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At last year’s’G-Star 2020′, Wemade CEO Jang Hyeon-guk mentioned the possibility of success of a blockchain game that combines virtual assets through a press conference. At the time, he predicted, “Blockchain game, one day it will be.”
As he said, metaverse emerged as a hot topic in the IT industry in 2021. Metaverse is a compound word of’Meta’ which means virtual and’Universe’ which means the real world, and is representative of the film’Ready Player One’ directed by Steven Spielberg. In particular, the game industry is attracting attention as a content that will lead the market as it is recognized that it is the beginning of the metaverse and its potential for the future is infinite. Globally, Roblox and Sandbox are already leading the future market by presenting the direction and potential of metaverse through games. In the domestic market, wemade, a mid-sized game company, is prominent.
Wemade is a game company that is showing the most aggressive moves in the metaverse industry across Korea, China, and Japan, such as actively developing a business that combines games and virtual assets. In particular, CEO Jang Hyun-guk is regarded as one of the representative figures who looked into the future of games and virtual assets. CEO Jang decided that “the core of Metaverse is an identity, that is, the MMORPG of Korea that can best dissolve it, starting from the concept of a person who has a different personality from the person who exists today.”
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MMORPG games are not just about hitting and action, but also developing characters in them, as well as cooperation, competition, communication with other characters, and a series of various processes. Players have given their meaning to a lot of time and body in it, and this will become a good example of the metaverse as it progresses gradually.
Under the judgment of CEO Jang, WeMade established WeMade Tree, a subsidiary specialized in blockchain in 2018, and took the first step toward virtual assets and game metaverse by entering the blockchain market, which is in the spotlight as the backbone of Metaverse’s economic system.
After studying blockchain technology through a subsidiary and setting a foundation for it, the company launched its own blockchain platform’Wemix’ in 2020. It issued a utility token’Wemix Token’ that can be used on the platform, and was listed on’Bithumb’, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Korea, and laid the foundation for popularizing blockchain games and advancing into the metaverse industry.
In the same year, it introduced two types of global services for blockchain games. A method of paying a cryptocurrency developed by the company as a game reward to real users, and receiving additional cryptocurrency rewards when the users rise to a higher rank through cashing, making items for greater achievement in the game, or strengthening weapons. The structure was designed. With WeMix, it is possible to change to KRW or Bitcoin in the domestic and foreign cryptocurrency market, which can actually create economic value.
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WeMade did not stop there, but expanded its scope by entering the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) trading market in March. NFT refers to game items or digital artworks that can authenticate ownership on the blockchain, and has the characteristic that it is impossible to replace one token with another token. It is a concept that separates the value of one token from FT (Fungible Token, replaceable token) such as Bitcoin with the exact same value, and through blockchain technology, ownership is thoroughly guaranteed and transactions are possible.
It plans to advance into the NFT trading market in three stages, and in the first half of this year, we plan to unveil the NFT exchange for NFT trading of WeMix platform games. Here, it is expanding to a new lineup of blockchain games that are being prepared for release, and next year, it aims to enter the NFT trading market based on the Ethereum mainnet, the world’s largest NFT trading market. It plans to support all types of NFT transactions distributed in the global market.
Wemade CEO Jang Hyeon-guk said, “If we actively institutionalize metaverses and virtual assets in a future-oriented direction, we are expected to have an opportunity to lead the industry and the world.” , “We plan to transform into a company in charge of the lives of people in the future.”
Min-jae Paik, reporter of Hankyung.com Gametalk