The impact of South Korea

Even though South Korea is a relatively small country, it has a huge impact upon cryptocurrencies. In fact, it played a major role in bringing cryptocurrencies to where they are now. If South Koreans pick a project, things become interesting. One example for this is Ethereum, which received heavy support from South Koreans. Even more so, South Korean investors did not only develop a great interest in the project but also helped ETH to lift off from the ground. Don't believe me? Have a look at Why Koreans dominate ETH trading. Another project that was heavily boosted by Koreans is ICON and we all know that this one went 100x after its ICO. Yes, it is currently stagnating just like the rest of the market but such a big rise within such a short time after its ICO is quite considerable.

To make a long story short, things can get interesting if South Koreans rally behind a project.

Yes, South Koreans absolutely love crypto. They have a much higher adoption rate than almost anywhere else in the world. But you know what Koreans love even more than a promising crypto project? A promising crypto project coming from South Korea.

A new South Korean gem on the horizon: BEZANT

I have to give credit where credit is due: I first came across BZNT on the channel of a American investor with South Korean background, Jake a.k.a. Korean Jew Trading.

When you have a South Korean conference and traders and managers alike are only talking about one project, I get interested. I began investigating BEZANT and what I found was pretty exciting.

Here's an overview of the project.

BEZANT seeks to create a service platform that provides content developers and eCommerce merchants to set up their own e-commerce stores. They will be able to receive payments from almost all the local payment methods globally. BZNT will be used as the universal cryptocurrency of the ecosystem that acts as a medium of exchange.

The major reason why this platform could become of great interest to content producers and merchants is that it would allow them to reduce expensive store fees to an absolute minimum. As such, it seeks to become a competitor to expensive stores such as iTunes and Google play.

A quick summary of the project:

• Chief Crypto Officer is Daesik Kim, co-founder and former CEO of BITHUMB (one of the largest crypto exchanges)
• BEZANT's ICO sold out in 1 hour; this made it the fastest selling ICO in Asia
• Market capitalization at roughly $32 million giving it some great room for growth
• It is currently trading at roughly it's ICO price, only trading on IDEX. Guess what happens once it gets listed on a South Korean exchange.
• ICON’s KJ Eee and JH Kim were advisors during the ICO stage
• BEZANT's Team consists of around 20 professionals from Ebay, Naver (South Korea‘s largest internet company), and Kakao (South Korea‘s most popular chat app and social media finance company); full-time social platform developers from Kakao, eBay, Gree, and Nexon etc.
• Team membersare experienced in building large-scale mobile platforms for Games, Commerce, Payments, and Virtual items.
• BITHUMB listing almost guaranteed thanks to Kim’s connections

In short, this could be the coin Koreans make their number 1 for anything related to payments.

Before investing in a project, I always seek to critically reflect potential problems about the ICO. As such, BEZANT is no exception from the rule and there are certainly negative aspects to the project that need to be considered:

• Icon advisors have only supported the planning stages up until the ICO. Their advisory role has ended somehow leaving a sour taste. I can only speculate but I think they were not happy that BZNT did not choose ICX as their platform.
• Payment sector is a pretty saturated market
• Token metrics are not perfect
• Projected revenues appear to be quite ambitious (over $110 billion processed through mobile applications alone)
• Lack of marketing, up to date, they do not seem to be particularly marketing savvy. It looks as if interest was considerably big so that the ICO did not have to be heavily promoted
• no social media hype at all – this is flying severely below the radar. People have only recently started to shill it on Twitter.
• ICO was conducted not fully professional, coins were not locked
• Github is not open, at least not yet.

Let me know what you think about this project. I'm really interested in hearing your opinion.

This is not financial advice. I'm just sharing my opinion. Always do your own research.