First Gaming Metaverse on Hedera! Earthlings and King Solomon (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

—

King Solomon interviews Earthlings 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 (00:00-07:11)

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I hope you guys are all having a fantastic day. As many of you may know within the Lighthouse we have Hedera corner, and today, happy to say that we have Patrick from Earthlings building out essentially the first gaming metaverse on Hedera. How are you doing this morning Patrick?

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Fine, thank you for asking. How are you doing today?

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Oh fantastic so super excited to finally get a chance to talk with you guys. Can you give us a little bit of a background about when you guys started with Earthlings, why you chose to launch on Hedera and maybe even just a little bit of a background about the team in general?

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍Oh yeah that's nice one to start off with. Me and my brother Marcel we actually ran a company for about 20 years, design company, and after a while I just got fed up with the Netherlands so I moved to France. I quit my job together with him we were still besties, but I just moved abroad so I quit the working in this company together with him. After a few years I did miss working together with people, and also my brother and I we are crypto enthusiasts, so we also had a crypto portfolio. Then this year and last year it already began with all the NFTs, and in the beginning of this year we had the nice next peak of Bitcoin, but also all these metaverse projects and gaming projects. That's where I started diving into these things a bit more. Not so much in collecting NFT for pictures and stuff but then NFT gaming came up, and Marcel and I both being crypto enthusiasts we liked the gaming aspect of these things. So I told him why not set up something ourselves, because we saw a lot of these projects really high hype drive and without anything to show for. For some you really didn't even have a white paper and still people were buying it. Of course in the bull run it looks like everything sells, but we really did see that there was a need for better designs, better game play, products, out there because a lot of these metaverses they claimed metaverse gains. We thought we could do better, and since we did a lot of designing and concepts actually, we said why not do something. So I wrote down the white paper, showed it to him, he liked it a lot, and he of course designed the logo. Then, we said, we need someone who understands the technology side of it as well. Because our developer we've known him for 25 years now, and he started his own company creating registered systems for shops actually, these digital screens where you can program your stuff. He's a self-taught programmer as well by the way those are the best developers, self-taught people because there's more enthusiasm in these guys. We showed him the white paper and he said, yeah the thing is that with web3, blockchain all this new emerging technology it's going to be the future so yeah I want in and he liked the concept. So then we had the three founders and we all pitched in to pay for the initial costs and that's where we started.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍The question I always have in all these especially when we're talking about builders and communities on Hedera Hashgraph, because there's so many different networks out there. So why did you choose Hedera?  I mean for me I think I probably know why it makes sense to build gaming and metaverse aspects on Hedera but from your guys's purview, what made it make sense to target it there? How did you stumble across Hedera, and why did you choose to build on Hedera?

Earthlings.land – Patrick de Grijs – Founder & CEO
‍The funny thing there, is that I knew about Hedera, but not as much as some other projects that I had in my portfolio. So I started out with looking at another blockchain first and I told the developer, what do you think? is this something for us?, because he had the last say about this because he needed to build all these this functionality of it. He’s a very good programmer and we'll get to that in a second but he said no, if I'm going to build on this, I'm going to have to go back to school and since this is just me it's impossible. So I said OK we're going to skip that. So we looked into some other ones, he gave me one actually, but that one was having a lot of issues so we're not going to call out names. Let's not do that either, but it was super easy because some of those popular chains are very easy to build on, but I didn't want to go for that either. So I said well I have some HBAR as well and this looks like a very solid project, can you check that out on the technology side of things. And actually, within an hour he called me back saying this is so easy to build on, there's a lot of help from the community that you can get. I should have him as on the third screen here explaining of course but its what I got from him, it’s  easy to build on, there’s a lot of documentation, and you can start right away. Within two days he had set up this old minting process even with HashPack integrated. HashPack was also very helpful with that from the start but eventually he didn't even need backup from them but they have very good assistance there. I think if you can build a whole minting process yourself within two days that says something about Hedera bit about your house as well but yeah then we saw that they were starting to onboard all these NFT projects so it all made sense and we started there and we never regretted it.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I mean that's kind of what I've heard across the board especially with devs, and community builders that move to Hedera, and start actually testing out the network ,and the tool sets and we all know JavaScript is an extremely fluid language with application development. So anytime that I've been in a conversation with somebody number one you nailed it with the community, there's so much help in the community, but number two once these developers start using the tool sets it's really amazing. I've never really gotten negative feedback, and it's just amazing to see where we’re at.