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Singapore's Biggest Online Mall Fights Alibaba With Blockchain

Ku Young Bae says the distributed ledger technology will help his company, Qoo10, expand in Southeast Asia.

Employees handle packages at a Qoo10 warehouse in Singapore. — Employees handle packages at a Qoo10 warehouse in Singapore.
Photographer: Bryan van der Beek/Bloomberg

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By Yoolim Lee

April 2, 2019 at 9:00 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

In the last decade, Ku Young Bae—a serial entrepreneur and South Korean transplant—has built Singapore’s biggest e-commerce company and fended off giant rivals like Alibaba, Amazon and Tencent.

Now he’s keen to expand beyond his home base into Southeast Asia. To do that, and to compete with his cash-rich rivals, he’s hatched an audacious plan to unleash the efficiencies of blockchain technology on e-commerce. In January, his Qoo10 (pronounced “Q-ten”) online mall started a separate marketplace called QuuBe using the distributed ledger technology best known for making bitcoin possible.