113.3 Billion KRW Invested in Blockchain Core Technology Development Over 5 Years... Preliminary Feasibility Study Passed

[Asia Economy Reporter Seulgina Jo] A total of 113.3 billion KRW will be invested over five years from 2021 to develop core blockchain source technologies.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 30th that the project titled 'Blockchain Technology Development for the Data Economy' has passed the preliminary feasibility study.

This project was planned to develop next-generation blockchain technology, which is the foundation for realizing the data economy. After passing the technical evaluation in 2018 and re-planning the project last year, it has now finally passed the preliminary feasibility study.

Accordingly, the Ministry of Science and ICT plans to invest a total of 113.3 billion KRW from 2021 to 2025 to develop core source technologies for improving blockchain processing performance and privacy protection. This includes consensus technology, smart contract security technology, distributed identity proof-based personal information processing and identity management technology, and data sovereignty-guaranteed data management technology.

First, consensus technology will be developed to maintain decentralization so that system management is not concentrated in a few entities, while ensuring stable service performance as the number of blockchain participants increases. Consensus technology refers to the algorithm that generates and agrees on blocks containing data within the blockchain.

A Ministry of Science and ICT official explained, "Current blockchain technology has the problem of decreasing consensus processing speed as the number of network participants increases. For service scalability, developing high-performance consensus technology is essential. To this end, we will develop control algorithms that resolve issues caused by centralization or scalability degradation during the consensus process and guarantee continuous consensus, as well as technologies that reduce resource consumption required for consensus."

Additionally, technology development will be pursued to improve vulnerabilities in smart contract security. This technology refers to implementing contracts, which were traditionally written on paper, as code that executes the contract when certain conditions are met. Since smart contracts execute according to pre-written code, if vulnerabilities are not detected in advance, users may suffer damages. Therefore, the plan is to develop technology that automatically detects and defends against vulnerabilities and can simulate them in a virtual environment.

Furthermore, technologies for managing distributed identity proof to protect personal information on the blockchain and privacy protection during data utilization will be developed. By applying biometric technology for personal key recovery and zero-knowledge proof and other data encryption technologies in distributed identity proof services, it aims to protect user privacy to the maximum extent while enabling identity verification online.

In addition, technologies to manage large-scale data using blockchain platforms and analyze it at high speed to enhance the usability of blockchain services will also be developed. The plan includes developing large-scale node management technology and large-capacity data distributed storage technology to increase the amount of data that can be processed, as well as index analysis and query language technologies for rapid searching.

Park Yoon-kyu, Director of Information and Communication Policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, stated, “Through this project, we expect the technological competitiveness of blockchain, which is the foundation of a hyper-connected and non-face-to-face trusted society, to be strengthened. Following the blockchain technology expansion strategy announced last month, we plan to continuously pursue policies to strengthen the competitiveness of our companies along with technology development.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.