The Ministry of Science and Technology of Information and Communications (MCTIC) of South Korea announced on Thursday its "Blockchain Technology Development Strategy" to ensure a level of global competitiveness in this technology and boost a market with huge growth potential, says a statement from that ministry. The strategy contemplates the investment of 207 million dollars in the next four years.

According to the ministerial document of the MCTIC, it is expected that the market related to blockchain technology will grow more than 10 times in the next 5 years. Given this panorama of growth, South Korea wants to follow the progress of developed countries in that technology and become a 'Blockchain Nation', the document highlights.

Within this strategy, MCTIC will promote six previously defined pilot projects : product management from livestock, personnel authorization, real estate transactions, online voting, international distribution of electronic documents and shipping logistics.

In the product management project of livestock, raised in collaboration with a division of nutritional products, the MCTIC wants to ensure access to a historical record of the products, so that "the meat can be consumed with confidence." To do this, they plan to share in a blockchain the information of the whole cycle, from the upbringing to the beneficiary process, so that the lapse of supervision and approval is reduced from a maximum of 6 days to 10 minutes.

In the case of the management of shipments, all orders, shipping manifests and customs procedures will be stored in the blockchain, which will allow the reduction of authorizations at customs and logistics costs, since the Import declarations can be viewed in real time, says the MCTIC.

As for the procedures to process a real estate mortgage, from the MCTIC expect to facilitate them by eliminating the process of moving to different public offices when a request for financing is introduced. In addition, an element of greater confidence for the buyers is introduced, since the property registers , once validated and stored in the blockchain, are unalterable.

The ministry's strategy also includes private projects of national scope based on blockchain in order to allow citizens "to prove the benefits of the blockchain and reduce unnecessary social costs".

In addition to establishing a roadmap for the blockchain standardization that ensures the compatibility of the proposals, the strategy also considers the development of blockchain service providers, Blockchain-as-Service, from the cloud (BaaS, in English), so that SMEs (small and medium enterprises) can implement these services by subscription quickly.

In mid-April, businessmen and academics in South Korea called for less regulation and more support for blockchain technology, a request that is largely fulfilled through the definition of this strategy.