An interview with Sung Hoon Kim, Vice Chairman of Cocone Corporation and Representative Director of Cocone Seoul Corporation, was published in the Korean business newspaper “the Seoul Economic Daily”.

※This article is machine translated.

Cocone Corporation and other Cocone Group companies Vice Chairman Sung Hoon Kim gave an interview to the Korean business newspaper ” the Seoul Economic Daily ” about the group’s full-scale entry into the NFT market and global expansion in 2022.

■Article

[ English translation ]

Global Avatar Social App Powerhouse Cocone “Expands into NFT with Korea as a Forward Base”

• the expansion of NFT based on Avatar social app IP
• Korean subsidiary established, spurring global expansion.
• “(Korea) has a more positive environment for new challenges than Japan.”

” Next year, we plan to enter the NFT business in earnest. We will establish a corporation in South Korea, which has a large number of human resources and a high level of understanding of blockchain, and use South Korea as a base for expanding our global business. “

On December 22, 2021, the Seoul Economic Daily interviewed Cocone’s Vice Chairman Sung Hoon Kim.
Cocone is an avatar social application developer established in Japan in 2008 by Chairman Chung Yang Hyun, the founder of Hangame Japan and better known as “good friends” with Kakao Board Chair Kim Beom Soo.

This “avatar social application” is a community service that allows customers to create their own characters, enjoy dressing them up, and communicate with other users in an online virtual space. It is the forerunner of the metaverse, which has gained momentum in Japan and around the world this year.

The number of services created by Cocone has already reached 24 apps alone. And its customers already number more than 16 million worldwide.

Cocone’s flagship service is “Pokecolo,” which was released in 2011 and has gained approximately 10 million users. Cocone’s service has been particularly popular in Japan, and as of the end of last year (2020), it was the No. 1 avatar service in Japan in terms of revenue and the No. 10 non-gaming application in terms of revenue.

Vice Chairman Kim emphasized, “We will differentiate ourselves in the NFT market based on the competitiveness of Cocone’s intellectual property (IP) rights.”

He says, “The number of items I have created in the avatar business over the past 10 years alone is 1 million,” and that “some items have a high value, with one item selling for digital currency equivalent to 5 million won (about 500,000 yen) in cash among in-app users.”

Currently, the structure is such that currency within the app cannot be cashed in outside of the app, but the plan is to allow it to be converted into digital assets (virtual assets) in the future. This is a method in which various items such as avatars, clothes, and interior decorations are given their own unique characteristics and traded in the Kraytn ecosystem of the Kakao Blockchain platform.

The company has already been laying the groundwork since the second half of this year and has begun operating its proprietary NFT trading platform, ” Cobalt, ” in Japan, Korea, and other Western countries.

Vice President Kim explained, “I think people will have a reason to stay longer only if the metaverse has economic attractions,” and that “the 24-hour day is constant, but if the same time is to be spent, it must be spent where it is worthwhile for the users.

Cocone plans to expand its global business to North America, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Middle East, with Korea as a key base.

Vice Chairman Kim stated, “If Japan’s unique meticulousness and detail are its strengths, Korea’s strengths are that it is progressive and not afraid to try new things,” and that “Korea’s organizational culture and environment that allows it to move quickly have great potential for global expansion.”

He also noted that “when smartphones came out around 2010, we saw many companies that could not adapt quickly enough and collapsed, but now we are investing intensively in the blockchain business and actively hiring talented people to spur growth.”

(Source: article published in the Seoul Economic Daily, December 22, 2021)
This translation was prepared by Cocone Corporation based on the published article.

■What is Cocone Corporation?

Cocone provides a number of social network-based digital content, including “Pokecolo,” a character dress-up application for smartphones supported by more than 20 million customers, “Pokecolo Twin,” a sister application to “Pokecolo,” and “Livly Island,” which was released in July 2021 and has become a huge hit.

Digital contents based on social networks provided by Cocone are mainly “social services to enjoy coordinating” and “games with coordinating elements ” which have “Character” and “Coordinating” elements and customers can “Play”. At Cocone, we have pioneered this genre, which we define as “CCP(Character Coordinating Play)”.

In 2021, we will globally release “Cobalt,” an NFT marketplace based on blockchain technology that allows many creators and buyers to participate, guaranteeing the value of popular digital items and contributing to further economic expansion in the online world in the future. In addition, based on the existing CCP service, we are challenging to build a digital world and metaverse space that can give shape to “sensibility”, which is Cocone’s forte, rather than convenience and functionality.

As part of the Cocone Group, in April 2017, we opened “International Montessori Mirai Kindergarten ” a preschool operated by our subsidiary Cocone Education Corporation, which provides a future-oriented education with bilingualism, Montessori, and computer science at its core, In 2019, we acquired “Hange”,a long-established online gaming portal as a subsidiary.

Established in 2021, Cocone Connect Corporation is developing the “noen konkatsu(Marriage Hunting in the Farm)” series and the popular avatar service “Selfy” for further development of CCP services, and Cocone Fashion Corporation operates the EC service “choiceis,” which is oriented toward a new way of selling fashion as an IT company.

We aim to build a new digital world by combining our experience in avatar development, community management, and language education with technologies such as blockchain and NFT.