South Korea’s crypto craze is over, but a blockchain boom has just begun — Quartz

Brian Jeong remembers the frenzy that swept through South Korea this time last year.

From coffee shops to fast food joints across the sprawling capital city of Seoul, a new obsession emerged seemingly out of nowhere.

“Last winter,” the analyst at BlockWater Capital, a digital asset investment firm, recalled, “you would hear senior citizens, like ladies and gentlemen, eating fried chicken, talking about bitcoin.”

“And at all cafes, at every table” added Erica Kang, a partner at the firm. “Suddenly, it was just like a hyped thing.”

And what hype it was.

Frustrated by limited investing opportunities in a stagnant economy, angered by hopeless politics, and driven by greed, millions of Koreans hopped aboard the cryptocurrency bandwagon as bitcoin took off on its extraordinary run in late 2017. The momentum was such that, by late December, according to one survey, three out of every 10 salaried workers in Korea had invested in cryptocurrencies.

Once a relative crypto…