Nexxus CEO Jang Hyun-guk Says Blockchain Is Gaming’s Future, Players Should Own Items

"The essence of blockchain gaming is enabling users to directly own and trade the assets they acquire in games."

Jang Hyun-guk, chief executive officer of Nexxus, said in an interview on June 2 that the industry needs to move away from a structure in which game companies unilaterally sell items and users simply consume them. Jang led Wemade for 10 years starting in 2014 and helped pioneer South Korea’s blockchain gaming market. After leaving Wemade in 2024, he acquired Nexxus, formerly Action Square, and now leads the blockchain gaming platform business for CROSS.

Jang said he remains all-in on blockchain even after leaving Wemade because he is convinced that shifting ownership of game assets to users will become a new standard in the industry. Until now, even when players spent time and money to obtain items, the records remained only on game company servers. That made it difficult to own or dispose of those assets outside the game. He described blockchain as a type of ledger that is difficult to forge or alter. Because game items are economic assets built with users’ time and money, blockchain can return ownership and disposal rights to players, he said.

To put that idea into practice, Jang launched the blockchain gaming platform CROSS last year. The system allows game companies to assign ownership to in-game items without developing blockchain technology themselves, while letting users hold and trade those assets. It also offers payment, community and streaming features.

Game companies can focus on developing content, while the platform handles the technology and compliance issues needed to operate blockchain games, including responses to country-specific regulations, the design of item-trading structures and user terms, Jang said.

The business is beginning to show results. Before blockchain technology was applied, the mobile massively multiplayer online role-playing game Seal M on CROSS generated monthly revenue of about 100 million won, or about $72,500, in December 2025. It had only a few thousand users. After the game was reintroduced to the global market on the CROSS platform, monthly revenue rose to about 4 billion won, or about $2.9 million, and new users climbed to 1.7 million.

Ahn Jeong-hoon, Hankyung.com reporter ajh6321@hankyung.com