South Korean giant Kakao is planning to list its native digital currency Klay on two exchanges - one Chinese and the other domestic.
Reported by Korean news agency News1, the names of the either of the exchanges were not revealed.
Despite being one of the largest conglomerates in the country, Kakao is facing a backlash from local authorities to list its digital coin on a South Korean crypto exchange. According to an official of its Blockchain arm Ground X, the domestic listing of the exchange facing hurdles as the project raised money from foreign investments through its Singapore office.
Crypto into a messaging platform - a smart way tap a wide user base
The South Korean internet giant operates one of the most widely used messaging platform called KakaoTalk, with around 400 million reported users - 10 percent of whom are active users.
To integrate its crypto to the instant messaging platform, Japan-headquartered Ground X is developing a wallet platform called Klip which will support Klay. The wallet is expected to hit the market in the fourth quarter of this year.
The company dove into the blockchain and crypto industry in 2018 and late that year announced its plans to raise $300 million through Ground X. In March, Finance Magnates reported that the company secured $90 million through a private Initial Coin Offering (ICO) ).
South Korea banned blockchain companies in September 2017 from taking the unregulated ICO route to raise millions without even having a working prototype of their decentralized product or service. The authorities also tightened the rules for opening fiat-based bank accounts to offer fiat-crypto trading to the traders.
A recent report by Business Korea revealed that 97 percent of the South Korean crypto exchanges are facing a financial crisis and are on the verge of bankruptcy due to the low trading volume on the platforms. It also detailed that due to local restrictions, most of the South Korean blockchain projects prefer to list their coins on overseas exchanges.
