About TeamKorea

TeamKorea is the culmination of months of searching for the right team of motivated, curious, and passionate group of individuals. On March 29th we had our first inaugural meeting. The team is currently conducting enormous amounts of research, networking with other Korean projects, and preparing a battle plan to introduce ShapeShift to the Korean market.

Executive Summary

South Korea sat comfortably at the #1 spot on Bloomberg’s Innovation Index five out of the past six years, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from a blockchain industry’s point of view. While the government itself has adopted blockchain technology in various aspects, such as COVID vaccination records, for the most part it has imposed strict regulations and oversight on retail investors (although this may change soon as Korea had just elected a pro-cryptocurrency conservative president last month).

The fact of the matter is, while Korea may be leading the world in innovation for technology like TVs, memory, chipsets, etc., it is severely lagging in the proliferation of the “new” blockchain paradigm of DeFi, DAOs, and web3. While the adoption of NFTs has taken a solid root in Korea – largely due to the high adoption rate of games and the Korean tendency to spend money in games – the core concepts of decentralization seems nowhere to be found.

We believe that several factors are contributing to this phenomenon:

• Language and cultural barriers - most of DeFi educational content is in English, and the few content we found in Korean were shoddly done, hard to follow, and a bit sketchy. Without educational content, and without proper DeFi communities for Koreans to fall back on with questions, your average Korean investor is left with no real way of understanding, participating, and enjoying the benefits of DeFi.
• Distrust of projects and/or technology not understood - In the 2017-18 bull run and the subsequent bear market that followed, an alarmingly high number of Koreans took heavy losses after months of FOMOing in (remember Kimchi premium?). Nowadays the typical Korean investor tends to shy away from seemingly risky investments and stick to solely purchasing what’s available on the remaining centralized exchanges.
• Lack of an education platform dedicated to DeFi and web3 - For a country that values education as much as it does, it’s almost shocking to see the lack of educational platforms for intermediate to advanced blockchain usage.

The Korean team will work based on research conducted on the status quo of the DeFi market in Korea, while engaging in strategic outreach on the most optimal avenues suited for the Korean market. Over the initial 3-month roadmap outlined in this plan, there will be a heavy emphasis on education, connecting with the few Korean projects and influencers in the DeFi scene, building media/PR relationships with Korean crypto news outlets, and the subtle ‘infiltration’ of Korean crypto investing communities.

Marketing & Growth Strategy

Marketing for the Korean market is an extremely difficult task simply because of the fact that their main social networks for cryptocurrency discussions are completely different from what we use in the West. However, we have managed to pinpoint some key discussion areas / communities that are of particular interest to our efforts. We have also began relationship building with key Korean media outlets, such as dstreet, for future features. For the sake of simplicity, this roadmap will be split into two phases.

Phase 1 Goals:

• Create a compelling storyline of ShapeShift to be shared with the Korean community
• The creation of key Korean social media accounts (Naver Cafe/Blog, ShapeShift Telegram for Korean, the various communities we have targeted in our research, Tistory, ShapeShift Korea Twitter, and continued growth of ShapeShift Korea YouTube)
• Host weekly open discussions with Korean projects and the few that are involved in the DeFi/DAO space
• The planning of educational materials, the learning tracks, and potentially prizes for completion
• Constant creation of educational content, in various delivery formats; fun engaging content
• Connect with more Korean communities spread across DeFi and DAO projects
• Creation of a education track fit for the Korean market (Bitcoin → blockchain basics, Ethereum → Wallets, Safety, NFTs, Smart Contracts, Advanced → L2s, DeFi, DAOs, etc.)