Relaunched Cyworld to offer users opportunity to earn cash

Tech

Published: 28 Mar. 2022, 18:04 Updated: 28 Mar. 2022, 19:21

Relaunched Cyworld to offer users opportunity to earn cash

Cyworld will reopen on Saturday [CYWORLD]

Cyworld users will be able to make money through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and games, its operator said Monday ahead of the reopening of the service Saturday.

Cyworld-to-earn (C2E) is based on the play-to-earn (P2E) game system which allows users to cash in items they've earned online.

With C2E, users can register their own content, namely pictures or videos, and turn that content into NFTs which can be bought and sold on Cyworld.

Cyworld's new cryptocurrency Dotori [CYWORLD]

Cryptocurrencies will be used for the transactions — the first two being Conun and Dotori, Cyworld said.

Dotori (the Korean for acorn) is the cryptocurrency that Cyworld issued on March 21. It is also the name of the tokens that users bought to decorate their personal spaces — or "minihompy" — in the past.

Dotori tokens and the Dotori cryptocurrency will exist separately.

The blockchain exchange platform where Dotori can be bought will be announced later in the week.

“We have been activating around 20,000 accounts every day during the last 11 months,” Cyworld said.

“We will start a new heyday for Cyworld as a new social media platform mixed with blockchain technology and a metaverse ecosystem.”

Cyworld is scheduled to resume operations at 4:42 p.m. Saturday after postponing the date four times last year, due to various reasons.

Once Korea’s most popular social media platform, the PC-based platform fell out of favor as Koreans moved on from flip phones to smartphones in the dawn of the 2010s. Other foreign social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, which were easy to use on smartphones, became trendy, and Cyworld eventually shut down its services in 2019.

The company said it will make its database of some 17 billion photos and 160 million videos posted by 32 million available again from Saturday.

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]