PARAMETA CEO JH Kim's latest interview with Edaily is out
PARAMETA CEO JH Kim's latest interview with Edaily has been published.
Read it for a look at where PARAMETA is headed after changing its name and accelerating its Web3 transformation business, along with its plans and outlook for the year.
PARAMETA CEO JH Kim
"STO Has Become a Battleground for Blockchain Solutions, and Understanding Finance Will Decide the Winners" [Web3 Is Coming]
PARAMETA (formerly ICONLOOP), a first-generation blockchain company making a fresh start under a new name, expressed confidence about the security token offering (STO) market. Its argument: the ability to reproduce existing financial operations on a blockchain will be the decisive competitive edge, and the company has finished preparing for it.
Issuing securities on a blockchain does not make existing financial operations disappear. The tech companies entering the STO market will be sorted out by how well they can restructure those financial operations to fit the blockchain.
PARAMETA CEO JH Kim
Now that financial regulators have decided to fully allow STO — enabling fractional investment in real estate, artwork, music rights and more through blockchain technology — competition to supply the technology for issuing and distributing security tokens is heating up. Alongside PARAMETA, players such as Lambda256, Blocko and CoinPlug have entered the field.
Only about 10% of the STO business calls for token-specific expertise. For the other 90%, understanding financial operations matters more.
PARAMETA CEO JH Kim
Even when tokens are issued on a blockchain, complex financial operations remain: margin verification, transfers, clearing, total supply management, and integration with the securities depository and KRX. PARAMETA is the only company able to handle all of that, Kim emphasized. He described the company's STO solution, PARAMETA S, as a solution fully prepared for securities processing and regulatory compliance. PARAMETA worked with BBRIC to turn those capabilities into programs that run on a blockchain (smart contracts) and built them into PARAMETA S. BBRIC has spent the past two years operating a blockchain-based real estate fractional investment platform in the Busan Blockchain Regulation-Free Zone, accumulating experience and know-how along the way.
Now that STO is permitted, fractional investment — until now largely limited to real estate and artwork — will spread into a much wider range of areas, from luxury goods to intellectual property (IP) and content development funding.
PARAMETA CEO JH Kim
PARAMETA recently began building a classic car fractional investment platform with the mobility services company Spigen. The plan is to give people a way to invest small amounts in expensive classic cars — something the MZ generation has been keenly interested in but rarely able to access.
This year the company intends to improve profitability by focusing not only on STO but also on supplying blockchain solutions to companies adopting Web3 (internet services that give users greater control). It also turned a profit last year, helped by lower marketing costs after shifting the center of gravity of its business from consumer-facing (B2C) identity verification (DID) services to enterprise-facing (B2B) blockchain solutions. From this year on, it plans to grow profits steadily.
Q. What was behind the change from ICONLOOP to PARAMETA?
A. We started thinking about a name change early last year. We hesitated a little, because the ICON and ICONLOOP brands carry real value. In the end, since we ourselves are saying a multi-chain world is coming, we decided there was no particular need to keep highlighting ICON in our name.
Q. What is the relationship between the ICON Foundation and PARAMETA?
A. From the ICON Foundation's point of view, PARAMETA is simply one of several technology partners.
Q. You turned a profit last year.
A. Since last year we have pivoted the shape of our business from B2C toward B2B SaaS. Revenue was actually similar in each of the past two years, but costs dropped substantially as the business model changed.
Through 2020 and 2021 we concentrated on the DID business. We intended to extend DID into a data distribution business, and to do that we needed people using DID, so we focused on growing monthly active users (MAU). But from last year, with all the attention on Web3, demand rose from companies wanting to convert existing businesses to a Web3 model. Starbucks and Nike are the obvious examples, and there were plenty of Korean companies too. To support them, we packaged PARAMETA Framework and PARAMETA Service as SaaS.
Q. Providing blockchain technology is what you have always done. What exactly changed?
A. Previously we did business by delivering business consulting and low-level technology as systems integration (SI). That meant most of the work was building large enterprise-grade platforms. Now the business model has shifted to SaaS. Last August we announced PARAMETA, a full package consisting of a mainnet plus the ability to build applications on top of it, and we used it to run the HAVAH project, an interchain non-fungible token (NFT) mainnet. Projects that large come along maybe once a year, whereas there is a lot of demand from mid-size and small companies wanting to move existing services to Web3. To meet that demand, this year we launched four more services: an STO solution (PARAMETA S), a general token issuance solution (PARAMETA T), an NFT solution (PARAMETA N), and a wallet management solution (PARAMETA W).
Q. The NFT boom was enormous, and now it feels like it has cooled off. Do you expect companies to show interest in moving to Web3 this year?
A. Interest cooled somewhat as people who approached NFTs as an investment product watched values fall. But the NFT market companies are looking at is a different one. They are adopting NFTs as a way to give consumers real value and as a marketing tool. Attempts are emerging to put benefits into NFTs that are hard to price in cash but genuinely valuable — product discounts, of course, but also purchase priority and admission passes. Personally, I think the biggest thing separating Web3 from the existing internet (Web2) is community, and NFTs are a crucial component for creating community. I expect every company doing Web3 business will end up issuing NFTs.
I think game companies will all move to P2E. The phrase "play to earn" provokes some pushback, but either way games will change into a form that guarantees users ownership of content, and Web3 components will become a basic requirement.
Q. CIZION, which operates the social commenting service LiveRe, is working with PARAMETA on a Web3 transition. What becomes possible when Web3 elements are applied to comments?
A. LiveRe is a social commenting service where you log in with a social media account to leave comments — you have probably seen it on news sites. But because the comment is written through a social login rather than a membership account on the outlet's own site, the outlet has a hard time making use of it. There is no account ID and no phone number, so it cannot be connected to advertising either.
CIZION and PARAMETA want to solve that with blockchain-based identity verification (DID). Even when an individual comments across many sites through social logins, DID can confirm that it is the same person. That makes comment data easy to distribute and lays the groundwork for a new kind of data business.
Source: Edaily, reporter Yukyung Lim (March 12, 2023)
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Web3 Enabler, PARAMETA