SerMorpheus wants to make NFTs an everyday sight in Indonesia • TechCrunch
More than half of the population in Southeast Asia is under the age of 30, making it a sought-after market for new technologies. Not surprisingly, several countries in the region, such as Singapore and Vietnam, have some of the world’s highest crypto adoption rates.
While Indonesia is not the most crypto-active in the region – the total crypto value received was less than half that of Thailand from July 2021 to June 2022, according to Chainalysis – the country is believed to have great potential for web3 adoption, thanks to a young and sizeable (270 million) population as well as a vibrant web2 industry.
Indonesia is in the process of “catching up” web3 because the huge talent pool still rests in the web2 industry, a crypto investor pointed out earlier.
But entrepreneurs are working to bring blockchain applications to the multicultural archipelago. Pintu raised $113 million in funding in June to offer crypto trading services to Indonesians. Now a startup called SerMorpheus hopes to connect brands and consumers through digital assets.
A digital asset in the form of non-fungible tokens can be used to authenticate ownership. For example, NFTs can prove one’s access to exclusive content, membership in an organization, or discounts on a deal.
“Indonesians are heavy consumers of content on social media. A lot of intellectual property is being created, but creativity is underexposed when it comes to web3,” noted SerMorpheus co-founder Kenneth Tali. “With so much money coming into crypto, why isn’t it much [web3] creativity comes out of Indonesia?”
Part of the problem, he believed, is the technical hoops creators need to jump to create smart contracts; they need to contact multiple platforms and manage relationships with each of them. On the consumer side, users are already stuck at the stage of setting up a wallet and are worried about losing their private keys.
As such, SerMorpheus recently closed a $2.5 million seed round to create an easy-to-use platform for businesses to create NFTs; end users, on the other hand, can buy and trade digital assets on the platform with the local currency of rupiah. To date, the service has been used by around 27,000 people to claim tickets to music events, exclusive celebrity fan benefits, football club memberships and so on, the founder said.
The platform is still manually onboarding businesses and brands – 25 of them so far, including Indonesia Comic Con – but the next step is to make SerMorpheus as automated as creating a Facebook page. To do that, smart contracts, or lines of code that run on predetermined rules, will be standardized, as well as the types of benefits creators devise for their end users.
The startup takes a 5-10% cut from NFTs minted on the platform and charges a 2% fee in secondary sales.
The seed round was led by Intudo Ventures, with participation from 500 Global, Febe Ventures, AlphaLab Capital, BRI Ventures and Caballeros Capital. With a team of 30 people, SerMorpheus plans to use the fresh capital to build out its infrastructure and hire across all functions.
