Paras Digital’s NFT marketplace platform received of $5 million or around 71.8 billion Rupiah seed funding. It was obtained through an Initial Dex Offering (IDO) and investments by a number of investors.
As stated in the website, some of the investors involved in this round include Black Dragon Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Moonwhale Capital, Digital Renaissance, GFS Ventures, Global Coin Research, OKEx Blocdream Ventures, as well as several other venture capital and angel investors.
The Co-founder, Rahmat Albariqi said this funding will be used to scale up its business, including to expand NFT assets vertical on the NEAR Protocol, such as comics, games, and toys.
“The NFT popularity is increasing this year, and there are many opportunities we haven’t discovered. We believe [market] research and expansion into new verticals can maintain the NFT value. By adding value to digital assets, we can create a big change for NFT in the future,” says the man familiarly called Riqi.
Paras was founded in late December 2020 by Rahmat Albariqi and Afiq Shofy Ramadhan, and was fully developed by a team from Indonesia. Prior to funding, Riqi claimed to have worked on several projects with creators to create and release their IP on the NEAR Protocol.
It wants to open up opportunities for anyone with passion to develop their IP in the crypto world. Currently, Riqi and his team are pushing for the development of crypto-natives IP to be built on Paras.
“We aim to be a pioneer in the transformation of games, comics, toys, and works through smart contract capabilities and blockchain technology. Therefore, we want to open up a lot of access by offering content through various media,” he said.
Several local platforms have started to initiate a marketplace-based NFT platform. Two of them are Tokomall by Tokocrypto and Kolektibel.
Digital comic project and target market
In separate occasion, Riqi revealed that his team is currently working on three digital comic projects using NFT. The first Paras Comic project has just launched and the content is created by in-house creators.
Meanwhile, the majority of Paras users come from crypto-native and tech savvy level. However, Riqi said that the platform has started to be used by early adopters not new to blockchain and cryptocurrency technology.
“We are targeting the pop-culture enthusiast market, such as fandom and gamers with a focus on China and Southeast Asia. To date, our total sales volume has reached $550 thousand from a total of 400 thousand transactions,” he said. Since Paras is built on the NEAR Protocol, this transaction is only available using NEAR cryptocurrency.
Riqi said that crypto volatility remains a different challenge. Especially when the crypto market declines, transactions and sales will automatically follow. However, he admits that he is passionate about pursuing the crypto world considering that there is always something new in the blockchain ecosystem.
“This requires us to be constantly learning and innovating. Even though most of Paras’ core team are from Indonesia, we still have to update about innovations happening in other parts of the world. Not to mention about the time difference between Indonesia and several countries as ‘blockchain epicenters’ like Lisbon and the United States,” he added.
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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian