Sustainability markets, creativity, and gaming in the Hedera ecosystem (Part 1)

In this week's episode of the Hedera Corner, Genfinity interviews Dovu, a sustainability project focused on creating a marketplace to buy and sell ESG-related products, and Pixel Land, an NFT project with a gaming arm. In part one, the panelists speak about how they got introduced to the Hedera network, and what made them want to start their projects.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Right, all right, I think I'm just gonna hop in, so, first and foremost, I'd like to again thank DOVU and Pixel Land. I'm going to kick it off with Pixel, and I normally like to start these types of interviews out asking for a little bit of a background individually. You know, what's your kind of story within crypto, web 3? What got you interested in the space? So yeah, Matt, if you want to kick us off from the DOVU aspect, from your personal standpoint, like what got you involved in the DLT, the web three space? What's your story?

DOVU – Matt Smithies – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, well, thank you so much for inviting me on, it's an absolute pleasure. Yeah, so I've been in kind of the DLT, web 3, blockchain space for quite a number of years now. I suppose back in 2017 is where I started first started working with different projects in the Ethereum space. There was, there was a probably the first official employee I had was the one called Block Mason, and their kind of idea was to almost create like a predator, a credit protocol on chain so that you could record debt and obligations and all this kind of fun interesting things. It's a fascinating concept but definitely not you know doable in terms of gas fees and the like you know, since then I've moved to various different projects, employers. We kind of moved to this other kind of team called Simple Web Block who kind of focused on, they were very early at the time, this was in 2018 where we were testing a bunch of different technologies all the way from, you know, Ethereum, Polygon, Stella. That's when I actually first started working with DOVU, and that's when we first started actually creating a whole kind of sidechain infrastructure and comparable to, you know, L2s or comparable to like the Loom networks at the time and things like that. I mean, ever since then it's just been one thing after another and I've been with DOVU with the company and, or obviously I've worked with them more or less since 2018, but I've been with the company officially probably since 2019 and I became a CTO probably around two or three years ago now. So it's been a rollercoaster ride and we're constantly learning and improving. Um, but yeah, it's, I'm happy to be here.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yes, so Matt. I'm curious because, you know, you guys from the DOVU standpoint, I don't think initially kind of started out within the Hedera ecosystem. So, I'd love to hear maybe the background of that story and if you could also touch base on because I think you guys were probably one of the first from if I remember correctly, because you guys have been around for quite some time, one of the first projects that was really thinking about, you know, a kind of a trustless carbon credits ecosystem, sustainability. If you could kind of give us an overview of that kind of initiative through Dovu. And why that was started, why it's so important moving forward in this space too?

DOVU – Matt Smithies – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we were focused on Ethereum. We developed our own kind of side chains, things of that nature. And the kind of vision at the time was, how do you incentivize mobility? And by mobility, it's people traveling, cars, using public transport, all those different things. So, how do you incentivize people to make better travel choices? And if they do, how do you reward them? And so, in this case, you would reward them with crypto. And by working with different companies, we did a whole range of pilots with car manufacturers where they would have their own kind of day-view marketplace, and people could test and actually, you know, claim rewards through these kind of different marketplaces and things. Obviously, it didn't kick off or anything because at the time everything was so slow, but as we were inching through that process, it was becoming apparent that carbon was almost a factor of how do you incentivize mobility in the sense of reducing emissions? We did a pilot where unofficially we took the Uber SDK, the system even, and we said, "Okay, if you have an Uber ride, we can reward you with DOVE for your entire journey at different points of the journey. And based off how long you were in this trip, you'd get like a comparable amount of DOVE and, you know, all these other things." But like anything else, the amount of times we've pivoted, I cannot tell you. But then we realized, "Okay, maybe we should go down this carbon markets and kind of figure out how do we sell carbon credits?" And so naturally, you think you can look at a registry like a gold standard or the viewers of the world and actually take those concepts, well, not concepts but take those credits, bridge them and just sell them through a marketplace, almost like an agent of credits, you know? And this actually was back in probably late 2019, 2020. While we're still on Ethereum, but then we realized that doesn't really help. We need transparency. We need this idea of how do we track people's behavior? How do we track the actual credit being onboarded? And then inch by inch, we were even going to take, you know, the work by Ocean Protocol. It was this kind of data markets aggregator where you can sell your data and put it on a bonding curve, and people can buy and sell it for like these tokens and things. So, we took that, but that's just so complicated to kind of deal with. It didn't really make sense. And then we edged into Hedera, and the whole world kind of opened up to us because it was untapped in terms of there were no standards in place, and so we came up with this idea of, I can't really say this anymore, but it's like this idea of dynamic NFTs. It's the definition that has completely changed now. You know, like Patches has taken it into a direction I could have never taken it. But this idea of what if you could have a token that would change over time, that would be linked to data? That would always evolve. And so, if you consider that and model that to soil or Farms, you could have carbon that you capture and you track, and every time it's measured, you would actually add more and more data. So that was kind of a first, and I just kind of got that realization only that there even took like a year. And just bit by bit, I'm trying to add on to that, and then slowly come into the Guardian, getting more involved in the decentralized identity, and just building up the Guardian. And more recently, starting to work with this project, it's a company called the Lexicon. They called the EBF, it's the Ecological Benefits Foundation, and it's how do we create a common language where different markets can say this is what carbon means, this is what ecological benefits mean. And then once you have that in place, then markets become more desirable for both sellers and buyers. It's been a long process. I don't know if I covered all your questions.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, no, 100%. I'd love to ask you because I think you're probably the perfect person to ask this question to. We talk a lot in all these spaces about kind of a convergence of a lot of different technologies. You touched on decentralized identity, or even digital identifiers, NFTs. He talks about kind of the sustainability markets. I'd love to pick your brain and get your opinion on, because I think over time, we're going to see us as human beings, once this technology really flushes out, kind of representing these unique items on distributed ledgers. And, you know, our carbon, our carbon activity is going to be tracked to an extent. We can offset it. Certain things can. You touch based on like the convergence of this technology, like how early do you think that we still are? How much further do you think that we have to go? And what's your opinion about kind of a lot of different aspects of crypto kind of converging together in a way that really makes, well, makes the world more sustainable, I guess is the best way of putting it?

DOVU – Matt Smithies – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, it's difficult to say. We're very early, you know. But to kind of step back and view the problem from like 10,000 feet in the air, there are still the majority of people in carbon, you know, just travel distrust for blockchain or web3 or decentralized like all these kind of concepts, blockchain is bundled together. Every single project is the same. There is this idea, you know, you, I'm sure you've heard of the whole kind of climber climate. There was a fork of Olympus, and it shared the same tokenomic model. So instead of being pegged to DAI, it was pegged to carbon credits. And those carbon credits were tied to this other protocol. It's called toucan Network. And although they've done tremendous work, they took the lowest quality credits, and the hope was, what if we could take the lowest quality credits and increase the price floor of carbon, right? But as things are in this space, the amount of hype and the amount of speculation is rampant. And so many people kind of jump in as the next big thing and try to make money. Many people lose money. And so the way we're trying to approach the problem is to not necessarily say, or not to necessarily position ourselves and say blockchain is best or web3 is best. It's like, how do we reduce the inefficiencies of current registries that exist? So projects working with a large registry, it may take 8, 10, 12 months for them to get on board, and it may be a cost of tens of thousands of dollars for a project to actually get through to the end, to actually get the rubber standard verification. What if there was a solution to onboard people in minutes or hours and connect people in the right way where they could slowly grow their credits over time, their verification of the correct save time? And our hope is, my hope is that slight adjustment, doesn't really matter if blockchain is involved. Blockchain will be a key to that, but like using AWS or Google Cloud, it becomes irrelevant. It just becomes a tool to use to enforce integrity.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍So I have to ask, even from the traditional standpoint, if you look into like, you know, the state of carbon marketplaces, carbon credits historically, I did a tiny bit of like research a little while back, and I remember seeing that there was a gigantic, it seemed to be a gigantic problem as far as verifiability, lack of trust, you know, certifying these carbon credits in certain regards. Is that something that is still very prevalent like in the traditional market? So then the question then becomes, if it is still very prevalent, how do you kind of bridge that gap by utilizing distributed ledger technology for these markets, in a way, like I think you touched on it, where it's not a cash grab from a project, but it's kind of building out sustainability based on real-world use cases and really kind of re-implementing that trust.

DOVU – Matt Smithies – Founder & CTO
‍Yeah, I think trust is going to be built over time, and all these registers for the most part have done a fantastic job. But you know, there are so many projects out there who focus on one particular benefit - carbon reductions, carbon avoidance. One case, for instance, is there was a fantastic YouTube video on Cook stoves, whereby people having a more efficient cook stove, there was this concept of carbon avoidance. Fantastic, basically people ended up using these cook stoves that were more energy efficient, they use less wood, blah blah blah. But then what happened is these individuals had bore cook stoves, and there are so many unseen side effects that we cannot control, we cannot see. And there is of course with the problem of centralized entities, there is always a risk of fraud, there's always a risk of things being picked up, and you know it's very important to say by just saying something is blockchain or something is DLT, that does not that pancia to fix everything. I think the gap is to understand the decentralized identity play, whereby what if you could have many actors in a system who have their own identity and can sign off on their individual responsibilities, and if you have a solid system that can manage that, it becomes interesting because you can have people from opposite ends of the world checking data, signing off on data, and you have that verification layer, especially, you know, if wallets or some easier more accessible technologies at play, and so that is the direction from a more technical point of view that is exciting.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍No, I really appreciate it. Before we get too far in, I wanted to also introduce Binx, and I believe I'm sure I think you probably have Bones up here as well. I started this out, and I'm going to ask you guys the same question that I asked Matt from DOVU for those that are not aware of what you, you know, who you guys are, can you give a little bit of a background about your own personal experiences, like how you got into crypto or interested in crypto, distributed ledger tech, web 3, and then maybe talk a little bit about the decision to start Pixel Land?

Pixel Land – Bones - Founder
‍Yeah, I mean, I'll jump in on Bones from Pixel Land. I'm the artist and game dev here at the project, and I got into crypto, I mean, geez, I think four years ago now, three, four years ago now. I can't even remember, but I pretty much have like the same story, I think almost anybody has. Is I basically saw Dogecoin starting to pump and I'm like, 'yeah, what is this?' I thought it was a joke, kind of jumped in, bought some, and then like the rest is kind of history from there. I started researching basically everything on coin market cap and like the top 100 coins, I would just go through and like read the white papers and try and figure everything out. And that's kind of how I stumbled upon Hedera and like DLT stuff as well, so unfortunately, I did, I actually did have some Hedera back when it was way cheaper, in the earlier days and then I, I kind of didn't really understand like the type of project it was. I was just kind of basically gambling off coin market cap, and then I did my research and kind of figured out that I thought Hedera was essentially the, you know, the, the altcoin if you will, and the rest is kind of history from there. That's kind of how I got into the project and started our project here at Pixel Land. I just wanted to do something that I thought would bring some value to the network and utilize the network and kind of experiment with it. And I found that through NFTs essentially. We had that period, yeah, geez, what is it, 2021 now, 2020, 2021, October time frame where we were just starting to get NFTs on the actual network itself, and people were trying to figure it out. And we were using Xact Wallet that had the mintor in it, and it seemed like magic, you know what I mean? I think a lot of people, including myself, that were on Hedera at the time, we didn't really mess with NFTs on other networks. So we were kind of just doing this grassroots movement on Hedera and just kind of minting and making our projects as we saw fit. And so the project for us with Pixel Land has evolved from, you know, those days where we used had our first collection. We've jumped into having our Numbskulz collection as well, and then now I'm jumping full-blown into web3 development, which is kind of funny that Matt's up here, because I am actually, I've tinkered around with, some of the stuff that Matt's built as well to connect to the network and create wallets and mess around with that as well, so I guess it's kind of a good thing that he's up here as well. But yeah, I mean, that's how I got into it and kind of how I see the way forward. Right, and we're just kind of evolving and trying to get more involved and use the network in better ways that's gonna bring value to it.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I think an interesting, I believe if I remember correctly, I think the first time I ever had the pleasure of like interviewing you. You told,  you told me the story of kind of how you started out, which is a very different story, I think than most people have from an artist standpoint. You literally, I think if I remember correctly, just started messing around with pixel art, and doing it, you know, just on your own. And then you're like, "Well, I want to see if maybe, maybe people like these, maybe, you know, maybe they don't, maybe they'll like them with the Hbarmery aspects." And, now moving forward, you know, you look a couple years down the line, you know, getting into kind of the development aspects and all sorts of other initiatives. I think it's a great story because a lot of people don't necessarily know how to get involved in crypto, whether it be NFTs or development or anything, and really it's just a doing. It's just doing it. Um, and I think it's, uh, it's quite the story when you hear people that just said, you know, "I'm just going to start doing this and see where it goes," and normally those stories develop over time. It's great to see you guys getting into development as well. Thanks. If you could maybe give a little bit of an overview of yourself. Am I correct in that, though, Bones? That was, I remember you telling me that a while back, right?

Pixel Land – Bones - Founder
‍Yeah, essentially when I got started, I had really no pixel art experience, and I just started watching all kinds of stuff, you know, like YouTube University stuff, and was messing around on my phone, and jumped over from my phone to a tablet to the computer, and really just started picking it all up. I mean, it's kind of, I'm just, it's always like a learning process, right? But when we started out, it was, I was just kind of posting stuff on Twitter here and there, and then people, I actually kind of owed to the community. People in the community would be like, "Hey, you know, can I get this? Like, are you minting these? Is this a collection?" And so it kind of just started as me posting, you know, whatever I was making and kind of the thoughts of having a collection, and then the community kind of pushed us to really take the step forward, and then that, that was kind of where we got the, got the jump to do the project was just kind of putting it out there, and then people wanted to buy it, you know, and so we're like, cool, let's just move on from here, right? So it's kind of an odd thing, I guess, when you look at it from that. It wasn't the intent when I first started, and then now, I mean, we're done now, where we're at, it's like we're so involved in the network and trying to do things and create cool ways to utilize NFTs in the network, so it's been a huge journey, and honestly, it's been a great time, so no complaints here.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Would love to hear your kind of backstory, Binx, if you'd be willing to share it with us.

Pixel Land – Binx - Founder
‍Yeah, of course. I mean, for me, it was quite simple. Like, I was always neutral to crypto but interested, but I never really took the time to learn or dive deep into it until I discovered NFTs thanks to Bones, who I've known for a while. And he kind of forced me into signing up for the Coin Eyes punks, and they told me about his project. And I, of course, started learning and started diving deeper into it and fell in love with it. And I kind of got stuck here, really. So that was how I got here and how I learned about crypto itself and started educating myself and everything. And I wasn't part of the project when it started, but I got onboarded a couple of months in, and it's just been an amazing journey since then.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I should also say, Binx, if you would be willing to share, so for Matt and for Bones and Binx, if we could pin anything up to the top so that people can learn about Dovu, sustainability ecosystems, creator economy with the pixel land aspects, that'd be great. And then also Binx, if you could please pin, because if you guys aren't aware, Banks does fantastic bring your own chain spaces every Friday, really trying to break silos down across ecosystems. It's very agnostic. The conversations are very open. Would love for you to post that as well.