas fees to store the data on the blockchain.
Last month, US brokerage firm TD Ameritrade used a series of 68 transactions to code an advertisement into the bitcoin blockchain, becoming the first public company to do so.
Recently, a group of academic researchers sparked a series of inflammatory headlines by releasing a report claiming that child pornography had been written onto the bitcoin blockchain, though the truth of the matter was far less sensational.