Crazy Creatures on Hedera! King Solomon Interviews CREETS (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

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King Solomon interviews CREETS as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity!  Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

Transcription (00:00-12:17)

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍What is up everybody Solomon here. I hope you guys are all having a fantastic day. As you guys know within Genfinity’s Hedera Corner in collaboration with HashPack, we're streaming multiple Hedera ecosystem interviews on, hopefully a daily basis for you guys moving forward. Super excited to have Warlock today from CREETS and Hedera Hashcast. What is going on today Warlock.

CREETS – WarlockNKey - Founder
‍Fighting a battle against the flu. My family during Thanksgiving brought the flu over I don't think the virus taught anyone anything, so I'm hoping not to get worse. I sound OK, I was happy to see that I wasn't like gross today for this interview.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah I'm hoping that it doesn't spread through my household again. My 7 year old was on amoxicillin, which we're not you know huge on getting on antibiotics, but we had to get on amoxicillin like two months ago, and now that cough is back and it's like please stop. So you know this is the first time I've had an opportunity to talk to you, and you've been in the Hedera community for a while now. Can you give us a little bit of an overview or a summary of a couple of your initiatives that you're building out in the Hedera ecosystem, one being CREETS and the other being the podcast or Hedera Hashcast, as we will refer to it as.

CREETS – WarlockNKey - Founder
‍I guess we'll start with the Hashcast, it's a lot simpler to explain. I came in to Hedera really by chance. A friend was like “hey you should buy Hbar, the numbers gonna go up” which, not true, but I joined a Discord for community members, and they just thought because I do video stuff for SaucerSwap, I did stuff for Dovu, and LedgerWorks and I’m voice of the Rebel Boon for Hangry Barboons, and they knew I was doing that kind of stuff. And they were like, “hey! you just start a podcast”, I was like I don't anything about Hedera. They said it's fine, and turns out it was mostly fine. I learned a lot since since then, but you know, they just kind of pushed me into it, it's been fun. Haven’t had an episode in a while, cooling off because I’ve been a little bit busy. I started working part time at a LedgerWorks which has been really cool, and obviously doing more stuff CREETS. As far as CREETS is concerned, I saw Jacob from HashPack, he had an NFT project that came out first or second month that Hedera NFTs existed, and I saw what he was doing, and I was like “hey, I draw little weird monsters, do you think people would pay money for my weird little monsters?” and he was like, “man I don't know”, but another friend of mine Cap who does Hotdog Hustle was like they totally would pay money for those monsters. I was like oh cool, so I kind of came up with gimmick which is you know I freehand, it's kind of like drawing improv, there's a video on my Twitter CREETS_NFT that kind of explains it a little more concisely than I could probably explain it here.  The idea is, NFTs are digital, a lot of people complain that it's just like a copy, so my initial concept was like, how do I make this more personal. I wasn't thinking about anything outside of the art. I'm transitioning to like being less of an art based project going forward, but I wasn't thinking anything else besides the arts. So I was like how do I make this more personal, and that way was like, hey let me tie this to my high school experience. Wanting to show friend a weird monster, weird drawings, you know before they were called CREETS, I’ve been drawing CREETS my whole life. I would just have to like something weird and silly and do it fast before we change periods, so that's the way I do CREETS. I sit down, I don't get up ,I can't get up, pen and paper, no erasing, no change, nothing. If it's bad, I'll throw it away but the CREET you get, that's the thing that exists and I'm further like condensing that with my stuff my new stuff CROOTOTS, which is just a collection of 50, they're supposed to be like baby CREETS, but they're starting a little bit more detailed. Each one’s just completely its own thing. Which is kind of what I wanted to do with CREETS in the beginning, but it's so much work. But it's a way to reward the CREETS 2 holders. They help name them, you know it's like that's your guy, they can pick them out too, I show them, and they pick them out. It's like that's your guy. I have the originals obviously that I drew but nobody else is gonna have that character that's your guy, it's personal. Probably a bad business decision, because no one's gonna want to sell them so maybe I'm not the best business person, they can get to, I'm hoping that if they get another one, they'll sell that one if it's ugly or something but I'm worried people just keep them forever.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Is it something that surprised you when you came into to Hedera. I mean you talked to a lot of projects like, they're like very very much so taking the like the project standpoint, like we're gonna do this, and this, and to me it's like a little bit of a pleasure to talk to like you know an artist. Somebody that like has always kind of been doing this, and I think there's probably maybe you could answer this but I think there's probably a lot of empowerment to be like you know, I've never really had this opportunity to do something like this in a way, they might not be the end all be all for like finances and XYZ, but it's nice to see that people like what I've always done and to kind of be able to empower myself a little bit as far as like finances are concerned to like you know put this stuff out there in the world and see if people are engaging with it.

CREETS – WarlockNKey - Founder
‍It has been immensely gratifying I don't know if I can accurately express or if you even believe me. But it has been a life changing experience, I mean as an artist that's what you thirst for right. You thirst for finding people who deal, with your... you know, I'm a big weirdo and I do weird stuff. That's half the reason people like CREETS. This is me being a big weirdo, and to find a bunch of fellow weirdos to watch me weird out, and enjoy it is amazing. I did not get into NFTs for the money, I like money, most people do, I enjoy getting the money, but I never wanted to be like a top three project or have crazy sales to whatever. I just wanted to connect with people and see if I could give them an experience and something special to hold on to. I've been getting that back from people and it' you know my CREETENS out there, my like little close community, you know I love you guys. I'd probably still be here without you because I was super unpopular when I started out. I started out, sold a bunch, I think people are just like oh Hedera NFTs exist I’m gonna buy whatever. After that sales bottom now, I could barely sell any of my CREETS because it was like there's ten designs, there’s always 10 designs, early on was 10 copies of each design, and it's so funny now, because those OG CREETS sell for a lot now. People are like there's only 10? When before it's like, “if it's not a 1 of 1 it's is garbage. Eventually CREETS 2 transitioned to one of one stuff, but they see the contrast like, oh the supply of CREETS 1 is just, it's just 100 CREETS? That's it? It's like yeah, only 10 per CREETS and you know it's funny how things change, but mostly I've been sticking around for so long, and it's only in like the past like six months that like I started like getting more popular. I think people finally got it. Making that video helped a lot. A lot of people didn't even know I had a gimmick, they didn't understand what I was doing. I've always been doing stuff in the Hedera Space but people wouldn’t necessarily connected the dots to CREETS. But also getting on Twitter spaces, and showing people how big of a weirdo I am definitely helped because NFT people are normal.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I have to ask because if I look at like the Ethereum ecosystem, and this isn't anything against any other ecosystem, but like is the Ethereum ecosystem, Solana, all kind of the other big DLTs, well still most of the liquidity as of right now and the most money flowing through those ecosystems but, to me a lot of the other ecosystems are kind of like the old boys’ club. Where it's like yeah there's projects that do make a lot of money, and they do really well, but it's lost kind of the luster as far as being able to empower like the actual real artists that are kind of like the underground artist that do this with a passion. So the question I have to ask you, is do you think if you would have launched CREETS on another network besides Hedera Hashgraph, that you would have had the same response, or the same community ,or the same experiences as you've had so far?

CREETS – WarlockNKey - Founder
‍Absolutely not. That kind of thing was never an option for me maybe because the only reason why I’m in Hedera today is because someone kind of pushed me into it, and was like here's the thing. You can do it, I don't have like a super high opinion of myself, which if you listen to Twitter spaces, people like you so humble. I’m like yeah... humble, self deprecating maybe, I don't know. But that was never an option, however CREETS is just not. You need way more time to communicate what I'm about, who I am, other chains you don't get that time. You get maybe a one minute pitch that's not enough. You need to see who's the guy behind it before you can really get invested. People didn't know I was doing all these in one session and like going forward now  I try to record all of them. Like if you get a CREETS it comes with 5 files and one of them is a reccording of me doing it. Yeah I mean I want to force people to acknowledge the gimmick because otherwise we're just like hey this art looks kind of rough so I made like a silly CREETS Jingle just because someone asked me to do it and like Hangry made like a music video out of it and the tagline came up with was “They may look tragic, but it's part of the magic, CREETS NFTs” and I just you know I don't wanna insult myself too much, you know I think I'm developing a lot as an artist, but when people don't know like what I'm about it's like there's a lot packed in you can't communicate quickly, and that's how you succeed another chains. It's also like saying, promising a lot of things, which I don't do that helps.