Infrastructure for the Hedera Ecosystem! Patches / King Solomon (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

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As part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity, King Solomon interviews Patches, CEO and Co-Founder of Hgraph.io, Turtle Moon and HGraph Punks. 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
‍Thank you guys all for joining in today. If you guys aren't aware, every Monday at 3 o'clock P.M Eastern Time, we're nailing out two Hedera Hashgraph ecosystem interviews. We're gonna do them on Twitter spaces. We were doing them via Zoom and then uploading to YouTube, but we're gonna start them on Twitter spaces and kind of create that feedback loop through the Hedera corner on Genfinity’s lighthouse.genfinity.io. Huge shoutout to before we get started pre-IPO, our sponsor for the guide to series 65, as well as HashPack within our collaboration for facilitating out and streamlining these interviews. I think we'll get started unless we have, I know we have Maui, yeah up here too, yeah. So today we're doing an interview with both Patches and Orbis 86, and you know, I'll just kick this off, so I mean, these are going to be more so to create a fee. I mean, a lot of people from the Hedera ecosystem obviously probably knows who Patches is, probably noticed through Orbis 86 is as well, but I really want to do these interviews in a way where we can kind of pull out shorts within the interview and create a feedback loop. If people aren't aware of what people like Patches are doing, Orbis 86 are doing in the ecosystem, really kind of take a snapshot of kind of these Twitter spaces and just have great information. So I always like to start these with maybe allowing you know, you yourself, Patches, to give a little bit of an overview of like your background in crypto and web3, you know, what got you interested into the space to start with?

Turtlemoon Tools, Hgraph IO & Hgraph Punks – Patches - Founder
‍Yeah, actually that's is interesting, I don't think I've told that story. Yeah, the I've been in technology, critical for a while, and that was my career path. So, I'd worked at a bunch of different places building things with code, but what got me interested was a startup idea I had that required tokenization of data from cannabis, and so there's a lot of data that could be utilized in understanding people's consumption habits that could then be used as a better pinpoint of what you know, distilled component of cannabis can help a person who is, you know, recovering from leukemia or something. So, the need for documenting it publicly was important. I got really far away from this, clearly, you know, now we make punks of turtles and moons, but this idea was open-sourced data on mainnet that shows different, you know, normalized data of consumption habits of different people, ethnicities, geolocations, and then an algorithmic way to best suggest for your terpene profiles. So, I was looking into different technologies to do that, and I got into Cardano pretty hard, and that's what I thought I was going to go with. But luckily, someone sent me an email about Hedera, and I dug into it pretty hard, and it achieved everything that I was really looking for, which is the quick speeds, the cheap costs, so that you could easily, onboard someone who isn't of great means to do things and work with it, and it's been a, it's been a very pretty, you know, cool journey over the last two years, building on this network and kind of finding, finding ways to empower developers and creators to utilize Hedera to meet their vision. So I don't know if that answered your questions. Yeah, this is a new piece of tidbit that I never brought up.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I'm pretty sure early on whenever you and I were talking as well, I think that you said the first crypto that you ever bought was Doge, right? Yeah, yeah. So, what was kind of the, was it kind of in a similar time frame where, you know, buying Doge and then kind of exploring out other ecosystems, when you, when you happen to learn about Hedera? What was that kind of, what was that process from? And you maybe, hey, maybe you still hold Doge. I mean, I know that you're very kind of not, you're building solutions out on Hedera, from, you know, knowing enough about you. But you also aren't, you know, a total, you know, maximalist in any one ecosystem. So I guess, since you did, you know, onboard into the crypto space with Doge, I'll ask, do you still hold Doge?

Turtlemoon Tools, Hgraph IO & Hgraph Punks – Patches - Founder
‍So I have, I believe I do, and I believe they're in my Doge mining pool. So I also have a Doge Miner. I don't run anymore but I made a small little company called Sky High Doge, and we were in the Doge community. And had a node and then I also got into Shib pretty pretty big. I still love SHIB. I hold a really big bag of SHIB and BONE and LEASH. And I was just impressed with how that was like an open-sourced technology that, or an open-source project that was taken over by some really smart devs that made, you know, the NFTs, they made the Shiba Swap, and it was just, it was really cool to see a community, based direction that there wasn't really a leader, there were people who were the devs, but the leading, it was kind of like my first hit of like what a DAO could be, or what a decentralized, decentralized project could exist as, and learned a lot about how they manage the community from existing in it. And then I was also into Binance small-cap coins for like three, four months, tried day trading small-cap coins, thought there was a method there, and then eventually gave up and was like, I'll just, I was actually build something instead of trying to make short flips and earn, because it's just such a, such a headache to research and go, and then like you buy into something, and then 10 seconds later it's a rug, and you're like, all right, well, I gotta do all that research. But yeah, so eventually got into Hedera, and then we was really interested because we came on, we'll start looking at it two weeks before NFT protocol even went live, so we had like a, I think an unfair advantage that we started building all of our tools after the protocol was on mainnet, and so people that were working with like fungible token NFTs at the time, had a had a lot of rework and refactoring they had to do that we didn't, so that was that was helpful too that we came at a really good time.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, when you guys started. You know, this was interesting to me to ask, just because of the fact you know, knowing that you guys obviously have hgraph punks, which kind of led into Turtle Moon, which kind of, uh, almost in tandem at a similar time leading into Hgraph IO. So, I guess the question that I'll ask is, I would normally ask, you know, what was kind of the inspiration behind the project that you guys launched, but I guess I might phrase it that's like a two-part question. So, what was the inspiration behind Hgraph punks, and then at what point did you guys decide, or did you decide, alongside, you know, I know you've been working with friendly forever, to build out additional aspects of like utility because, you know, Turtle Moon deals in kind of like native DeFi functionality? I know it's based around, you know, cute turtles and moon shells and things like that, but if you dive under the hood, there's some real functionality that's being built out in a, in a way that to use for decentralized finance as well as Hgraph IO. So, did you know that you were going to start, kind of DeFi, you know, protocols through Turtlemoon when you launched Hgraph punks, or was it kind of a, "Hey, we launched this, and now would be really cool if we had these tools as well"? I would love to hear the story around kind of how the business aspect developed around, from creating the NFT project to kind of really branching out and developing more tools and services.

Turtlemoon Tools, Hgraph IO & Hgraph Punks – Patches - Founder
‍Yeah, that's a really good question. Once I understood, like, as a technologist, once I understood Hedera fully and had read the white paper, understood the governing Council body, you know, like, once you've put all of that data in and you understand the strength of this network, it was like, okay, I believe Hedera is going to be a top five coin. Like, everything that's here is, it just has a trajectory path that I can see that is going to be groundbreaking in global communication and technology. And so, the Hgraph punks was created in a way where, like, we knew we didn't, we knew what we didn't know. So, Hgraph punks, and, you know, when this was in our initial post, you know, we didn't, we came into this knowing Hgraph Punks is going to find the problems, like, Hedera has not tested scale, and again, like, as an engineer, I understand, even if you have the best technology in the world, things happen at scale that you cannot predict, and as it happens, you have to fix them and grow, and it's just like, it's an organism you have to continually grow and grow it. And so, we took the approach of, "Let's make at the time, there were really, you know, smaller NFT projects. It was the, you know, go mint was the only Marketplace, and we're like, what if you took one of these Punk projects, the 10K collection, you know, something in that range and bring it to Hedera, and what are all the problems you're gonna find?" So, we didn't say, like, we're gonna build a Marketplace like a launchpad we said we're gonna build the, you know, hgraph punks, and we chose 8192 because that's bits. And I know people hate that it's not a round number, but I like it. So like, we would leave them in five, you know, 512, which is also bits, or 1024. And then, so we have this giant collection, and the first thing we found out was minting is hard, right? We had the coin ice punks that were supposed to be airdropped, there's a thousand of them, and minting them was really hard at the time because, you know, the protocol just came out. So we spent our time, you know, working and building a solution there. And then we eventually created the first tooling that we put into the ecosystem, which was Turtlemoon tools. And so, that was through, you know, hundreds of hours of work, figuring out what does and doesn't work, getting it to a place that I felt comfortable releasing it, and then we released the beta eventually, which is, you know, where it's at now. It hasn't been maintained in nine months, because there's a lot of different, minting tools out there now. But, it was a first non-code needed tool that you could just download for your desktop and mint on Hedera. And so, we, you know, that was also our focus, is the ease of use, making this amazing technology that I believe is going to be a top-five coin, to be very, very easy to use. And so, this was the first step in that direction. And then, after everyone was minting, you know, everyone was selling them, you know, before secure trade, there's still an exact wallet with their QR codes. The problem was, no one could launch. And so, we're like, okay, you know, roll up the sleeves, let's build something that can launch NFTs. And so, we built a Turtlemoon launchpad, and that's kind of, that's been the ideology of punks from the beginning, is like, what are the problems on the network, find them, build solutions, and help the community grow and build together. And the you know, we got to the point we everyone could mint, that's great, but no one can get analytics on the chain or the graph really, because it's so complicated with the old REST API. And so, then we started building HGraph.io internally just for us to use. And then, as we dug in, we're like, "Oh my God, this is like night and day," you know, REST API to GraphQL. So, we kind of spun up a business. HGraph.io is a company, or we're doing consultant work with Swirlds Labs, we work with NFTIERR, work with Kabilia app. You know, it's been really great to see all these different methods that people use HGraph.io for and, like, how they're creative with it. But, that it's all, I guess, it's all coming to fruition. Like, this none of this was an accident. We knew we didn't know exactly what we were going to do, but we knew that we wanted to be fundamental in building technology that's going to ease people to use Hedera, that's going to allow them to create their vision. We wanted it to be a really nice user experience and smooth. And then, again, you know, things like HGraph.io, now it's really getting to empower people to do things where you don't have the clunkiness of the REST API. It's just like if you had all the data on Hedera that you wanted in any way, what could you build? And we're seeing some really cool stuff behind the scenes. And yeah, that's... I don't know, I always keep rambling when you cut me off.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍You know, you mentioned community growth, you mentioned ecosystem and network growth, and it's one of the things that we've certainly witnessed over the past year and a half, two years. You know, one question that I think that I would like to ask from your guys' standpoint is, from the hgraph.io, from the Turtle Moon aspect, from everything that hgraph punks is doing as well, seeing that all of these other additional marketplaces building out on Hedera, additional launch pads building out on Hedera, additional farming and DeFi mechanisms building out on Hedera, how does Turtle Moon and hgraph.io, how do you guys maintain a competitive advantage within the ecosystem while also trying to cultivate network growth from a cooperative edition standpoint by working with other projects and trying to help where you can? So, what does that or what has that looked like for you guys so far, and how would you imagine that kind of evolving over time as well?

Turtlemoon Tools, Hgraph IO & Hgraph Punks – Patches - Founder
‍Yeah, that's a really good question. I think, you know, I think a really good example of how tight the Hedera community is, especially developers, is when, you know, the Dead Pixels drop, for obviously not going as planned. You know, 50 were actually minted to the public when it was supposed to be 100 waitlist. I think every launch pad was, you know, just really understanding and publicly showed us support. That's Sentient, you know, Hash Guild Zeus, now I feel bad. I started naming them. I'm like, I remember them all. NFTier, just every launch pad really was just like, "Hey, you know, these things happen." you know, in a capitalistic, you know, dog-eat-dog world, that would have been jumped on as a "look at this, you know, these people suck, you should come to our launch pad," and it's just not that way. But even today, I saw that Hedera Sentient put up a new really cool feature that shows what Marketplace the NFT is listed on, and you can click the link and like go and see the Dead Pixel on Zeus to go buy it, and they're working within NFTier or to bring in analytics. So, even though we have a lot of launch pads, I would argue that each of them have their own different thing, or like a lot of marketplaces like they have their own angle, and I think there's a lot of room for growth in Hedera as we get bigger for these specific use cases or specific niche that they're trying to accomplish with their UI. With Turtlemoon in that light, we really want to be focused on building new stuff and not always we kind of went for the aspect of more of a curated market that's slower with launches, so that we could focus on building out farming, promo code minting, voting, auctions, music, like. So, we're not really only an NFT launch pad, we're a services platform situation, and I think as we grow, the network, that is where all of these launch pads will have their own, you know, slice. Like, NFTier has the best analytic tool on the network for anything that you would want to see. Like, they did a breakdown of dead pixel holders, and it's great. Like, they get donut graphs of like how long, like, 50% of people have been holding for over three months and like just really cool stats. And so, as we grow, I think that's what's going to happen. We'll still be able to support each other, and everyone's gonna kind of find what voice they have in the market and build out that unique solution in the direction they want. And, I think again, as we grow, the opportunity of getting launching more projects is just going to go up because there are so many people that are going to come in. If we had one-tenth of Solana NFT traffic, you know, that's like 8X of what we have today. And that's not where we're going. We're gonna be the, you know, 100 to 500X where we are today. So, it's really exciting to, again, be here so early, even though it feels like we've been here a long time, and to see where it all goes. But, I think I've answered your question. That's how we see the market and where it's going.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, totally. And, I think, you know, we get into, you know, pretty heavy verbiage sometimes when we do these interviews. One thing that I would like, maybe for you to explain, two people that may be interested in coming onto the Hedera network or into the Hedera ecosystem and building, from a tool standpoint. So, in a really simplistic way, which tools or, you know, what tools would be interesting to projects coming into the Hedera ecosystem to utilize something like HGraph IO, and how would that help a project? Why would a project, you know, for lack of a better phrasing, why would a project care to use Hgraph IO, and how does that help them to streamline and query the network and pull data? Sit on that for one second because I will, I do have to give a shout out to NFTieras well because I've seen their Data analytics from a market, a Marketplace standpoint, and they are insane. I know they leverage with a service that you guys have right now, but they are above and beyond, you know, anything else that I've seen. That's not to say anything bad about anybody else, I just haven't seen the type of data and analytics that they're able to pull and query from the network. So, from a simplistic way, somebody coming over from a different ecosystem, you know, what's the easiest way to describe the services that Hgraph io offers and why would projects care to pay attention to what you guys are doing in the space?

Turtlemoon Tools, Hgraph IO & Hgraph Punks – Patches - Founder
‍Yeah, yeah, the easiest way to describe it is all of the data on Hedera, easily given to you without having to build, you know, giant amount of application layer of Technology. This isn't the easiest way to say it. It's Hedera made easy. That's it. It's getting Hedera data easily, any kind that you want. You know, you can easily manipulate it. It's just graphql is the underlying technology we've used to build it, and it's light years ahead of rest API. And because rest APIs, what, you know, it's the Hedera mean that is open-source rest API, it's just much clunkier to try to get new data. It's much clunkier to access different tables when graphql just allows you to query every table all at once if you wanted. So it's freeing in that way. But more specifically, if you're coming and using the EVM on Hedera, you know, we're talking with teams that it costs 50 cents every time to call Contract to get the reserves of liquidity pool. It's free if you call a graph age graph I o right, you just, it's a query. So there's a lot of ways that it saves cost, and it absolutely saves time because it is quite quick as a service. And it also can do aggregate data. So just like how you can see really cool aggregate information on NFT or the way that you can get giant pools of like, hey, how many NFT transfers were in the last day, you just get one number back from that API call. So it simplifies getting information, and it allows you to really focus on what you're building and not how do I build this with Hedera, which is, this is really cool, and I'm very excited to be able to announce people that we're working with in the coming weeks. We are going to be at ETH Denver, Hgraph IO will be there, Turtlemoon will be there, and we're gonna announce some stuff before then, and I'm excited about it.