NHN Corporation Steps into Web3 with Sui

Korean conglomerate will leverage Sui Network to create a better gaming experience for the next generation of gamers

SEOUL, South Korea, Sept. 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — NHN Corporation, a publicly-traded global IT company, through its NHN Gaming division, today announced a partnership with Mysten Labs to enter the web3 space. Mysten Labs is the initial contributor to the Sui blockchain, a first-of-its-kind Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform.

Sui Network is uniquely suited for web3 game design, offering low fees, fast transactions, and high scalability. Sui allows developers to build games that are decentralized, secure, and adept to enable ownership of in-game assets. Through the partnership with Mysten Labs, NHN continues to be at the forefront of global publishers adopting web3 gaming.

“What excites me about building with NHN is what we’re beginning to refer to as ‘stickiness’ for users,” said Evan Cheng, CEO and co-founder of Mysten Labs. “It’s a code web3, as a whole, has not managed to crack, with daily active users on the most popular chains barely topping 300K. At Mysten Labs, our mission is to bring the benefits of web3 to the masses, by the billions. Creating products that actually attract user volume is our utmost priority.”

NHN is the largest developer of social casino games in the APAC region through titles such as Hangame Poker and has deep expertise in building experiences with strong user retention. Across mobile, online, and desktop platforms, NHN’s games have registered over 37 million total users with titles including Friends Pop and Crusaders Quest. In the second quarter of 2023, NHN Gaming generated the equivalent of $80 million USD in revenue.

“Up to this point, there has been a lack of synergy between web3 and gaming,” said Ujin Chung, CEO of NHN Corporation. “That synergy will be driven by growth and sustainability, the kind of which is best served by the minds who honed this skill in web2, and have a proven track record of success in creating experiences that users enjoy. Through our partner selection process, Mysten Labs stood out to NHN for both their expertise as well as the innovative capabilities of Sui.”

Korean game studios have long led innovation in the gaming industry – South Korea is home to the world’s fourth-largest market for gamers, and is growing rapidly. The last major paradigm shift in the gaming industry began in Asia with mobile gaming, greatly contributed to by NHN’s work over the past twenty years. However, web3 gaming has been slow to catch on with consumers, as enjoyable gameplay has been deprioritized in favor of incentivized rewards that dry up quickly.

NHN expects to launch its first web3 gaming projects in 2024. Mysten Labs and NHN will continue to collaborate on new use cases for the Sui blockchain in web3 game development.

About NHN

NHN is a global IT company with an expansive IT-based business portfolio which includes games, payments, entertainment, IT and advertisement. NHN offers a wide array of services including game, webtoon, music, advertisement, commerce, fintech and cloud based on its expertise in IT operation as well as its technology and service operation skills. Learn more: https://www.nhn.com

About Mysten Labs

Mysten Labs is a team of industry-leading experts on distributed systems, programming languages, and cryptography, whose founders were senior executives and lead architects of pioneering blockchain projects. The mission of Mysten Labs is to create foundational infrastructure for web3. Learn more: https://mystenlabs.com

About Sui

Sui is a first-of-its-kind Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform designed from the bottom up to make digital asset ownership fast, private, secure, and accessible to everyone. Its object-centric model, based on the Move programming language, enables parallel execution, sub-second finality, and rich on-chain assets. With horizontally scalable processing and storage, Sui supports a wide range of applications with unrivaled speed at low cost. Sui is a step-function advancement in blockchain and a platform on which creators and developers can build amazing, user-friendly experiences. Learn more: https://sui.io

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