South Korean Internet Giant Kakao Says its Blockchain Is 15x Faster than Ethereum’s

Kakao’s blockchain subsidiary Ground X has recently alleged that its blockchain platform takes only one-fifteenth of the time than that of Ethereum’s. If indeed true, it seems to be one of the biggest achievements a blockchain service provider could obtain.

South Korean major internet company Kakao has raised $90 million through a private coin offering as part of efforts to raise a whopping $300 million, and all the funds were used to develop and launch its in-house fully-fledged blockchain platform. Kakao has estimated that the platform would be launch by the end of June 2019. And finally, during a recent press conference in Seoul, South Korea, Ground X has revealed notable information regarding the development of the group’s new blockchain platform.

Kakao is one of South Korea’s most dominant internet conglomerates that offers leading communication and advertisement services through its Android and iOS apps, and other platforms. In 2018, Kakao partnered with Ground X, which is a Tokyo-based company that offers an initial platform for app developers to render blockchain-based services.

Kakao launched its blockchain for enterprise services last month and during a press conference on Tuesday Kakao’s spokesperson said that the company’s blockchain platform Klaytn can process transactions 15 times faster than the Ethereum blockchain network. It is well-known that Ethereum’s blockchain can take up to 15 seconds to mine the single block, while Kakao’s Klaytn can do the same in a single second.

The reduced block mining time has brought a number of advancements into the platform. The aforementioned transactions per second (TPS) being the first one. According to Ground X, Klaytn can process up to 300 transactions per second in contrast to 20 transactions per second of Ethereum.

Ground X CEO Han Jae-sun said:

“I believe it would be the initial version of a mobile (blockchain) service. With the reduced response time, many projects that we believed unfathomable could eventually come true.”

Faster But Less Decentralized Blockchain

In order to reduce the transaction time, the blockchain platform had to sacrifice part of the main element of any blockchain: decentralization. Without getting too technical, while Ethereum operates as an utterly permissionless (public) blockchain, Kakao’s blockchain is somewhat permissioned (private). The main difference is that in a permissionless (public) blockchain, everybody can verify transactions; on a permissioned (private) blockchain, on the other hand, only a selected group can actually verify transactions.

Ground X has started working on Klaytn and released its mainnet for commercial uses. More than 26 companies have started to join the network since October last year, amd many of these companies have millions of active users. Some of the notable brand names from South Korea that have joined are LG, Celltrion and Netmarble