Accelerating Innovation in the Hedera Ecosystem with HeadStarter

In this weeks Hedera Corner interview, King Solomon from Genfinity hosts HeadStarter CEO Tudor to talk about the progress they have made since they launched, what the main challenges HeadStarter is tackling, how they are helping new projects go to market, and much more.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Alrighty, I am going to kick this off. So if you guys are just joining, every Monday, Genfinity does kind of an HBAR ecosystems space with interviews in collaboration with HashPack. We're just trying to educate the community as much as possible. We have a HashPack community portal, which they transcribe all of these interviews. Genfinity has a Spotify and a podcast which we upload as well. Super excited today to have Tudor, who is the CEO of Head Starter come up and join us, as well as Patches from Hgraph Punks. Again, we were going to have Hello Future on here. We are going to reschedule that and facilitate that as quickly as we possibly can. So, I'm going to kind of get the ball rolling here. I am going to keep this to Head Starter first because Marc from HashPack transcribes all these interviews and we found very quickly as soon as we were mixing the content, he messaged us and he's like, "Oh my God guys, can you please do like 35 or 40 minutes dedicated so that I don't have to go through and try to transcribe like across the entire board?" So, huge shout out to HashPack, Marc, Jacob, May. They've been fantastic to work with across the board. But yeah, I want to introduce up Tudor. Tudor is the CEO of Head Starter. And I would like Tudor if you could give us a background on yourself, as well as an intro to Head Starter in the Hedera ecosystem, that would be fantastic.

Head Starter – Tudor – Founder & CEO
‍Hey, King Solomon, thanks a lot for having me here. It's great to be here on Genfinity spaces again. The story with Head Starter as a project started bubbling up, I would say, in Q4 of actually late Q3 of 2021. Personally, I was already in the Hedera space, in the crypto space, although I remember I have a very tragic story about mining in 2010s. I don't remember exactly, there's a sad story about me mining and losing those Bitcoin. But actually, the emergence that I have had into money and crypto started in 2017. And at that time, there wasn't much to go around. You had your faithful crypto Twitter, and at that time, I was already living in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and I couldn't find a lot of people to connect with. Now we all know how many crypto conferences and how Dubai became a hotspot for crypto projects, but in 2017, there were some initiatives from the government, there was a lot of blockchain buzz, but there wasn't a lot really that normal people can interact with, can start learning. And after I started a master's, which is the first master's in digital currencies, it's called Master's in blockchain and digital currencies by University of Nicosia, it's an online master's that is three semesters long. I strongly recommend it to everybody because it really opened up my eyes, and I, saw past the high, put the trend. The drive to make money and really understood what money is, and make me buy in a lot more to the Austrian School of Economics, into what Bitcoin stands and represents, and what crypto economies feel built around native layer one cryptocurrencies can represent to us and to how this is a paradigm shift that probably happens once in your lifetime. Yeah, I was bought in. I couldn't find a lot of people to network with, so I started my own meetup group. It's called Crypto Builders Community. We used to meet a lot more, and during the pandemic, it was fun because we were meeting weekly. Those were cool times, and we always were having a different presentation about the different educational subject. So started off in the Bitcoin and let's say the more Bitcoin-oriented space, then ventured off into Ethereum world DeFi, experimented with everything happening in the crypto space 2019, 2020, 2021, and actually in the Hedera space. I had learned about Hedera pretty early on, met Mance and Tom Toll Bridge very early 2018, I think. Then participated in the soft Etc, and with two of the former Hedera ambassadors in the Middle East, we started off a project called Taskbar. It was back in the days when on Hedera, you didn't have Smart contracts 2.0, and you couldn't do a lot of really cool things, but the space was starting to grow in excitement, especially because finally you had retail-facing applications and app Nets. Taskbar was one of these early app Nets on Hedera, and it is a key economy marketplace. Networking with a lot of people in the Hedera space, we came to find out how underrepresented Hedera is on a VC level. The user base was passionate, but it was kind of like a bit segregated from Ethereum and the DeFi world. We realized that everybody that was building on Hedera was kind of bootstrapping. So I realized at that time that something that we all needed to be able to build up the Hedera ecosystem was a Launchpad, and Head Starter. Initially, in its MVP stage, the mission of Head Starter was to create an ideal Launchpad. IDEO stands for initial tax offerings. Our bread and butter today is the facilitation of the public rounds for fungible tokens. Now, networking with the Hedera entrepreneurs and projects in the space, to date, we probably spoke to almost everybody publicly who's probably building on Hedera and who's still in stealth mode. We realized that a lot of them are still probably very tentative when it comes to launching a fungible token because of the lack of regulations, the confusion, and the overall scared that the SEC and the overall regulators have brought onto the crypto space when it comes specifically to projects that want to leverage a utility token. That's why we decided not only that of course, funding is great and we continue to aim to facilitate this for projects. But we wanted to go above and beyond. That's why we have been heads down building on the accelerator front. And on the accelerator front, what we aim to achieve is to not only give out some initial guidance and possible funding to early Hedera projects that are trying to build Cutthroat and Innovative applications on Hedera. We also want to connect them with the right network to give them assistance in any service that they might need, from legal to strategy, to tokenomics, to recruitment, marketing, etc. Also, help them with their race on the private side of things. So, it's multilateral, the support that we will be making a lot more public in the very near future on the accelerator side of things. We have enabled support for the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We call these public rounds INOs, which stands for Initial NFT Offerings. This is a model that has been working pretty well over the past months, maybe a year or so, because NFTs are still omitted when it comes to overall regulations in the US and Europe, and it is still a very lucrative avenue. One thing that I want to emphasize is that what Head Starter is set out to achieve is to enable the Hedera projects to build and grow and offer them a 360 solution when it comes to them going from ideation stage to mainnet. We have a lot of partners, some are public, some have not yet been announced. But one thing that is important is that we don't see INOs just as simple public rounds of a project launching and creating buzz around it, making it popular to the community. But we also see it as the crowdfunding way of startups going forward. So, we strongly believe that web3 crowdfunding, whether through IDOs, INOs, or any other mechanisms, will become a lot more prevalent in the future. Our most recent INO, which was for the Citadel Wallet app through an NFT project that is in deep symbiosis with the hardware wallet, represents an innovative way of crowdfunding or doing a pre-sale for a hardware wallet, which is done through an NFT. And that NFT, to people who have visited the Head Starter app in the past few days, is represented by some very cool 3D models and knights. Thereafter, after a few months, as the development of the underlying hardware wallet continues to unfold, people will be able to obtain the hardware wallet NFTs. And ultimately, once the product is ready in Q4, claim them - claim these wallet NFTs for the actual physical device. So, it's an innovative digital way of creating and crowdfunding for a project that is deeply, normally a physical device and something that is in the real world through something that is a bit more gamified, a bit more fun, the community can interact with the project and appreciate another NFT project aside from the actual, let's say, more boring hardware wallet. And this is the way that we see it going in the future. That's why the way that we currently perceive Head Starter is that it is a web-free crowdfunding platform for Hedera problems.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍That's awesome. Hey, real quick guys, because I forgot to mention this at the beginning, and I've got some more targeted questions for Tudor while he's up here as well. I believe that Hgraph punks before, and we've got some time, Tudor, so please. I've got a lot of questions for you. Hgraph punks is going to be doing a giveaway within this, I believe. They have meant for coming up. So I wanted to say for anybody that's in here right now, if you share this space and then tag two people, and then just take us, take a screenshot and then post it that you shared it and tag two people down below in the comments underneath this Twitter space right here. Later on, we will certainly be getting to potentially who might win some aspects around drop four with Hgraph Punk. So share it, tag two people, and then post a screenshot that you shared it and tag two people down below. That'd be fantastic. So, Tutor, you had mentioned, and this, it's been really interesting to watch because Head Starter seems to have their reach out a little bit everywhere within the space. You mentioned Hbar to the moon and Citadel wallet, the Guardians of The Citadel Knights. I see Earthlings down there as well. Can you talk about what those relate like? I guess how those, and I think that the Citadel wallet initiative that you guys have is also in collaboration with HashPack. Can you talk about how some of these initiatives start, why you're so excited to collaborate with the community? You guys are consistently putting spaces on, and what that relationship development aspect looks like through Head Starter to kind of even get in the doors of trying to work with Head Starter. You know, the onboarding process, the partnership process, what that's looked like for you guys.

Head Starter – Tudor – Founder & CEO
‍Thanks a lot for the question, and I hope I'll try to keep it a lot more swift this time. As an accelerator and crowdfunding engine, we not only onboard new projects and partners, but we are consistently always looking for new ones. We have three main avenues where we interact and onboard new partners/projects. It is the crowdfunding funding body. We call that party, and we're gonna have a new page that explains the whole mechanics behind Head Starter, but a very important component for Head Starter, there is the community and the funding aspect of projects. The funding project, the funding part is bilateral. It consists of a community site, a more public side of things, and that is through the public sales. You're correct. We had an Ideo that was across multiple rounds, which was for the HST token. This was in June and July of last year, so very early on in the Hedera DeFi history, just after standard Came live. We were the second DeFi application on Hedera, and after that, we had the Iano for our utility coins. This year, we had the launch of The Villages and towns for earthlings, and right now, The Guardians of The Citadel for Citadel wallet, and all these rounds were public so that the public community could participate in these sales. In the future, such activities will be growingly token gated through for holders of our utility coins or our token. At the beginning, we purposefully want to keep this as open as possible so that more people who are from the other communities will come to Hedera on board and get excited by the newest projects that are launching. Sorry, I was just going to say that we also have something that we call the Head Starter Committee, and the Head Starter Committee is formed by Angel of investors, and we are growingly onboarding VCS. What we want these entities to do is to, through Head Starter, gain visibility into what are the latest and most innovative projects launching on Hedera, and we introduced them to these projects and help them through some private funding to help these projects grow rich MVP and progress to ultimately have their public sale on Head Starter. So, this is a very important initiative that we felt like it was somewhat related to our long-term success, long-term goal, which is to launch as many projects as possible, as many awesome, whether it's Game five DeFi projects on Hedera as possible, grow TVL, grow Network adoption, etc. These are the funding side. We also have projects that we are launching, and for that, we have a form. Once the project applies for a Head Starter Ideo or Ino or for acceleration, we take them through a due diligence process, and we are bringing the projects that we feel take most of the boxes as we are trying to protect as much as possible our community and the entities that will proceed then in backing these projects up. Finally, we also have the accelerator side of things. So there might be partnerships with Head Starter that entities, or individuals can tap into, and that is for projects that are launching on Hedera. We've partnered with a few service providers, and as I mentioned, this can be on the legal side of things, it can be on the marketing on the development side of things, so having these service providers part of our accelerator ready to help on-demand, grow and scale some of these header projects. Also, have mentors or experts, whether that's on the community side of things, on tokenomics, or on different business mentorship. We also are growingly importing them in the accelerator as we are going on the final legs of formalizing it 100%.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I see five comments down there, guys, so you know only five people have retweeted and tagged two people. So, I know Hgraph punks is going to be giving away some stuff here at the end, so retweet! Let's get some more eyes! And there are 40 people in here right now, we can certainly get this up to 100 by the end of the space. Because Tudor has been in this space for quite some time with Head Starter, he is probably one of the OGs of OG's in the Hedera ecosystem. Again, retweet this space, tag two people, and you might have a chance to win something here at the end. I think a lot of people too, as well, Tudor within Head Start's ecosystem, don't realize that you guys have Dev shop aspects as well. And I would be really interested to hear from the firmware or software aspects as far as what you've facilitated within the Citadel wallet initiative, because each part of the moon's been here forever. He built out the hardware aspects of that from what I'm aware of, and you guys have really kind of helped to bootstrap out from the software standpoint. If you could just touch base briefly on, is it, how do I pronounce, is it Biddler or Builder? If you could touch on that, that'd be fantastic.

Head Starter – Tudor – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, I'd love to, thanks for the question. It's spelled Biddler, but we read it Builder. We were very fortunate to collaborate with Hbar to the Moon, AKA Andy from the get-go, as we were launching Head Starter there. He accepted to be one of our early advisors. He really helped us with the business development side of things and opened up some of those initial doors in the Hedera ecosystem with projects, whether it's bigger projects that have been building on Hedera from the beginning of Calaxy Tune FM, or even making acquaintance to some of the newer projects that are still probably still in stealth mode on Hedera. He's been great. We flew him over to Dubai when we had in I think, March of last year, we had our more public appearance in the crypto space where we had a booth for AIBC to buy together with Hedera. And we flew him over from LA, and we hit it off really well. So, he's being somebody who, in his day job until now, worked as somebody who is very security-focused on, I think, avionics and some other, let's say, very sensitive equipment. Probably, the device that he designed, in the overall scheme of things, for the Citadel wallet is a piece of cake compared to the equipment that he normally interacts with. And that's why it's so cutting edge in the hardware that it employs, and also the overall design of the technical solution.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I had the chance to actually interview him a while back when he was just kind of finalizing the iterization, or the aspects of Citadel, and understood what that guy and where that guy worked for, and I was like, 'wow, I did not know that this guy worked like within, I think it's like government or military initiatives from what I wrote from what I remember, but yeah, I didn't mean to interrupt, please continue.'

Head Starter – Tudor – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right, and so he needed, he needed somebody to, take him over the hump, and we were trying to help him out as Head Starter there as we were coming up with the overall concept of the Guardians of The Citadel and the launch, the strategy behind it, etc. in the earlier days, we were like, uh, thinking how can we take this project to the next level, and we wanted really for before we exposed the community with the project before we even consider the community backing us up. Through funding for the Citadel wallet and bringing the project to life, we wanted to have it at an NPP stage, and that's why our software development arm, Build their Labs, acted as a, Venture studio, and we were very fortunate because we have a couple team members that are very passionate about firmware development, and it was a, um, let's say of a passion project for them. So, yeah, we, if you guys saw it, I think a week ago, he posted a demo of connecting the hardware wallet to the computer to HashPack signing, creating an account, signing transactions, and it's really heartwarming to see a project that normally we live in web 3 and we are increasingly more engaged into metaverses and virtual life augmented reality, now we are at the stage where we okay, we're actually interacting with a physical device that we created ourselves, and through our awesome partnership with Hacken and some other security firms, we're looking forward to bringing this product to life and catering for our responsibilities as from software development side and from Head Starter with the funding.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍That's amazing. I mean, I'm also kind of interested because you briefly touched on it, but obviously a review process for the launch pad, but I, you know, I think that there's aspects you guys have connections into Saucer Swap as well. Can you talk about Sentinel and the review process that you guys go through as far as vetting out projects and what the relationship with Saucer Swap looks like and kind of the process that you guys go through whenever you do try to vet projects out, and I know obviously there's a lot of intangibles within that because just the nature of web3 in general, but you know, what kind of processes do you guys go through in reviewing and what is that relationship with Saucer Swap and like for Head Starter as well.

Head Starter – Tudor – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, that's a great question, and brings me to a point which I probably forgot to mention. That, last year, Head Starter had their Saucer Swap and stayed there, so the earliest DeFi protocols on Hedera. We created an initiative called the Hashgraph DeFi Alliance, and we will be coming out with a lot more on that front, pretty soon. And, I'm very excited for the community to interact and probably also enroll in the initiative. Going back to the question about the due diligence process, so, as I mentioned, um, whenever a project is applying for a Head Starter or accelerated or standard Ido or Ino, we are taking them through a multi-stage due diligence process. We have somebody who's an analyst in our team contact with the applicants first. The applicant needs to fill in a form with a lot of details, and then there's a couple of rounds where our analysts discuss, discusses with the projects. We have multiple review sessions before we consider a project being ready to either join the accelerator, so we have a few projects right now shortlisted for the accelerator, and we have some other projects that are shortlisted for a standard ID or Ino, and a more formal launch for the public round with Head Starter. And, our due diligence process, when it comes to projects that we are launching, is, fairly subjective. There are a lot of untenable points there,  and what we wanted to do with the Sentinel project is to offer the community, and this is an initiative that is, that is backed by the Hashgraph DeFi Alliance, we wanted to offer the community, when interacting with, um, uh, new projects, new tokens, a basic DYOR,  do your basic research, and, with some of the points that we employ in our due diligence process but are more objective. So, we tried to carve out the points that normally our due diligence process is a 70 point, report, but for the, for the Sentinel project, it's, uh, only, three dozen. I know it might sound, thick, and I know that a lot of people who have applied for the Sentinel project listing have had, quite some headache with the amount of information that they were requested, but we want this to be to serve as a sort of a transparency report for people that are in the Hedera ecosystem or are just joining, and they are seeing some of the tokens on the DEX, and they are considering interacting with those tokens. They can look at the Sentinel report for that respective project and have it serve as the first point when it comes to researching and foundering, um, uh, offering support or interacting with that respective token. It is not an endorsement by any sort of things; it's more of a transparency, initiative. And, afterwards, as the Sentinel report is out, the DAO or the holders of, I think, electromagnetic NFTs of Saucer Swap, look at the report and vote whether it should be whitelisted or not on the Saucer Swap DEX.. And, our partnership with Saucer Swap goes a bit, uh, obviously is multi-level and there's a lot of initiatives there, but the projects that we'll be launching through Head Starter, through an Ido which is for the fungible utility tokens generally, will be have will feature incentivized pools on Saucer Swap after launch.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍That's great, thank you so much for the answer. I posted and penned up above, and I know normally we do these for a half hour, but I'm happy to do it a little bit longer because I have some more questions, and I definitely want to get to Patches with Hgraph Punks again. If you guys are just joining, if you want to share this space and tag two people, that'll be fantastic so we can get some more eyes on Head Starter and Hgraph Punks here. You may win something at the end or have the chance to do so, at least. So if you share the space and tag two people, that'd be fantastic. I see Rose XRP in here, which is fantastic. Always try to do the cross-chain and cross-network aspects within everything that we do. I pinned up to the top, though, Tudor. You know, you guys, I think within the past week, posted about your revamped decentralized application. You talk about how important user experience is in web3 to make it really easy for people to understand what they're dealing with. And maybe just briefly on what that revamped decentralized application through Head Starter is facilitating for the community?

Head Starter – Tudor – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, thanks a lot for that question. The new app that we launched features a portfolio page. So not only are you seeing the latest projects that are launching or have launched with a Head Starter there, but you also have your own portfolio that is related to Head Starter assets. It features the current two tiers that we have, which are fairly easy to achieve, and they are based on the amount of token of HST tokens that you hold freely in your wallet. But we are also tracking some of the approved liquidity pools. So, until recently, the pools that we were tracking and adding up in our tier calculation were the Head Starter HST pools on Saucer Swap and Heli Swap paired with HBAR or USDC. But we will soon add the latest pool that we support, which is the one on Pangolin where HSD is paired with HBAR. And this is the first time that people that are interacting with HST pool benefit for three types of rewards by locking in their liquidity pool tokens into the farms. And the three rewards are in HST token itself, in HBAR, and in P-BAR. So, it's an awesome initiative by Pangolin, and I think going back to the overall theme that you usually do, King Solomon, of multi-chain collaboration, I think the Pangolin DEX being and supported supporting Hedera is great for the overall exposure of the space. And we wanted to really lead the way into welcoming them in the DeFi space by being the first Hedera Native project with a utility token is up there and incentivizing community to try and interact with the Hedera DeFi specs. Yeah, so I guess the DAPP for Head Starter, we're trying to expose their portfolio so some people might have interacting with different Head Starter IDOs and they need to claim their tokens, which are vested. We also have the utility coins that people can burn and can claim some HST against burning them, and all of these functionalities can be leveraged by projects that launch through us. We also will be creating some basic tooling that all these projects that are launching can leverage, and something that can be easily to recreate going forward. For example, the functionality of burning for the Citadel wallet nights will be in a certain way replicated so that the Nature Night, which is the most rare and thought after, would interact with the Nature Night with a smart contract and you will be receiving three wallet NFTs that you can claim afterwards for the hardware version and get it delivered then in Q4. Our utility coins are pretty. There was something that we also were pretty proud of because it was pretty innovative. Our eligibility for participating in Head Starter IDOs and INOs as I mentioned earlier will be growingly demanding of these resources. The least rare one is the bronze coin. Initially, there were 200 bronze coins in circulation, but people already burned I think more than 115 to date, so it's growingly scarce. We will continue to have this dual model with fungible tokens and NFTs to encourage everybody to engage with either of the asset they see more suited.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍100% no, and I appreciate that because I was actually going to ask about the HST token as well as the NFTs, but I think you tackled it there. So before we move on to patches and please Tudor, I would love for you to stay up during that as well so we can keep trying to push this space and get people because we're recording obviously, we're going to be transcribing the spaces. HashPack will be pushing it out. We'll be pushing out short snippets from this as well. You briefly mentioned earlier, and I always try to do this so you don't have to answer this, but you briefly mentioned moving forward into 2023, maybe some interesting partnerships. Maybe if you don't have to answer which partnerships they may be exactly, but would love to maybe hear some aspects of what those partnerships may represent for Head Starter moving forward.

Head Starter – Tudor – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, I'm happy to try to tease at some Alpha. As I mentioned, we are working to get a lot more VC interest in the Hedera space. So there's one thing that's there's some things that might be coming up on that front when it comes to projects that are launching on Hedera I think a couple of the projects that we'll be launching are fairly already known to the Hedera ecosystem, but there are also a couple that - I mean, a couple that are in the immediate future that I'm particularly excited about that either have multi-chain aspects or aspirations. Or are something that is totally innovative, and the way that they will be proceeding to fulfill their web 3 like crowdfunding event will also be relatively unique. Also, on the collaboration side of things, when it comes to service providers and experts, there's a lot of familiar faces. But I'm also excited on that front to make some more public announcements about partnerships that will, of entities, that will be backing up the growth of Hedera on the services side of things. Overall, I think that the hedera space has made amazing strides over the past year or so. And obviously, we owe it to projects, early projects, and ecosystem enablers like patches, hbar punks, since early 2021. The NFT space on Hedera has been bubbling. You have the early enablers there with go mint and apnet, and the space has changed a lot since then. The space has changed a lot since smart contracts 2.0. The space is also, I see, I heard patches over the past few spaces that has been changing a lot since Chat GPT. And I said this to my community back when we had the head starter Ido pre-launch spaces that expect a lot more adoption and TVL and overall network activity next year. And I couldn't be more excited for the years to come.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Well, thank you so much, Tutor. It's been a pleasure. Please hang out with us up here. If you guys are just joining in right now, Tutor is the CEO of Head Starter or head starter as a growth accelerator, a Kickstarter, a launchpad. They've got their own NFTs, they've got their own token. They have multiple relationships in the Hedera ecosystem, whether that be the new Citadel wallet or whether that be saucer swap or whether that be relationships with HashPack. And certainly, excited to see all of the aspects of head starter's growth into 2023.