NFT Marketplace Opens Korea's Multi-Billion Gaming Industry to Crypto

Korean Blockchain gaming company PlayDapp has launched a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), offering Korea’s multi-billion gaming industry a native gateway into digital assets.

Announced on June 8, the new platform, ‘PlayDapp MarketPLAce,’ advertises itself as providing free support for coin-to-coin trading between NFT-based in-game items.

Koh Kwang-Wook, a founding member and former CTO of Item Bay, an early online brokerage platform for in-game items, led the development of PlayDapp’s marketplace. 

Korean NFT marketplace targets gaming industry

At launch, the platform supports items from Ethereum-powered collecting games CryptoDozer and DozerBird.

Over the past 24 hours, the games have attracted 201 users and 30 users respectively.

CryptoDozer has generated $610 worth of trade over 2,132 weekly transactions, while DozerBird represented less than $12 in volume over 277 transactions.

Korea’s game industry is the fourth-largest globally, representing 14.3 million KRW ($12.1 billion) in 2018. Korea’s gaming sector has grown at an average annual rate of more than seven percent over the past decade.

Earlier this year, Korea-based blockchain game developer SuperTree announced it had attracted $2.5 million in Series A investment, including participation from SBI Investment Korea.

NFT marketplaces proliferate

The growth of NFT-powered games and gaming ‘multiverses’ has sparked the launch of a number of new NFT marketplaces.

In March, the Winklevoss-owned platform Nifty became the first U.S.-dollar-based exchange for NFT trade. Despite Nifty announcing it would be taking a “slow and intentional” strategy regarding support for tokens, a surprise run of limited edition CryptoKitties saw the platform experience outages last month.

May also saw the launch of Tokyo-based startup Yiedl, a peer-to-peer marketplace for NFT rentals and mortgages.