Comic Book Universe on Hedera! Orbis86 / King Solomon (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

—

King Solomon interviews Orbis86 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
‍I do want to definitely invite up Orbis 86 as well. If you guys aren't aware, Orbis has done multiple Twitter spaces recently, you know, over the past few months, driving in tons of engagement from multiple different communities to not only engage with other Hedera community members but also start learning about the tools and functionality of the Hedera network. Yesterday, or on Saturday during Hederaween, we had two people that I believe have played around with HashPack a little bit that come from Ethereum. They have on-chain Buccaneers and they came into the Hedera Hashentines space on Saturday and gave away a thousand dollar NFT, which was fantastic. And I believe Orbis's mission is also to onboard kind of the next billion people into Web3 and certainly wanting to do that through utilizing the Hedera network. So man, I'm giving Orbis an intro like I would normally give you, Patches, and I apologize for that, but what's up Orbis and welcome up to the stage. Thank you so much for joining us.

Orbis 86 – Soniya Ahuja - Founder
‍Hey, hey King Solomon, thank you for having me and it's an absolute pleasure to be sharing the stage with you, with Patches. And Patches, it's no secret, right, it has been building for a long time in the space and had, he is greatly revered to practice your reputation obviously and it precedes you. And when I met with the Hedera Foundation team back at NFT London, any question I had about development and this is even coming from Brady, right, like literally from Swirls lab, they would be like, "Brady was like, you know what, I can't remember, but Patches would probably be the right person to talk about it." So that's coming literally from Swirlds lab, right? And King Solomon, we have obviously wiped with the fact you aren't just a, I mean, you know, you're a freaking genius obviously with what you do, but also the fact that you believe in developing web three, right? And yes, we are here, we are talking about Hedera. I know we have a lot of love for Hedera, but also we keep our minds open and then we look at all of the other ecosystems out there too. And I think that is extremely important because at the end of the day, like five years from now, users will not know which ecosystem they are really getting onboarded to, right? Because the experience needs to be that smooth and that friendly. And I completely agree with Patches with what Patches has said. So over for our project, all of our Sigma DAO members, we minted our NFT on Ethereum. So all 25 of them, we told them we just sent them two videos that, "Hey, you know, this is how you create a wallet, this is how you associate a token." We did not have a single person come back to us asking us to help them through anything, right? Except for the fact that they needed like a couple of H-bar for the token association. But I completely agree with the purchase. I've mentioned this a few times that the first touch point for consumer onboarding, right? For onboarding anyone for onboarding the end user, the first touch point is the wallet, and again, props to HashPack for an amazing wallet onboarding experience. Marc knows I've mentioned this a few times, and literally, I can have, you know, a screenshot from people saying that the wallet onboarding was fantastic. That includes my husband, who's actually not as deep into web three as I am, and he just has, like, a couple of four. Let's see, it's Coinbase, he has a wallet, and he has this one. At the moment, he was like, "Oh, I can just see all my NFTs in my wallet over here, and it just works nice because it's like cool, I like it." So, yes, you know, definitely an amazing experience with that wallet onboarding.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I would love to, uh, real quick, before I kind of get into some questions, uh, for you, Orbis. We are hosting this Wednesday. We're kind of back to our normally scheduled content at 5 PM Eastern Time, which we're doing, you know, a lot of cross-chain, cross-network spaces. We have a Left Zero, um, coming up, three individuals from Left Zero. We've got one individual, working with Iota. I just got word that we have V Chain coming in. I believe HashPack's gonna be there from Hedera. If either you or Patches want to join up on that panel, that'd be fantastic as well. It's at 5 PM Eastern Time, just, trying to give, you know, more, um, more odds on what everybody's doing, kind of you know, a bigger community type way across multiple networks. And then also, a huge shout-out to, Pre-IPO Club. If you guys aren't aware, through Genfinity, really providing kind of free financial literacy. Valor, if we could post, something from Guide to Series 65 again, sponsored by Pre-IPO. If you guys have questions about the guide or questions about the financial literacy that he's publishing that we're facilitating to push out, uh, feel free to DM him, give him a follow as well. And a shout-out to HashPack, and a shout-out to Swirlds, and a shout-out to Serenity Shield, who I saw down here earlier. lright, let me get into Orbis 86. So, Orbis, I think it's always interesting to learn a little bit about the background of people in this space. One of the first questions that I always like to ask is, what is your personal onboarding journey into crypto and web 3?

Orbis 86 – Soniya Ahuja - Founder
‍From a place of ignorance, to be honest, right? Like most of the people out there in the world, I was a skeptic, and the reason being, I did not, I was, I wasn't really aware of decentralization as a concept. So, when I go and speak, I often talk about it, that back in 2011 and 2012, I had folks from Seniors, people who had graduated from my engineering institution, telling me that, "Hey, you know, you should be mining Bitcoin." And I was like, "Uh, it just seems like, you know, people are making money from thin air." And that's what my impression of crypto was. I never really took the time to understand how what was being proposed was really revolutionary, because now you could have a bank in your own hands. And this coming straight off of Lehman Brothers crash meant you're just protected against things like that, and the huge impact it could have on economies around the globe, so I didn't know about it then. Come 2015-2016, the wave of ICOs that went, crashed and burned. Right obviously there was that skepticism even then, but then I started investing a little bit into crypto. And I used the word investment here, right, because even at that time it was just like, "Oh, you know, you put in a little bit of money that you don't care to lose, and if things go well it will go, it will, you know, just shoot right up." And that's how my journey unfortunately, that's how it started. It's only over the past couple of years that I have become more aware about how much more powerful decentralization is and how it extends beyond just decentralized finance. So now I'm much more aware, but my journey really started with, "Hey, you know, I have some spare money to invest, and if I'm ready to make a risky bet, I'm just going to invest it in crypto." And, yes, you know, that's how my journey started, yeah.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍And if you could give us, you know, on the back end of that, you know, the journey for you to decide to, launch your own project, amongst, and by the way, you know, I should preface this by saying, I had a chance to, uh, meet with Orbis probably a week or two ago, and I mean, she's got a massive team, a massive network, a mass amount of people that she knows from different ecosystems as well, which is always quite amazing. So the journey to launch your own project, and the journey, that kind of made you want to, you know, start leveraging the Hedera network for your project as well, and kind of what that looked like from your experience.

Orbis 86 – Soniya Ahuja - Founder
‍Thanks for that question, King Solomon. So first of all, why an NFT project, right, because by my background, really, is I started as a Java developer back in 2007, and then in about 18 years ago, I moved into product management. When I started my startup, and then we were looking, you know, this is back in November 2021, and we were looking at NFTs. Obviously, November 2021 was like the peak of, you know, NFTs becoming like a household name. What attracted me to that wasn't just, well, you know, one of the things, right, you're starting as a startup, right, so obviously there was capital that was involved, but more importantly, the notion, the idea of building a community enterprise, building with the community, building for community prosperity. That was what really attracted me to this idea. Why though, well, I have come from pretty humble backgrounds and you know there was a time in my life, back in 2003 to 2007, for example, right when I was enrolling in my graduate school for engineering. The fees for the entire year, that included tuition, everything like food, boarding, lodging, tuition fees, all my expenses, all lambtoned together, they actually amounted to 300 to 400 a year. And at that time, we didn't even have that much money, so I had to get by, you know, getting scholarships. And there were people who helped me, and they gave me money without expecting a single penny in return. And that is why I love this idea of not building to just make a couple of people mega-billionaires, but building with the community, building for community prosperity where everyone grows. And the idea of taking this to people in these various recesses of the world where we, where they don't even have reliable banking systems. So, I know this, you know, a lot of the times, this comes as a surprise to people when I ask people this question that, "Hey, what do you think the average citizen of the poorest country in the world makes in a year?" And the poorest country in the world is Burundi, and many times, you know, folks from the US would be like, maybe five thousand, ten thousand dollars. And actually, the global poverty line is at 1800 or something, eighteen hundred dollars, right? But the poorest nation in the world, which is Burundi, their per capita GDP is 290 dollars a year, a year. And decentralization can actually change that. I mean, so you know, that is the reason why I got attracted to NFTs, building with the communities, building for the communities, and building for community prosperity.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍And from the Hedera standpoint, I know that you guys are obviously launching aspects within the Hedera ecosystem as well. So, what kind of drove you into Hedera? How did you find out about Hedera, I guess, first and foremost? What drove you to launch your project in Hedera? And what's your experience? Again, I'm doing the three-question thing here. Patches, what's your experience, for new people that you show the Hedera ecosystem to, whether it be wallet or you know, network functionality, etc.?

Orbis 86 – Soniya Ahuja - Founder
‍So, I ran into Dylan, so I think a lot of folks in the ecosystem know Dylan, right? Helping Hands Dylan and Sarah. We met, we have, I don't know, I mean, you know, it was probably our third or fourth conference where we had to run in, and every time I met them, they had all praises for Hedera right, they were like, "Hey, you know, you should meet folks in the Hedera ecosystem," and everyone's super nice. It was probably the third time around when I actually sat down and had an hour-long conversation with Dylan. He was talking to me about Hedera and how the tech is cool and the people are cool. People are really loving, and Dylan and Sarah, these guys are loving souls, you know, absolutely brilliant people. And Dylan, I mean, you know, they're just a dweller for people, right? So I thought, "Well, you know, Dylan probably is probably perhaps overly optimistic, and he just sees the good in every single person because you have people, you know, who have such a kind soul." So when he said that every person Sonia that you meet in the Hedera ecosystem is going to treat you with kindness and respect, I thought, "Well, you know, that can't be true." And then he introduced me to Jacob from HashPack. So Jacob, obviously, you know, being one of the co-founders, and here's the thing, when I met Jacob, these guys walked me through a lot of stuff for the next, I don't know, like an hour, one and a half hours. And this was like super late for Jacob because, you know, he's based in Central European Time. And then from there, Jacob introduced me to Alex. He had also introduced me to Patches, and every single person that I met, they made time for me. They made time to answer my questions, and those who know me, they know that I ask a lot of questions, right? And all of these people were actually tired and they were wrong. And then I realized, holy, Dylan wasn't lying. He was so freaking right. Everyone in the ecosystem is so cool. And then I took a little bit of time to understand how Hashgraph is different, the low gas fees, obviously brilliant. Like, one of the things that, you know, King Solomon, thank you for catching on to that and for repeating that, oh, we have mentioned that we want to bring on a billion people to web3. And we want to do that to art, entertainment, education. Now, imagine if every time I was onboarding someone, I had to pay, like, ten dollars to fifty dollars in gas fees, or they had to pay that. It is, yeah, you know, it hurts, right? But then on Hedera, we could actually onboard people through various means. I know Patches was talking about all the different ways in which you could do it. For example, in Orbis 86, we are looking at creating this membership rewards program for all the people who become a part of Orbis 86. And trying to run something like a rewards program, earlier the only other place where people have done that is, for example, on Polygon, right? But Matic is increasing in price, so your fees also increase because it's still tied to the underlying token, but in Hedera, it's always going to be the same, and those fees are packed to the US Dollars. Whether we like it or not, right, you actually end up paying all of your expenses in US dollars because cryptocurrency hasn't become a spending currency. So, the finality of transactions, the network uptime, the TPS, obviously everybody talks about it, but more importantly, the user onboarding experience, and I can't tell you that every single person I already mentioned, right, all the folks that we have brought in, their first touchpoint is the wallet, and the wallet onboarding experience has been amazing for everyone. So that was the reason why we said that, "okay, you know, when we want to onboard people, like we have two pieces where we would like a lot of folks where you know we are expecting to onboard a lot of web to folks, and the first one is the comics that we want to put out there, so you know, the art and entertainment section that we're talking about, so we have the comics and the game that you're working on, and there we want the experience to be really seamless, and Hedera provides for that particular experience." And I know patches was talking about building a game, so for gaming earlier, we have explored things like immutable X, but now after we came to Hedera, we realized, "oh, you know, Hedera with the TPS and the low gas fees is also a viable DLT to actually build a play and earn or you know, just to build a game where the tokenomics, the in-game economy can be completely built on Hedera." So that was the first thing, and then the second place where we want to onboard people is the education platform that we're working on, and again it goes down to the same thing, having something that's reliable, that's fast. On Ethereum, on a lot of other networks, you have to wait for a whole minute, sometimes even more, to wait for your transaction to be finalized. That is not a smooth onboarding experience. So that is why, you know, when we looked at Hedera, we came in, and before I really was got impressed by the tech, I got impressed by the warmth and kindness of the people here, and as I said, we got into NFTs because we wanted to build with the community, and Hedera, even though it has a small community, I would say, big things come in small packages, right? So I really hope that as we grow and as we bring onboard the next million and the next billion people onto Hedera, we are still able to provide the same onboarding experience to all of the folks.