AMA Highlights – Morpheus Labs

By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.

February 25, 2020 – 9 min read.

On Tuesday 25 February 2020, we welcomed Pei-Han Chuang and Dorel Burcea of Morpheus Labs into the Hillrise Capital Telegram chat for an AMA. Pei-Han is the CEO, and Dorel the CIO, both are founders.

Tommo Coumans also joined the session representing Morpheus Labs in his role as Ambassador.

Morpheus Labs is a Singapore-based blockchain startup primarily operating a B2B enterprise-focused platform for blockchain development. This flagship ‘Blockchain-Platform-as-a-Service’ is a centralized cloud-based hub designed to simplify and expedite the processes and procedures involved in evaluating, developing, and deploying blockchain solutions for organizations of any size.

The overarching mission of the company is to be a connector; bridging the gap between commercial enterprise and the possibilities emerging blockchain protocols present as alternatives to legacy systems.

In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.

Daniel Dal Bello
Welcome guys, thanks for joining us today.

I’m obviously very familiar with what you are doing, but it might be nice to hear a short introduction from you and some background on what Morpheus Labs is about?

Dorel Burcea
Hi. I am Dorel the CIO of Morpheus Labs, a long-haul technology leader with passion for innovation. I’ve been working in the banking industry for 17 years and have spent more than two years in Morpheus Labs leading the platform development and strategy.

Morpheus Labs (MITx) is a BPaaS (Blockchain Platform as a Service), blockchain agnostic platform, aiming to bridge the gap between blockchain and the real world (companies, developers, students). We are integrating a lot of blockchains (Ethereum, VeChain, EOS, NEO, Waves, Wanchain, TomoChain, CPChain, NEM, NULS, Hyperledger, ProximaX and many more.

Realistically, we hope to have many more blockchains connected to us, where companies, students, and developers can ‘develop’ on the platform. We focus on building the tools to develop on blockchains, while we let blockchain companies focus on improving their blockchain.

Daniel Dal Bello
Dorel, you were in attendance for the opening of the Blockchain Village at Medini (‘BVAM’) in Malaysia. This is a significant project in a neighboring country, launched by i2M Ventures who are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the sovereign wealth fund of the Government of Malaysia.

I want to understand the gravity of this connection, as we first heard of this in October last year and were expecting to hear more in the following months.

What involvement does Morpheus Labs have in the BVAM, and with the other stakeholders involved?

More importantly, what tangible impact will this ‘partnership’ have on you as a business, and under what timeframe?

Dorel Burcea
Yes, Medini we keep eyes constantly on what is happening close to Singapore. Unfortunately, we are still not able to share about our involvement regarding this project in Medini as there are still talks going on (government institutions as well we’re depending on a slow process).

Eventually, we hope that through this open door, especially for education in the region, we are able to deliver talent development and business solutions on blockchain technologies.

Daniel Dal Bello
It’s a bummer you can’t discuss it, but we understand. There is a government arm involved, so it is understandable. Is your goal in this association to work directly with businesses and bring on customers for the BPaaS, or work through educational institutions and distribute memberships through those institutions to students?

Dorel Burcea
Although we have already enterprise customers that use our platform we want to use any opportunity that brings us mass adoption of our platform. In this initiative through education, we aim for more subscriptions hence more conversion. After the [Hanwha] DreamPlus education initiative, more and more education providers want to engage us into education business for blockchain.

Pei-Han Chuang
The goal of the business was to get our foot in the door to bring blockchain education into the region. This was one of our goals to drive mass adoption, as well as to find opportunities in a new market. What is better than a door opening via the government itself?

Daniel Dal Bello
Have you found that by your association and curriculum with Hanwha, other education providers are interested in working with you? Can you comment any more on that?

Tommo Coumans
So far the education providers I’ve talked to don’t name Hanwha as the factor on why they want to move forward (or go to introductory talks); it’s often the complete package of what we offer (blockchain partners, platform, current curriculums/educational courses).

Daniel Dal Bello
They’re interested in the complete package as you put it, so what is the motivation for an education provider to engage Morpheus? They want to offer the course to students, and have the benefit of the platform for them (the students) to learn on?

Tommo Coumans
Basically the platform offers an easy way to do blockchain development (and an easy way to integrate curriculums). I like to compare the BPaaS to the office package from Microsoft. Everybody uses Word, Excel, and PowerPoint but nobody thinks about using it. It’s an easy way to get your work done, your presentations made or your spreadsheets in order. The BPaaS functions as this; we’re blockchain agnostic and with a subscription model developers, students or companies can build (or get help building) with blockchain. So for a university, utilising our BPaaS means they don’t have the build their own tools for development and it means every student uses the same method. If they want to switch from VeChain to Ethereum they can stay in the same platform.

But yes; educational providers can:

• Use our curriculums or write their own
• Use our help
• Get every student to use the same BPaaS
• Try out a lot of different coding languages / blockchains in the same environment

Dorel Burcea
Furthermore, according to a few education providers we are working with, by using our platform they will increase training productivity by delivering more content and diversifying the types of training and coverage for multiple blockchains, all in an easy way. They also emphasized the average time for a student’s readiness for blockchain class is dramatically decreased.

Daniel Dal Bello
Pei-Han or Tommo, could you talk to us about the strategic direction moving forward as you approach your improved BPaaS deployment?

Tommo Coumans
Sure. The idea is to become the go-to solution as a BPaaS (Blockchain-Platform-as-a-Service). In order to do so we need to have as many ‘ flavors’ for people to work with as possible. In 2019 we were mostly focused on exploring the blockchain side of this (a plethora of new partnerships to join the ranks, plus more pending on the integration schedule). Besides having these blockchains integrated, we have 7 coding languages on the platform.

Now for step 2 it’s mostly business, university, and enterprise-focused and we’re working very hard on this aspect. Sadly, normal business tends to move a bit slower than blockchain partnerships since so many of the details need to be perfect, so news isn’t coming out in quick succession as we used to have in 2019 (near bi-weekly partnerships).

That doesn’t mean we’re not working hard; because we are. And we are getting results which we’re happy with, but can’t share too much of this until it’s in the final stages. One of the partnerships that have been in the fetal stage for a long, long, long time seems to not be that far off though.

Besides having all these blockchains, we need to work on growing our developer base. Platform 2.0 will help with this, along with organizing hackathons with bigger parties and aiding and assisting on blockchain curriculums with bigger universities. We’re constantly exploring the next step; we’re already in Europe.

Daniel Dal Bello
Here is a question from the community which I have been asked to forward on, I have paraphrased and edited slightly, but here it is.

This question is in reference to the allocated exchange and token burn wallet. An article from Morpheus Labs stated this wallet was to assure the community of proper governance. However the account has numerous transactions ranging from several thousand to multimillion token transactions including 28m and 34m transactions. It does not appear to have been used for exchange or burn purposes.

For instance, the 28m was disbursed through multiple accounts ranging from 6m to 100k where it has been largely intact. Furthermore the remaining amount available to burn will fall substantially short of the 250m over 48months proposed for burning. It would be good to have detailed update concerning what this reserve has been used for. For example, team payments, marketing, exchange listings, and how much is expected to be burnt.

Tommo Coumans
Heya, for security reasons we’ve recently moved roughly 34m to multiple multi-sig wallets. We’ve done this with the 28m before aswell. We’ve updated this in our Medium.

It’s good to keep transparency on this so I’ll forward this internally and ask to make a new overview so all movements from 2019 (and 2020) are summarized and accounteded for.

@Randyarl
What’s the most difficult obstacle faced by Morpheus in getting businesses onboard to blockchain technology?

Tommo Coumans
Knowledge and cost. Most companies don’t know why blockchain could be a possible improvement for some processes, nor do they know how to get ‘in’. Do they need to hire their own blockchain developers or they outsource it? To who? Are there any good teams available, are there any other companies who went before them?

First mover advantage is a scary thing, especially if a company puts a lot of resources towards it. It’s why the bigger enterprises have a little jar of money to dabble in blockchain and if they deem it successful they can slowly roll it out on a bigger scale. Smaller companies often lack that resource luxury (both employees and time) so we aim to help on that.

Besides all of this, blockchain development is still in its infancy; it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to make this grow. Trial and error and a new generation of students that work with blockchain  exclusively. Once they’re all experts, they can help the people who seek for solutions in a better fashion. So we also cover that angle. The obstacle is getting towards adoption; which is going to take a lot of baby-steps and hand-holding along the way.

Daniel Dal Bello
In your 2019 roundup you highlight the Chongqing Connectivity Initiative (‘CCI’)—this is a cooperation between the Infocomm Media Development Authority (a statutory board in the Singapore government) and the Chongqing State Government.

Further to this, veriTAG who is an early customer of Morpheus Labs is involved in a joint venture to build a blockchain-enabled cross-border trade platform in support of the CCI.

Is this referring to the ‘TradeTrust’ initiative? Perlin has also recently been named in an article about the TradeTrust platform.

In an online post, veriTAG mentioned Morpheus Labs as Blockchain Developer and Project Coordinator, but what exactly is Morpheus Labs a part of here?

Overall, this is a lot to comprehend and it takes some digging just to extract these facts. Could you finally talk to us about what this connection to the CCI really means for you? How will this trickle down and make an impact on the business, and again, in what time frame?

Pei-Han Chuang
We are humbled that our platform is being selected to build, development and implement TradeTrust solutions by our client. Our platform provides a collaborative development environment with developer tools for an end-to-end solution. meaning you can assemble the parts, build the cover and run the solution on our platform–all in one.

We hope to find opportunities in providing blockchain-based solutions to the market in China through this partnership. As you can see, we are working to penetrate into various country (e.g Malaysia) for China as well, and concurrent our platform is also being used by group of students from Tsinghua [University].

Daniel Dal Bello
These are some of the first steps in expanding into different regions. Can you talk more about your expansion plans and target markets/industries? Are you focusing on any particular industry or sector? Education, commercial/enterprise?

Pei-Han Chuang
Like what Tommo mentioned, we’re very focused on education and enterprises this year. We are working on use cases in various industries, stepping into Europe and China. TIBA – Tsinghua International Blockchain Association is group of (majority) Master degree students in engineering – such as advanced computer engineering, and top students around the globe from different countries who are studying in Tsinghua. Most of them have extensive experience in developing dApps for years.

Daniel Dal Bello
My last question, as I don’t want to keep you too far over time. What can we expect to hear from you over the coming months? What are your priorities, what updates and public comments can we look forward to?

Dorel Burcea
We will be launching our BPaaS 2.0 in the coming months. We are thinking of giving it a name. I wonder what does our community think about brainstorming together and give it a name? 😉

The new version aims to complete the Morpheus Labs BPaaS positioning as an end-to-end platform for blockchain solutions. Keeping it short, we are in talks with education providers, schools, working on use cases with businesses in different industry sectors which we are not able to disclose at the moment. We see growing demand in Blockchain and a gap in talent supply. Beyond rapid prototyping, the platform will become the cornerstone for interconnecting traditional business with digital transformation and blockchain innovation and we are glad to get positive feedback and comments from blockchain partners and schools about our product.

We will continue to do our best.

The text in this summary has been edited to correct grammatical errors and for presentation purposes. We thank both Pei-Han and Dorel for joining us for this AMA. For more information on Morpheus Labs, visit https://morpheuslabs.io.