Red Date Technology, the company China tapped to manage its Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) — the public-private nationwide infrastructure project to spur mass adoption of blockchain technology — announced today a partnership with South Korean blockchain company MetaverseSociety Corp in what will be BSN’s first expansion outside greater China.
As part of the partnership, MetaverseSociety will exclusively operate a BSN portal offering blockchain-as-a-service in Korea, according to a statement released today.
The BSN portal in Korea is expected to launch in November this year, the company said. After that, blockchain projects developers in South Korea will be able to build blockchain applications with the upcoming BSN portal, which integrates frameworks including Ethereum, EOS, Polkadot, NEO, Tezos and Oasis. The portal also connects global cloud services such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure.
China announced the launch of the BSN — a signature project meant to cement China’s leadership in blockchain technology — in April 2020 as a joint initiative of the State Information Center, China Mobile, China UnionPay and Red Date Technology. In July 2020, the BSN separated into two ecosystems, BSN China and BSN International.
Red Date’s latest move to set up a Korean portal reflects China’s ambition to expand BSN globally. BSN, as a whole, aims to build a global blockchain-based cross-cloud, cross-portal and cross-framework public infrastructure network.
“The mission of the BSN is to make enterprise blockchain application development much easier and more affordable,” Tim Bailey, vice president of global sales at Red Date, told Forkast.News in an interview. “To support this mission, we’re working with partners around the world to build and operate blockchain-as-a-service portals that will give developers access to BSN resources that will unleash the power of innovation and expand the blockchain developer community.”
David Doyeon Kim, CEO of MetaverseSociety, which launched only last year, told Forkast.News in an emailed interview that the construction of a blockchain infrastructure network is not easy and requires a lot of investment and time. “We believe that the most powerful and well-prepared blockchain infrastructure network platform to date for such issues is BSN. Therefore, it will be a very wise choice to make good use of BSN in the Korean market, and we believe that it has high growth potential.”
Specifically, the duo plans to work with universities in Korea, “so that they can use BSN portals to give their students access to easy and low-cost blockchain development resources,” said Bailey.
Domestic drive
The BSN is already thriving on its home turf in China. Bailey said that a total of eight portals have launched in China in a community of over 25,000 developers, who build applications on the BSN, working on over 2,000 private chains in the country.
South China’s Hainan province has been very active in developing blockchain projects with the BSN, according to Bailey.
“The Hainan provincial government has installed what we call private BSN, which is a version of the BSN that rather than being in a public cloud environment sits on a government private cloud…Today there are over 100 different blockchain-based applications and services running on the private BSN,” said Bailey, adding that the Hainan government has put together a roadmap for over 1,000 applications and services over the next three to five years.
More global partnership in the pipeline
Bailey said that a portal in Hong Kong, which has already launched, is expected to go commercially live in September, followed by the Korean one in November. The company is working to launch another portal in Europe by the end of the year.
A key part of the BSN International expansion strategy is to build partnerships with portal operators around the world, Bailey added. “We view those portals as a really core element of our strategy because the portals are what makes the blockchain development resources available to individual developers in those markets,” he said.
To fuel its global expansion, Red Date in June received a massive investment boost, securing US$30 million in Series A equity financing from global investors.
The company has different development plans for its BSN International and BSN China businesses. BSN International, headquartered in Hong Kong, has integrated major public chains, which tend to focus on cryptocurrency and decentralized systems, while BSN China, which owns the majority of BSN’s city nodes across the mainland, is a separate permission-based system that cannot access public chains deployed on BSN International.
BSN China is intended for China’s domestic use in accordance with the government’s strict laws and regulations towards cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. As a result, BSN China will tend toward enterprise uses such as supply-chain management and financial and legal transactions that require security and record keeping.