Indonesia has no shortage of NFT marketplaces. TokoMall, TokoNFT, Paras, Kolektibel, Enevti, all have existed for some time in the country’s relatively young Web3 space. That certainly won’t stop new NFT marketplaces from emerging, though, especially with the continued growing interest among Indonesians, fueled by influencers and social media personalities.
One upcoming NFT marketplace that is gearing up for a launch is Artpedia. Founded in 2021, Artpedia is looking to set itself apart from the rest by integrating multiple Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) solutions such as Optimism, Polygon, Starknet, and Arbitrum in addition to the mainnet, with the goal of facilitating cross-chain transactions.
What this means is that users will be able to buy NFTs minted on one L2 with ETH stored on another L2 in Artpedia. This should alleviate one major pain point in trading NFTs, as Artpedia users won’t need to bridge their ETH manually using protocols like Hop. Moreover, Artpedia is currently exploring multi-chain NFTs so that users will also be able to transfer their NFTs from one L2 to another L2.
Artpedia’s founder, Arjuna Sky Kok, likened L2 solutions to cities, and said that people would want to bring their assets from one L2 to another L2. He envisioned Artpedia to become the bridge to transport assets between different L2 solutions. “It won’t be the Indonesian OpenSea,” Kok said when he first announced Artpedia in February.
As the name suggests, Artpedia will focus on art NFTs, but it will later expand to other NFTs like video games, certificates, and liquidity positions. Artpedia is also looking to bring features that let people top up their crypto wallets on L2s using traditional digital wallets like GoPay, OVO, or Dana. This should help improve accessibility by bypassing crypto exchanges and the mainnet.
AI integration is also going to be a big part of Artpedia, Kok said, given his experience in building a tool to predict salaries using deep learning. Some planned AI-based functionalities for Artpedia include reverse image search to detect copyright violations, queries using natural language processing, and optional recommendations.
For artists and creators who are new to the NFT space and are not familiar enough with how crypto technology works, Artpedia will also offer to be a custodian. Kok acknowledges that this kind of arrangement will go against the decentralized nature of Web3, but he believes that this may be a temporary necessity given the current condition of the market, at least until crypto wallets have reached mainstream status.
According to Tech in Asia, Artpedia recently received a $100,000 funding from several angel investors such as Windy Natriavi, co-founder of AwanTunai and former Gojek executive; Jim Geovedi, renowned IT security expert and CTO of Koinworks; Dendi Suhubdy, CEO of Bitwyre; and Indira Widjonarko, founder of Sebangsa. Most of the funds will be allocated to the hiring of software engineers.
Artpedia is still in development, but a beta version of it is expected to be released by the end of June 2022. It should be interesting to see Artpedia offering something new in a market that is already starting to be quite saturated.
