Leading the way in NFT Innovation with Hedera

In this weeks episode of the Hedera corner, King Solomon from Genfinity hosts Patches, CEO of Hgraph Punks, Hgraphio, and TurtleMoonCC. In this conversation, they dive deep into the background of the Hgraph Punks collection, how the idea came to be, what utility these NFTs, and what the plans for the future are.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I do want to introduce up here, Patches. If you're not aware, Patches is the CEO of Hgraph Punks, Moonshells, Hgraphio, and Turtle Moon, kind of run the gamut here. I do believe that we have a giveaway here for somewhere near the end of this space. So if you're just hopping in right now, if you share this space and tag two people and post underneath in the comments that you shared and tagged two people, you may be able to potentially win something, GraphQL API with Patches as well. I mean, to the point that I believe even Swirlds uses that. So, Patches, welcome up to the stage, man. It's a pleasure to have you here, and thank you so much, Tudor, for taking time out of your busy day to join us as well.

TurtleMoon – Patches – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, thanks so much for having me, and it was great hearing about everything Head Starter is doing in that awesome, awesome spaces so far. So I hope I can keep the vibes right there where you left it off. Do you want me to just dive into stuff? What do you got?

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I think I mean, I would love to give just an overview of the ecosystem that you guys are building. I know we kind of had a unique interview a little while back which people can check out on HashPack, people can check out through Genfinity as well. But for people that are new here that don't know about Hgraphio, Turtle Moon, Moonshells, Hgraph Punks, maybe just an overview of the ecosystem that you've really built out over the past couple of years here would be great.

TurtleMoon – Patches – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, no, I'm prepared for that. So that's good, good. We're aligned there. Yeah, so on Patches, CEO of Turtle Moon and Hgraph Punks. We really decided to see what, what can Hedera do for NFTs all the way back in September 2021. The protocol for NFTs, you know, HIP 17 and 18 just came out and we saw the technology is really fundamental and exciting because it did a lot of things that we need in Web 3. But then it didn't have all those overhead costs and complexity when it comes to a blockchain versus a Hashgraph. And so we set up shop, and we started out, and we wanted, we were the first large collection to be built on Hedera. And our purpose and our goal and our mission since that time has been to prove that Hedera is the best tech for NFTs, you know, and that's been our mantra for years now. And I think we've been doing a really good job on that mission. So we started out working on the initial infrastructure that needed to be created. The first issue was very difficult to understand how to mate. Everyone remembers, you know, if you have a glitch Punk, which is our first series of punks at Hgraph Punks, they're all on their own token ID, and this was all the way back where we didn't really understand the token ID collection and we were working with Baptiste some exact wallet all the way back then to figure out what is the best method. Um, and we built after we figured out the best method of minting on Hedera. We built open source minting tools, and that's kind of where Turtle Moon started to get created. We open-sourced them as Turtle Moon tools. Anyone could download it: desktop application Mac, Windows, Linux. And he could mint on Hedera. So we solved that issue. You know, it's a great second issue. Okay, how do you launch? You know, luckily Hedera is really cool, and you can do P2P transfers very easily. Even today, HashPack has secure trade. If you have multiple NFTs, you want to trade with someone else, you can do that all in your wallet without going to a marketplace. It's a very cool unique thing about Hedera. And back then, people were just like trading like, 'Hey, I'll send you Hbar, you send me NFT.' And it was really hard to launch projects. So we set up Turtle Moon Launchpad, and we wanted to create the tooling for a launchpad in the space. We launched Href Punks on it, and then we have a Moon Shells - I'm sorry, not many shows up - Shell Mates. That's all mean for having so many total themed names. The Shell Mates, like Hangry Barboons and Dead Pixels, also launched on this Turtle Moon Launchpad. It was really cool to see the usage of an actual full soup-to-nuts system for NFT launches on the network. And then we found out, okay, now all these NFTs exist, how do you interact with them? And so we enhanced Turtle Moon's functionality to do things like promo code minting, which we're doing today again. Solomon hinted at it. We're giving away a Coin Eyes Punk, which is a whitelist token for upcoming mint April 10th 7 PM Eastern. You need a Coin Eyes to get a mint. It's one-to-one, but it is over-allocated, so it's an access token, and then you have a chance to mint. We're giving that away using this promo code system that I'm talking about. So again, tweet the space, retweet it, tag two people, and we're gonna pick one person at the end of the spaces to give a free Coin Eyes Punk using the promo code minty. So we created that tool, which really allows it to easy giveaways such as this exact use case that I just described. Then we created a farming platform using our NFT project Moon Shells. So Moon Shells are like the alpha and beta testers of everything Turtle Moon does, and they did the first three-tiered farming, where we took the metadata from the first Mama tort and it went into the egg, and then it went into the baby torque that was born from it. So it was really cool to test out some mechanics of Hedera consensus service while having an interactive way for people to see this complex technology have some sort of value for our user. We created auctions, we hosted the last Hedera charity auction on our tournament platform, we raised eleven thousand dollars for a really great charity picked by Liam Baird. We launched voting and created the first token-gated voting platform which Hgraph punks actually voted to make Drop four whitelist-only. Again, April 10th, 7 PM Eastern Time on Turtlemoon, and it was really cool to see a token-gated vote of participants in the NFT project decide how the NFT project is going to execute the next drop. Then, we created a reverse music menu. So, working with CZ, we created the liftoff which we already completed, our first met of our show, and we're working on building the second one that will have multiple bands on a live stream sound stage into our metaverse. It's for holders only, so that's all the issues we tried to solve as Hgraph punks, and we're currently building some things for our holders. One is a US compliant point system so that you can earn and exchange points based on the NFTs you hold and what you do with them, such as staking. We already passed the proof of concept there which is really great in the last couple of weeks. And now we're working on some demos. Excited to innovate in the space and push forward some mechanics within these very opaque regulatory environments that we live in, and we've just been nailing our roadmap. I'm really proud of Hgraph punks and what we've done. You know we airdropped corn ice punks, it was the first big airdrop of a thousand NFTs, at the time it was the biggest one, created the farming platform for our glitch punks who could actually farm corn ice punks, executed the biggest dynamic airdrop to all holders for the Halloween airdrop where it sensed the holder's wallet noticed all of Hgraph punks they held and then airdropped new seasons punks into that wallet on demand, and it would mint them and then send them immediately. We executed the first token-gated metaverse live concert, and we launched our holder voting platform and we're already using that. So, extremely excited about the things we've accomplished, and we got a lot coming up that we're just going to continually now out, and then again drop four April 10th, 7 PM Eastern, get your corn eyes, and you'll be able to participate in our next drop.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, it's always interesting to hear from you, Patches, because you've said it, I think months ago to me, where it's like we're actually building out real-world use cases on Hedera in the form of pixel art that looked like turtles, but at the back end of this, there's like real-world initiatives that are playing into basically everything that you guys are building. One of the things that's always interesting to watch from you, and I know I think Tudor kind of mentioned it earlier, is that you've been playing around a lot with the AI aspects. You put out a tweet recently stating that a wave for adoption, a wave of adoption for Hashgraph and blockchain is coming soon, all digital media becomes simpler to create overnight. Millions have access to AI, and the efficiency of AI is accelerating the space, so the need for proof of digital legitimacy and ownership is now imperative for a lot of enterprises. That last statement, for me, is something that I would love for you to expand upon if you can. So again, I'll repeat it: the need for proof of digital legitimacy and ownership is now imperative for a lot of enterprises, given the speed that AI is becoming adopted within the world, let alone web 3. If you could expand upon that, that'd be great.

TurtleMoon – Patches – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, yeah, so I definitely have been living inside, I think, Cap calls it 'The My AI Mech,' where I just kind of go very deep into AI, and it's extremely exciting and terrifying at the same time. To rope and ground to each craft punks, we actually have a ChatGPT-enabled bot in our Discord now that ChatGPT wrote for me based on prompts and directions. So you can go in there and hit like exclamation point 'Spike' and ask it any questions, and we're going to keep enhancing him. He's just been Soft Orange so far. But yeah, the entire paradigm of web3 and how we operate inside it has changed in the last two weeks, and if you don't acknowledge that as an engineer, unfortunately, you're going to get left behind in the next couple of months because the rate of speed is insane. You know, like seven days after GPT-4 came out, people already had ways that they could think and code based on external ear modules that listen to brainwaves and translate into words. And then this morning, we saw the first inklings of an AGI model, which is a general intelligence. So it's not just an LLM, which is a linguistic language model. It's an AGI, which is kind of the iRobot version, where you have a replication of what you would, you know, perceive as consciousness. So, it's going very fast, and as all of this is happening, you know, like, I got into mid-journing, I've been doing a bunch of AI art. Um, just trying to understand how problems work in different AI tools. And the rate of digital media creation is insane. You know, I saw a demo this morning where someone texts to 3D model in Blender that was a complete game sequence. It took him 30 seconds, and they just wrote out a very detailed paragraph of what they wanted to see, and then it executed all live in front of them, a new 3D environment. And so the ways that I would translate that back to NFTs and to fungible tokens and web 3 is that, you know, if you're in the Hedera space, you've probably heard Lehman Bear talk about how he wants to just wave his hand and create a world. And this is exactly how that happens. But the problem is that when you have this much media creation and data creation globally using this AI technology that just again will exponentially get faster and slow compared to what it's going to be in two weeks, and it's already insanely fast. At so much misinformation is going to exist everywhere, you know, if you're a totalitarian government, you can create a fake thing that happened in the 1970s with real photos from it, biographies of people that were there. Just a massive amount of fake information can be created that looks extremely real. And so, the tokenization of data is going to be imperative for understanding what digital communication is actually real. It's a little scary, but any enterprise, like an example would be coupons, you know, like it used to be easy to kind of mess with a coupon. Now I could go to Walmart, get 10 coupons, understand the sequence numbers of the barcode, get AI to just kind of break that system down, print out a bunch of coupons, go there, and then I can now attack a lot of systems that depend on older archaic things like print. And so, the need of a tokenized coupon just became a hundred thousand times more important because if you don't, once all of your systems can be abused and then you're going to lose a lot of money and breakage as an enterprise. So that's just a little example of why it's going to be extremely important very shortly for a lot of enterprises to look into web3. And I do think through Davos and through, you know, Eth Denver, which we were at as Agecraft Punks handed out 300 stickers, I worked for the Hedera booth, it was awesome. It's going to be imperative for these enterprises to embrace web3, whether they like it or not. And I think Hedera is in a really pretty upfront being in the solution that's cheap, fast, eco-friendly, and already has some enterprise use cases that show at scale as possible.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, I was going to ask you if you plan to integrate AI into any of the Turtle Moon aspects, but I think that given your answer of being left behind, Fai isn't integrated in certain ways responsibly, and maybe am I correct in assuming that, yes, you know, if you can make sense of it, that you plan to integrate AI initiatives into Turtle Moon?

TurtleMoon – Patches – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, well, I mean, again, it's um, I think it's got to kind of start getting weird where you don't know if you're... I think if we're already there, like when you read tweets, do you know if AI wrote that or not? Like when you get resumes, do you know if someone used AI to help that? So, digital content's already being consumed this way. That's why we have an AI bot. I wanted to understand it. I think it's important to embrace this technology because it's not going anywhere, and it's only going to get bigger. And then, yeah, through Hgraph Punks, through Turtle Moon, through Hedera.io, all of these are looking at ways that we can use AI and to enhance our holders' value, to enhance our ability to help people get data off the main net, or to build our tools to be more verbose for a better use case. So, and you can go in and talk to spike right now, and that's always just fun. People have fun breaking him, asking them certain questions.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I know I see Renly down there, and I know Renly is pretty good with, you know, some of the giveaway aspects. Really, if you don't mind helping with us picking a winner for the coin eyes, that would be absolutely fantastic. If you can do it, if not, I can probably facilitate it as well. I wanted to ask you though, Patches, there was a recent announcement with Hashconnect upgrading into Hedera wallet connect aspects. Can you touch base a little bit about what that represents for the Hashgraph ecosystem? Maybe just briefly, yeah.

TurtleMoon – Patches – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, another thing I like to do in the community is try to help the working groups. From my perspective of developer standpoint, so I'm in the DAO working group, and actually Turtle Moon hosts the DAO vote for the Dow working group, and then I'm in the NFT metadata group, and we're solidifying some music metadata there for a hip that, so that'll be coming up. And then I'm also pretty entwined into the wallet connect that's coming out, and I'm going to be helping pull requests and managing that open-source project, and it's going to be really cool to have things like wallet connect, which is a very massively adopted wallet connect, what's the name, but it's a connecting wallets system on other networks like Metamask and Trust wallet. I believe are both wallet connect enabled, and so what they'll do is they'll allow Hedera wallets to easily integrate into people's systems that have already integrated wallet connect. Is my understanding, it is really on its infancy stages, so there's only been one commit, and we're still working out the internal workings of how we build this as an open-source project, just because the rollout was a little clunky, but the future was looking really bright for it, and it will be really cool to have this interoperable, very massively adopted thing be enabled by Hedera as well. So, you know, the seamlessness should be higher, which will be really cool.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, when we talk crosshair, I mean, I know you guys have already confirmed, but next Wednesday, we're going to be doing a cross-chain Punk space, as well as some other aspects within our kind of Wednesday spaces. So, Hgraph punks will be there, Aleft zero punks will be there, Casper punks will be there, XRPL punks will be there. Jeremy Hogan's going to be talking about legal and regulatory clarity around the Ripple lawsuit, and maybe just as a space as a whole, I think we're gonna have Expector there and EXO worlds from a V chain. So, it's just really cool to kind of try to put these things together. I know we did a really big one last week with some layer one CEOs and CMOS and all this stuff, but even from the community aspect, it makes sense to kind of build this stuff out cross-chain as much as we possibly can, I did see an interesting tweet from you today. Patch is about a rumble Royale and I'm not sure what the rumble Royale is, but can you tell us about what it is a little bit?

TurtleMoon – Patches – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, absolutely. So I'll pin that up. It's tonight 9 p.m Eastern. Go into our Discord. We already have, I think, 400 people signed up for it. It's to get a coinized punk. You know, we're really trying to go hard on promoting this drop. It's been a while since we've done one. Renly just, like, completely killed the artist. She does. I'm really excited for people to see all these new, new punks come out. And then we're really trying to. Just like you said, we're doing the cross-chain spaces. That is after mint day, but on Thursday, we're going, uh, I'll be on XRP Spaces, uh, giving away another coin eyes and pumping up some XRP people about the future Hgraph punks and just getting the message out. But the Discord Rumble is a game that you can come in, you just click a button and then everyone, in a battle royale style through text-based updates, you know, you get stabbed or you stab people and it's a fun little versus game, and at the end someone wins, and then that person gets a promo code and they can go and get their corn eyes mark. So that's tonight, 9 p.m Eastern. And then again, our drop four is April 10th, 7 p.m Eastern, 512 punks, 500 H, uh, each Punk, and you just need a coin eyes or clap hunk or glitch Punk 2 come and try your hand at getting a new bunk.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, I mean, I'm curious if you could touch base on so this has dropped four. How many more drops will there be, and I'm trying to buy Renly some time down here, uh, while she figures out who is gonna get the coin eyes, uh, and I would love Renly if you know the answer to come up, whenever you do have it, but can you touch base on the drops? How many more drops are there going to be with Hgraph punks, um, as well as, you know, I know that there was a Hedera Community leaders discussion on Discord today. Can you tell us a little bit about what those discussions represent, who participates, and what's actually being discussed within those discussions as well?

TurtleMoon – Patches – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, yeah, so first, the drop numbers are kind of, I can't say anything for certain because we do have our voting mechanism. We don't know how many we're gonna drop. In the next one, because we look at them, you know, kind of where the market's at and when and how many make sense at one time. So, there's gonna be more drops, is all I can say at this point. And then we'll have votes, in the future. And then, uh, for the, oh, he's gave me two questions. What's the second one? Uh, oh yeah, the community stuff. So this morning was really great. Got to talk on the Hedera-wide Community Discord chats It's really just about an update on, you know, Swirlds Labs gets up there and talk about some cool tips that they're working on. We had, uh, it's Brandon who is an amazing - you might know him as Pixel Rug - but he's an amazing community member. Really, I don't know what Hedera would do without him. He's kind of like both Lou for a lot of, uh, project management. He got up there and just talked about what they've been doing on the Hedera Enthusiast podcast, and then the working groups that he's in. Um, I went up there and, you know, described how, you know, hgraph IO is building some new tools like subscriptions to the mainnet, stuff smart contract platform for easy creation and distribution, and then, you know, update on Hecraft Punks on how we were at Eth Denver. I actually got to present Hecraft Punks' voting platform at Dow Denver as an example of how you can enable your holders because there's a problem where you can lose some of your holders in a DAO from a vote because it's too expensive for gas. You know, it could be five ten dollars depending on your network, and so showing how you could utilize Hedera as a dow platform while staying on your native network using the Hgraph punks vote as a demonstration on how it costs one one thousandth of a penny for everyone to vote, and then it's immutably forever written, and then also you can use that if you're on Ethereum, and then just use Hedera for the consensus service. So, yeah, it's kind of like a network-wide update of what people are working on, and then, uh, yeah, I was really excited to talk about the cool things that we're doing and the ability that we've had to break outside of the Hedera system and show other networks just what exactly each product, Hgraph punks are doing to demonstrate again Hedera is the best tech for NFTs, here is why H draft punks are front and center.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍That's awesome. I wanted to give both you and Tudor the opportunity to maybe talk about anything that you're excited about within, you know, any events coming up, you know, outside of the mint, uh, for you guys Hgraph punks, but like spaces that you guys are interested in joining this week. Or whether it be Citadel aspects with, uh, the Head Starter initiatives or anything you guys are kind of looking forward to, and then I think Renly is going to announce, the winner of the CoinEyes, and then we'll close this out. So, uh, I'm gonna start with, I'll start with Tudor because I know, you know, we went kind of 1-1 and then let's go back to Tutor real quick. Anything you're interested in or spaces that you're joining that you would like other people to join and pay attention to this week, and then maybe just an overview on 2023, what you're excited about, and then I'll move to Patches, and we'll keep rolling.

‍Head Starter – Tudor – Founder & CEO
‍Thanks a lot,  for the question. It's always great to hear Patches and the amazing initiative that he's in. Like, I'm always fascinated by how much work he's putting in, and he's the one-man wrecking crew for a Head Starter we generally have spaces. We have two types of spaces that alternate between weeks. One is the Hedera ecosystem Spotlight Series, where we're bringing and inviting the most innovative and let's say projects that are building on Hedera, that are spread across different verticals. We are excited to feature one innovative, very innovative project this week, and afterwards, at the end of this month, there is the snapshot that's being taken for the Citadel wallet night, the Geo, the gotc knights that will reflect on the airdrop for the gold knight. If you guys haven't checked it out, it's on app.headstarter.org or on citadelwallet.io. The craftsmanship for these nights is second to none. Afterwards, of course, we're very excited to announce our upcoming project that we will be launching. Not only that, but we're very excited to also see a lot of people in real life as we'll also be participating in some crypto conferences around the world. Ourselves, we're gonna make it to the US, but we're going to have a footprint in Southeast Asia, in particular, in the months to follow.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Awesome, thank you so much. Patches, any closing thoughts, and then we will, uh, Renly is up here. If you're not aware, Renly is the second hand of all of Turtle Moon's initiatives. Renly will announce the coin as Punk's winner, but Patches, any closing thoughts?

TurtleMoon – Patches – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, yeah. I know. I really appreciate the kind words. Headstarter. I definitely, Renly ping slash all of the teammates at Agecraft, Punk's, Turtle Moon, and Nhrefil. Where are how we get to do all these things so quickly without Renly? I don't think I'd be able to function at all. She's the best project manager and tells me to stop doing new things and just do the things in front of me, which is needed most of the time. But yeah, I'm excited to see how AI comes to terms with how the world comes to terms with AI and how Hedera embraces it in 2023, which I think was one of your four questions. Supplement and I think it's going to be really exciting when it becomes clear exactly how Web3 will facilitate AI adoption in a way that allows the complexity of needing to know what is and is not real to exist. So very exciting. And then just, it's extremely exciting again. April 10th, 7 PM Eastern, 512 punks, 500 H-bar show up with their white lists. You can come and mint. It is over-allocated, so just because you have a token doesn't mean you can mint, but it gives you a good chance because it's not that it's only six percent over-allocated. So show up on time, get your punk, and Renly, what do you got for us?

TurtleMoon – Renly – Founder
‍Hey, thanks for all of that, Patches. Thanks for having me up, Solomon, and helping us with this giveaway. Excited to announce our winner is Rose xrp. Now congrats, Rose If you send me a DM or the Hgraph punks account a DM, it will get you hooked up. Congrats again!

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Awesome guys, well congrats Rose and thank you so much for, from Genfinity's standpoint, to Tudor and to Head Starter for coming on to this discussion. I know how busy everybody is because Head Starter and ourselves have had a couple of different times back and forth where we've missed interviews, one being my fault, I think one on the opposite end of the spectrum. But, you know, it's always amazing to see real builders in this space and to have these people up here speaking. I would certainly put Patches in Turtle Moon into that group and the Head Starter entire team into that group as well. So, yeah, we'll be pushing out a lot of content around this and looking forward to discussing with you guys and seeing you guys grow in the near future as well. And, as always, it's been awesome. Rose, send a DM to Renly and yeah, congratulations and we'll see you guys next Monday where we do these Hbar spaces. I think we have some pretty big ones coming up soon. We might have ServiceNow coming in soon. We might have some other real heavy Enterprise players coming in, so it'll be fun to watch. And thanks everybody for listening as well. So I'll talk to you guys when I talk to you and thanks Valor for hosting. Thanks to the Genfinity team as well. Yeah, we'll see you guys next time. Bye.