Morpheus Labs 2019 Exclusive Interview BPaaS Blockchain Platform

Morpheus Labs – Blockchain Platform-as-a-Service (BPaaS) and App Marketplace

Morpheus Labs believe that “Infrastructure is critical in all functioning, robust first world economies. However, in the current blockchain state of affairs, proper infrastructure, blockchain talents and skills are sorely lacking”

With this in mind they have spent the last year hard at work creating a comprehensive and inclusive platform aimed at providing enterprises with blockchain solutions and resolving the current pain points that they face. Using this platform they will look to onboard enterprises interested in utilising blockchain technology by providing flexible, scalable and efficient solutions all in one place.

They call this BPaaS – Blockchain Platform-as-a-Service.

These enterprises can pick and choose from seven different blockchains, including VeChain, NEM and QuarkChain, and 7 different programming languages so it’s incredibly easy to quickly find a solution that suits the needs of their business. A blockchain can be chosen, language selected and be up and running in 2 minutes. CEO Pei-Han Chuang has also previously stated that their platform can cut the time and cost needed to get up and running by 70%. These efficiencies are already driving incredible interest in the platform in the private sector.

An introductory promotional video can be found below for more information:

Morpheus Labs Introduction (YouTube)

Clients and Partners

Morpheus Labs already boast an impressive array of clients and partners, as the below image indicates, and this is just the tip of the iceberg as we will discuss later in an exclusive interview. Two standout and established blockchain companies can be seen here in VeChain and QuarkChain. Additionally they have partnered with a highly established QR Code Tagging giant in Asia – VeriTAG . Here’s what they had to say on their partnerships:

Gu Jianliang – VeChain CTO

“We are glad that VeChain is adopting a progressive collaboration with a credible partner like Morpheus Labs to work alongside and shape the blockchain landscape. Personally, I believe that the Morpheus Labs platform’s one-stop development tool is a time-saving feature and will definitely ease the developers’ load on project development and deployment”

Qi Zhou – QuarkChain CEO

“Morpheus Labs greatly simplifies blockchain DApps development and promotes wider applications of blockchain. We would like to work with Morpheus Labs to build next-generation scalable DApps that could serve massive users.”

Jason Lim – VeriTag CEO

“The team are experts in their areas of expertise and the platform targets the pain spot of the current times.”

Morpheus Labs have also been accepted by Amazon as a Technology Partner in their Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network which will provide a vital link to enterprise’s looking to use their platform and service.

In Conversation

I sat down with Bruce Lu, CTO, to discuss Morpheus Labs in more detail.

When did you first hear about Crypto and what was it that drew you into this space?

All along, in the tech space, emerging technologies are always hot topics for discussion. My most sound memory of Crypto was in late 2015 when decentralized applications were launched using Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains and later everyone was taking stride and sides on the consensus and mining process which eventually resulted in the crypto and blockchain boom.

Since then I realized this technology would transform how people will work and live that drew me into this space.

What is your background and what was the driving force behind starting Morpheus Labs?

I have been working in technology innovation and large scale business applications for more than 20 years including 11 years with IBM as a senior technology architect. My days in IBM since 2016, was focusing on rolling out Blockchain initiatives. I had seen the challenges of implementing blockchain initiatives faced by enterprises and technical teams.

This made me question “What if we could have a platform for enterprises and developers to easily select blockchain use cases, work on different ready-to-use blockchains and use ready-to-use tools to create new blockchain business applications?”.

I knew Pei-Han (CEO) and Branson (COO) through the MIT Fintech Course years back and heard from Pei Han that they were planning to build a Blockchain Platform as a Service that exactly matched what I was looking for. I then joined Morpheus Labs as the Founding Team Member and the rest was history.

2018 was a tough year for the Crypto market. However, from a tech perspective, we witnessed even more innovation and advancements than ever before. Can you talk about the progress you’ve made over the last year?

Year 2018 was for the quality ICO projects to move from concept to creation and we have completed a well loved comprehensive platform in less than 9 months, which has been examined, tested and well accepted by our partners. I feel especially excited because when we talked to them, the validation and resources they committed shown something big for us.

Developers looking to deploy a solution on your platform can choose between 7 different blockchains: Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, Multichain, NEM, Vechain, NULS and Quarkchain. Can you give a little background as to why you decided on these specific chains and the advantages they bring to your platform?

Different users or companies have different use cases that require different blockchains to satisfy. Our platform is designed to be blockchain agnostic, below are some of the key considerations when onboarding a blockchain on our platform:

1. Type of industry and use cases that they focus on, e.g. Finance, Supply Chain and IoT

2. If a blockchain provides technology uniqueness and advantages

3. If a blockchain is popular among developers and enterprises and will be sustainable in long term

4. If the team of a blockchain has same vision to push blockchain adoption

With these carefully selected blockchains, we offer comprehensive choices for enterprises and developers to develop blockchain business applications. And more blockchain communities will jointly promote blockchain adoption.

You’ve been accepted into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network as a Standard Technology Partner. What opportunities and exposure will this give you in connecting with Enterprises interested in utilising blockchain technology?

Cloud providers are looking for value added services for their clients. Apart from its own blockchain platform as service, AWS sees us as an independent software provider that provides a complementary end to end blockchain platform services to its clients and we are working towards becoming a blockchain competent partner on AWS.

Our platform can now be found in the AWS business solution finder and AWS will support us to acquire new users. This allows us to connect to AWS’s extensive client base and provides a competitive advantage against the competitors.

Pei-Han has previously stated that Morpheus Labs can “reduce 60-70% of time and cost required for development from months down to weeks, and from a team to just a few.” Is this your unique selling point when pitching to Enterprises and can you talk about the amount of interest you are receiving because of this?

Yes, these are the pain points that business owners are facing and care about deeply. Currently, technical complexity and high implementation cost are the main blockchain adoption barriers. When we talked to enterprises, they immediately agreed with our vision on the blockchain platform and we provide what they have been looking for in last few years. In fact, most of our clients came to us because of this.

In 2019 we should see phases 3 and 4 of your Roadmap executed which brings the introduction of Version 2.0 – allowing Enterprises to host real process driven and revenue generating applications. Can you comment on the amount and types of Enterprises you already have signed up to your service and ready to deploy their solutions?

We have seen different types of enterprises have signed up to our platform. For example:

VeriTag – a Singapore based Food Export and Import Platform, they have deployed a food tracking blockchain platform using our platform service together with their patented tagging solution
Dsoftec – a Singapore based startup Accelerator, they have developed and deployed an Asset tokenization solution on Ethereum
LittlePo – a food and technology startup in Singapore, they implemented a F&B tracking platform using private Ethereum
XMinds Infotech – a development house, they are using our platform services for DApps Development on various blockchains
Partner Campaigns – Our blockchain partners sponsor campaigns for their community users to build dapps using platform

Other enterprises signed up would like to remain confidential at the moment, and we have dozens of individual developers signing up to build dapps.

In 2019, I foresee more individual developers and more enterprises from different industries will use our platform to develop and deploy their more revenue generating applications.

Education is clearly a key value to Morpheus Labs and the partnership with Hanwha emphasises this. Can you talk a little about your education alliances and the value they are bringing to the blockchain community?

One of the biggest challenges for businesses to choose and adopt a blockchain technology is to hire engineers who are specifically skilled in this sector. Currently, more than 70% of enterprises are still exploring and trying out different blockchain technologies.

Blockchain is an emerging technology and even though there are hundreds of blockchains available to use, there is a distinct lack of engineers in the space.

Blockchain engineers are required to have a different set of skill sets and knowledge from the mainstream engineers and high quality practical blockchain training will help grow more blockchain engineers. Through partnership with DreamPlus, a Hanwha subsidiary for online education, we can reach out to thousands of students who are willing to learn blockchain and the underlying technology.

After the basic online training many of them may want to further grow their career path as blockchain engineers. These future blockchain engineers / developers can then further leverage our platform to build various blockchain dapps and accumulate practical experience of dealing with multiple blockchains.

In addition, from rich sets of blockchain applications in the Application Library (a Application Marketplace with source codes available) on our platform, they can learn from other blockchain practitioners to further enhance their dApp development skills. These students, will become our loyal users, from their first step into blockchain space to becoming experienced engineers / developers in the blockchain community.

Image result for hanwha asia — Morpheus Labs have an educational partnership with Dreamplus, part of Hanwha group

What can we expect from Morpheus Labs 2019? Are there are many surprises around the corner?

There will be more in-depth partnerships (especially in the areas targeting education) as I believe that education will be the turnkey solutions to gain adoption and also to curb the issues of global shortage of tech talents.

We are currently exploring curriculum that take on the blending learning, facilitated with theory and hands-on experience. This format will ensure the students understand the blockchain development in thorough and is capable to develop a decentralized applications where the skillsets are well sought after. There will be more advanced functions added and blockchain partners onboarding the platform in order to pursue the blockchain agnostic model.

And an exclusive sharing to the readers of Alex and The Daily Chain – we are planning to grow a BPaaS development community and create open source the development of some of the key features of the platform (currently the platform is purely proprietary).

Can you summarise your ultimate vision for Morpheus Labs?

To provide opportunity for keen individuals to explore and experiment with blockchain technology and for enterprises to break free from resource constraints without breaking their bank.

I sincerely thank Bruce for his time.

Alex Libertas

Further Reading

Full Vechain article featuring CTO
QuarkChain Medium Announcement with CEO
Medium Article with What NULS CEO
Forbes Article
Platform will be used for students in Hanwhan – DreamPlus (one of Korean Largest conglomerates) www.dreamplus.io/academy (Korean)
Tsing Hua University (Aka China Harvard) – Fintech Research Lab visited SG and interviewed few shortlisted startups but ONLY Morpheus Labs has explicitly been shared twice – The following interviews explain why this is so important

Interview 1 Interview 2 (Chinese/ China)