“There was an incident where fans were greatly disappointed due to vote manipulation in past idol audition competition programs. We resolved such issues by introducing blockchain technology.”
Lee Min-jae (photo) explained the background of founding Next Trust. Next Trust is a startup that operates a platform applying blockchain technology to audition voting to prevent manipulation. Lee, who worked as a fund manager overseas including in Singapore, founded the company in April 2019.
Lee said, “I had the opportunity to invest in blockchain-based technology while working as a fund manager,” adding, “I thought it would be great to have a blockchain service that the public can feel, so I decided to create an audition voting platform.” He noted, “As the external growth of audition programs increased, the importance of real-time voting rose, but public trust was undermined due to poor systems and repeated voting fraud issues.”
The actual audition vote manipulation incident caused a significant stir in our society. Mnet manipulated the voting results of each episode of its audition program 'Produce' seasons 1 to 4, either by altering them or by arbitrarily setting the final rankings before the audience voting, resulting in winners and losers being reversed, then broadcasting it as if it were the viewer voting results. As a result, the broadcasting station faced the highest level of penalties under the broadcasting law, and the director and chief producer received sentences of around two years in prison.
Existing voting systems have been criticized for being vulnerable to hacking and manipulation, leading to long compilation times for voting results and frequent errors. However, Next Trust's 'MyStappik', which applies blockchain technology, has the advantage of being tamper-proof for voting records and allows easy participation regardless of time and place due to its online nature.
The advantages of blockchain services are "transparency" and "security." Blockchain refers to a distributed data storage technology. Because encrypted transaction records are stored across multiple computers rather than a single central server, it is extremely difficult to manipulate or hack. By applying blockchain technology to audition and contest voting services, the voting process data is recorded and disclosed in real-time, enhancing transparency. The security is also excellent, which can increase the trustworthiness of the votes.
MyStappik has been applied to over 40 representative domestic auditions, including Miss Korea, and holds voting records totaling 2.1 million votes. The number of members also reaches 130,000.
The main revenue model is from platform usage fees and the sale of paid voting rights for contests. It sells paid voting rights to users who want to vote additionally beyond the free voting rights in beauty contests or audition programs. Lee said, “One vote is free per day, but for the rest, we have introduced a paid voting rights model to share revenue with the event organizers, and we have adopted a paid voting rights model around 100,000 won to prevent any disputes over fairness.”
Next Trust plans to accelerate its strategy to expand overseas in order to grow into a global audition platform. Leveraging its experience in domestic beauty contests, it is targeting Southeast Asia. Lee emphasized, “The ownership of the Miss Universe pageant has shifted from the U.S. to Thailand, and we plan to apply MyStappik to global competitions.”