NFT Market Place & Launchpad on Hedera! Hedera Sentient / King Solomon (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

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King Solomon interviews Hedera Sentient 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

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 and our Hedera Corner, in collaboration with HashPack, we are doing multiple Hedera Hashgraph ecosystem interviews, and we are super excited today to have Patricia from Hedera Sentient, which is a launch pad and marketplace built out in the Hedera ecosystem. How are you doing today, Patricia?

Hedera Sentient – Patricia - Founder
‍I'm doing great, thank you so much for inviting us. I'm really excited to be able to be here with you, talking about our platform, the Sentient platform.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Awesome! So, I always like to start by getting a little bit of background about the people behind the project, so if you could kind of talk about your experience in crypto and Web 3, what brought you to Hedera, and then maybe move into what made you guys decide to start Hedera Sentient?

Hedera Sentient – Patricia - Founder
‍Okay, so I started in crypto back in early 2019, so it's already a while from this crazy life. In mid-2019, I started doing content creation for a crypto platform, Coil, from the XRP side. Then, I started being a content creator there, and I did this for more than a year. Then, I had to move away for a bit because I reached a breakout point, because it also happens, we burn out in crypto. It's super fast-paced, and so I was only checking crypto on the side. I was not creating content, and I took a break from crypto for a few months. Then, I came back, started digging about Ethereum NFTs, started buying things here and there from several projects. Then, a friend of mine, Eli, who also brought me to Sentient, told me about Hedera NFTs. I started buying their NFTs, and at this point, I'm a hoarder more than a collector, because I think I have almost 500 Hedera NFTs at this point, so yeah, hoarding right now. Then, he told me about Sentient as well. I was already a big fan of the project, and after a while, I joined the Sentient Discord. At this time, Sentient was an art project, interestingly enough. It was not a launchpad yet, it was not a marketplace, because Sami is also an artist and he loves to do art pieces. So, we started as an art project, but Sam is also an amazing dev, so he was developing tools to help him launch his own NFTs. Then, more people started mentioning, "Why don't you use those tools to launch other collections and help other projects?" And that's how the launchpad came to life, curiously, because it was not something that was planned or made for, but we have the knowledge, so we have to take advantage of this. Sam is a great temp, it's his real-life job for more than 15 years at this point, so he's pretty capable. Then, from the launchpad, it was, "Okay, now let's take advantage of a bit of time that I have here, and let's create a marketplace." And in two to three weeks, the marketplace was live and now, the marketplace exists for a month and a half of each eye of two months, so the marketplace side is really super super new yet. We are starting to have more people coming a little bit every day, so yeah, really exciting I'll say that.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍You know, it's been really interesting to kind of watch because, you guys are killing it in the space right now. I see tons of projects launching with you guys. And the one thing you did mention kind of you know, even with stepping away from crypto, I see a lot of, you know, kind of burnout in the space across multiple people. But what's really interesting within Hedera is it's been you know, I don't even really consider it like we say it all the time, but it hasn't really been a bear market. It's more of like a build market, like you see people really building projects and ecosystems and values. So I wanted to kind of get into from the Hedera Sentient standpoint what differentiates the marketplace as well as the launch pad compared to what we've seen out there right now that was already existing. I would love to hear your take on what really separates you guys from, I don't like saying competitors, but let's say co-op edition.

Hedera Sentient – Patricia - Founder
‍This is something that, we don't like either in the sense that, we have a very fair vision in the sense that if we have a good platform people will come to us, but we don't need to say bad things about others that exist around here. It's not the way we work either, so we try to build up for us things that are new to Hedera. For example, in terms of the marketplace, before, when you wanted to change the price of an NFT, you had to list the NFT, cancel the sale entirely, pay the listing fee, and then release the NFT again. Sam made this work in another way. Instead of having to list, you can just go there, change the price of the NFT. You can change it 100 times if you want and all the time without having to pay the network fee because this is all done internally. So this may seem like a really small thing, but if you think about the amount of times that you want to change the price of the NFT at a certain point, after a few months or a few years, all those things to change their prices add up. So we don't think, because this is such a cheap, free network, that it makes any difference, but after years, it certainly does so for example, that's a one thing different in terms of marketplace in terms of functionality. In terms of launch pad, when we started the launch pads and to my knowledge, we were the first, or one of the first launch pads where people would not have to pay hbar in advance. So what we do is give a shot to everyone. We are very careful with the projects that we launch, of course, because we don't want to start launching scams on our launch pad. So we are, we have, a doxing um schedule that we follow with each project that approaches to launch, but we don't take hbar up front. We believe that someone that is new in the ecosystem has needs to have as many chances, and someone that might not have a lot of money as someone that another project that already made sales, that already has hbar, or someone that has more money available. So we take a percentage of each NFT sold. If the project does well, we do well as well. If the project fails to sell, we won't earn either. We are not going to go to the project and say "now you need to give me imagine 10,000 hbar, or five thousand hbar, or fifteen thousand hbar because you didn't sell". That won't happen. If the project doesn't sell, we don't get our fees either, but this is also something that we try to help the project sell with us, because we want projects to succeed, to have a good project for themselves and for their community. So we also give advice. It's not just a situation where the project approaches us to launch with us and then we say "okay we will launch you and go away disappear until midnight". We don't do that. We are there to help the projects with questions, with advertising,  for example retweeting their tweets or being with them on amas or spaces if they are going to do any of those. We saw each other on the orbis 86 spaces, so yeah, we do that a lot. We try our best to support the projects that launch with us.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍100% and I think um, a lot of this kind of boils down to, you know user experience and just making that user experience as seamless as possible, continuing to push forward and innovate both from the community onboarding standpoint and the project onboarding standpoint. The one thing that I did want to point out within your platform that I think is really interesting is kind of the increased, the data analytics that you guys have available for these different projects and just really making, like bringing to light, like all of these aspects that just make it much easier to participate, in the community in the ecosystem. So gigantic shout out to that and I think that's through, a relationship that you guys have with NFTier, if I'm not mistaken, so I kind of want to get into you know some of the some of the milestones and achievements that you guys are um really proud of so far, yeah, so if you want to touch on that a little bit, that would be fantastic.