Koreans issue official certificates 1.04 billion times a year, mostly by standing in line. I built a blockchain-backed way to issue them in ten seconds, and persuaded the government to make it official.
Koreans need 87 types of certificates for life events like employment, marriage, and pensions, issued more than a billion times every year. Getting one meant a trip to a community service center: slow and costly, for documents an entire country runs on. Public, financial, and medical services here had not meaningfully changed in twenty years.
I was the product manager, team lead, and researcher on a team with a business-development manager, public affairs, four engineers, a UX researcher, and a designer. Most of the work happened outside the product. I had to persuade stakeholders across the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, the Ministry of Environment, the disease-control agency, and the national information society agency, and solve the legal and systemic barriers in the way. We signed an MOU with the national agency, and Toss was accredited as a certified electronic document intermediary, presenting our approach to the government as a consultant along the way.
An electronic certificate that issues in seconds inside the Toss app. Blockchain to guarantee each document's authenticity and prevent misappropriation, real-time national data, and a secured API and ERD design for official issuance. We shipped it as an MVP in August 2021.
It landed: a perfect NPS from a study of 582 users, with feedback like "I was amazed it is possible through the Toss app. It only takes 10 seconds. Now I can't imagine my past daily life without this service."
Research showed certificates get issued more often on a PC than on mobile, so we built a PC version instead of assuming everyone was on their phone. And during the country's slow shift to paperless, many institutions still required physical paper. Rather than wait for them, we turned convenience stores into print hubs: by overriding the convenience-store printing system, anyone could print an official certificate at a store within a three-minute walk, any time they needed one.
The hardest part of a zero-to-one at this scale was not the product. It was getting institutions that had never changed to move together. I learned how to ask for help, align stakeholders who saw the problem completely differently, and turn imagination into something real. A small initiative, done right, can reset a societal default.