Indonesian Exchange Pintu Raises $113M to Meet Country’s Crypto Boom
The Indonesian-based exchange has raised $113M despite the bear market to meet the growing demand in the cryptocurrency sector.
The Exchange, which was launched in April 2020, had previously raised $35 million in August last year during a Series A extended funding round. This present funding was onboarded by Investments from Venture Capital firms Pantera Capital, Intudo Ventures, Northstart Group, and many others.
During the Press release, Lightspeed Partner Advisor Hemant Mohapatra said,
We are excited to continue our journey with Pintu and to welcome our new partner Northstar Group. Since our investment in August last year, Pintu has scaled 5x to become the country’s leading retail-focused crypto brokerage, and hired one of the strongest teams we’ve seen in this market. The crypto wave is entering mainstream adoption globally and Pintu is building a generational company in this category.
Hemant Mohapatra, Lightspeed Partner Advisor
Lightspeed had previously led Pintu’s Series A funding round extension that got $35 million, they’re one of their biggest supporters.
Pintu has led out a plan of the use of the capital to launch into bigger territories. They plan on building newer and better market features, that is listing more tokens, integrating more chains and bridges to allow better scalability and faster transactions, and products, launching extensive educational and marketing campaigns, and increasing their workforce. All these efforts serve to cater to their growing number of users and investors which the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Timothius Martin said to have doubled from its previous number in 2021 which was around 6 million users to more than 12 million onboarded users in February 2022. These statistics showed that the exchange is becoming widely accepted in the country and keeps adding to its growth.
Intending to simplify the user experience in crypto transactions, especially for beginners, they had integrated a feature known as Pintu Academy, a platform that onboards users on the keys of crypto investments and how to minimize risk and exposure. Pintu Exchange currently supports the transaction of many coins like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and about 50 other coins. The app allows users to buy Bitcoin from as low as Rp 11,000 (76 cents), the Pintu Earn feature that offers about 15% APY and also allows staking of its native token Pintu.
Indonesia’s Investment Conditions
It’s a known fact that the conditions and policies governing a country are what allow the inflow of investors that help boost the domestic economy.
Indonesia holds a huge population, it’s the fourth most populous country with about 274 million people. There have been talks and plans about taxing digital assets and trades in the country because of the growing number of digital coin users. However, this is not affecting the growth of the sector as more and more individuals adopt the utility of cryptocurrencies. It was said that many Indonesian businesses accept coins.
The number of crypto users increased during the pandemic among retail investors because of its potential, Pintu’s CMO stated
we see that the market is more mature now compared to last year. Users are starting to make investment decisions based on the use-cases of the crypto assets. For example, gaming is a big thing in Indonesia with over 100 million gamers in the country. This spurs significant growth in gaming and metaverse-related crypto assets, as many believe that these projects are contributing to the future of gaming.
The company is registered and regulated by BAPPEBTI, a commodity futures trading regulatory agency in Indonesia, which emphasizes the safety of its investors.
The Future Of Pintu
Even with the advent of the bear market, Pintu plans in increasing the workers in its firm unlike the recent layoffs happening on prominent firms like Coinbase and Gemini. The company’s CEO said that he believes in the potential of his product and that he projects that the number of users would quadruple in the coming months as they look into crypto’s other use cases like NFTs and DeFi.
One of their investors Panthera partner Paul Veradittakit confirmed in the press release that
Crypto adoption is happening everywhere, and Indonesia has proven itself to be one of the world’s most rapidly growing markets for crypto assets, Crypto is a global asset class, and Pintu has become Indonesia’s premier portal to gain access to crypto and invest alongside global peers.
Barry Pene is a stern blockchain research/copywriter. Barry has been trading cryptos since 2017 and has been invested in issues that would put the blockchain industry on the right pedestal. Barry's research expertise cuts across blockchain as a disruptive technology, DeFis, NFTs, Web3, and reduction of energy consumption levels of cryptocurrency mining.
