For much of the 2000s, the most important room in South Korea was a virtual one. On Cyworld, a social network that began in 1999 as a project by KAIST graduate students, every member got a “minihompy”: an isometric mini-house where a cartoon “mini-me” avatar stood among wallpaper, furniture, and a background song. Friends joined each other as “ilchon” and dropped by to leave guestbook notes. How a person furnished that room was daily social information, a compact public statement of taste, mood, and status.
The minihompy launched in September 2002, and co-founder Dong-Hyung Lee later described it as a last chance to keep a near-defunct service alive. It worked. Cyworld was bought by SK Communications in 2003 and became one of the first services anywhere to profit from virtual goods. Identity had a price: users bought dotori, or acorns, for about 100 won each and spent them on wallpaper, background music, and fonts. Many items were rentals that simply expired unless repurchased. The economics were serious — roughly 80 percent of Cyworld’s Korean revenue came from decorating purchases by 2006 — and so were the numbers. Around 13 million people, more than a quarter of the country, were members by 2005, and roughly 32 million of some 50 million Koreans held accounts at the peak.
A world its users couldn’t keep
Decline was not deletion but a slow loss of access. The iPhone arrived in Korea in 2009, and Facebook, Instagram, and KakaoTalk all shipped experiences built for phones. Cyworld’s house never made the trip; observers consistently described a platform that reacted too late to mobile. In 2011 a hacking incident exposed data tied to some 26 million Cyworld accounts in what was then one of Korea’s worst breaches. Ownership passed from SK to the founder of the rival portal Freechal in 2016 without a turnaround, and the service shut down in 2019. For users who had paid for songs and sofas, the end was literal: years of photos, posts, and purchases sat behind an offline login.
The possessions were always the pitch for revival. Cyworld Z took over the service in 2021 and said the old servers still contained an enormous archive. In March 2021 the company reported that about 18 billion records from 32 million members remained intact, including roughly 17 billion photos and 150 million videos. The mobile service finally reopened in April 2022, accompanied by plans for NFTs, a metaverse and a new cryptocurrency called Dotori; contemporary coverage of the relaunch described the attempt to turn recovered nostalgia into a new digital economy. By November 2024 the business had changed hands again, to a special-purpose company called Cycomms that promised 3D mini-mes and chat — then ran out of money for data restoration.
The long, contested comeback
In August 2026 the blockchain firm Sigmachain held a Seoul press conference titled “The Return of Cyworld.” It says it has acquired Cyworld-related intellectual property, trademarks, and user data and plans an October 2026 beta centered first on friend connections and a feed. Digital Today’s report on the announcement says the company aims to restore roughly 17 billion records and launch a fuller service in the first half of 2027, while also considering NFTs and stablecoin-based features.
What a revival could genuinely recover is the archive — the rooms, songs, and photos that once stood in for their owners. What stays uncertain is whether this round holds. The announced acquisition and relaunch remain entangled in disputes over business rights, data, and control of the service, so the October beta is a plan rather than a completed restoration. The parts users could buy were always recoverable assets; even in the darkest years the archive kept its value. Ownership has been the fragile half of the arrangement all along.