Recap of the First Fully Live AMA with 8Hours CEO and Lead Engineer in VeChain Community

Following the successful listing of EHrT on Bitrue exchange, we held another live AMA with the VeChain community in their Telegram Group. As in our previous AMA, we received a lot of important and insightful questions and we were again blown away by amazing questions from the active VeChain community. For those who missed it, here is a recap of the AMA with our CEO John Dempsey and Lead Blockchain Engineer Sherman Meredith. Before we get started, here’s a brief introduction of 8Hours from our CEO John Dempsey and Lead Blockchain Engineer Sherman Meredith. John Dempsey is the founding director of 8Hours Foundation — working on this project for a couple of years now. He has a strong passion for games and collectibles and dropped out of his college studies of Computer Engineering to pursue his passions in the startup industry. Sherman Meredith is a game developer for 9 years and a blockchain programmer for almost 4 years now. He has designed and written the smart contracts and ecosystem for 8Hours Foundation. The 8Hours Foundation is building a platform to bring people together via social games. It’s right in the name… we strive to bring meaningful experiences to people for at least 8Hours a week. We believe that’s what it takes to build and upkeep the most important social bonds in our life. And at the end of the day, that’s what the 8Hours represents — time spent with your family & friends. The 8Hours platform revolves around VIMs — our smart NFTs, and VIMworld — our digital collectibles. VIMworld sets the stage for the gamification of VIMs and the use of EHrTs feeding those VIMs. It’s an app platform complete with games, collectibles viewing, a marketplace for trading, leaderboards, etc. Let’s get started with the live AMA! Question: EHrT’s role in its ecosystem seems clunky how is it expected to become user friendly when people currently involved in the space have difficulty understanding it? John: EHrTs = food for VIMs (our NFTs). We are building our blockchain experience to be seamless so that users don’t need to understand tokens to use it. The value they get is from the use of EHrTs, which will let them wager VIMs, authenticate against counterfeits, and get to the coveted S-tier class of VIMs. Question: What are the utility of EHrT token and how to improve its value in the future? John: EHrTs are fed into VIMs to level them up, and used to buy games / VIMs. As more brands adopt the platform, they’ll have to create their own type of VIM using their IP. This brings more community and more users to buy the VIMs and need to level them up within the games. More games and more brands = more adoption of VIMs and EHrTs Question: What is the special relationship between 8Hours and VeChain? John: We are in close partnership with VeChain to make our platform successful. Sunny has visited our office a couple of times to play on the PlayTable and he got one for his kids. 8Hours is a VeChain ecosystem project to bring the utility of VET and VTHO in terms of the application within the gaming space. It’s quite a special relationship to find VeChain because it’s the only chain with MPP that allows us to do what we do. Also, VeChain’s NFC toolsets are very well-crafted for what we are doing in the physical/digital figurine space. Question: Can you please talk a bit about why you feel your platform needs blockchain, the importance of the token in the platform, and what is coming that might increase the use and need to stake or use the token? Sherman: Our goal is to merge the worlds of physical toys and digital toys. With physical toys, the owner is whoever has possession of the toy. But when that toy has any digital data, the digital data is owned by the company that created it. With blockchain technology, we have created the VIM token that allows for true ownership over the digital data for your physical toys. As for Eight Hours Token, we created this as a utility token to give the VIM tokens value. Right now you can stake EHrTs into your VIM to power them up in our games, and EHrTs can be transformed into “colored tokens” and deposited into your VIM to signify achievements, history, etc. It’s a really open system that we are currently building many features for, and we’ve only scratched the surface of the potential functionality. Question: Can you tell me where does Team Get Funding from? Is TEAM Financially strong to survive in any market? John: We have Silicon Valley VCs involved in the project as well as actual business revenue that we’ve been seeing from Day 1. When we started the company, we did a pre-sale for PlayTable to prove demand. We used that seed money to build the initial elements of EHrTs and VIMs to start 8Hours. We’re well-capitalized and have been enduring these tough times quite well. Question: Can you explain more about how EHrT is burned when used to reduce the token supply? Sherman: Any time EHrTs is “spent” on certain things, instead of accepting all the money, we will burn 50%, enforced on smart contract-level. Also, all colored tokens are created by burning EHrTs. If a VIM has a million colored tokens, it means a million EHrTs were burned to get that. When colored tokens are spent, they are also burned. The EHrTs never re-enters circulation. Question: How much does a VIM consume over its lifetime and can you give a theoretical example of a company and how many VIMs they will mint at each tier? I am having trouble visualizing it beyond a single VIM? John: A VIM consumes as many EHrTs as the user will feed it and the bar to get to the top (S-tier) is very high. On top of that, you can store additional EHrTs to participate in wagering games. Theoretically a company will ask us to digitize their IP into digital collectibles. They have to pay us in EHrTs, which are burned/returned to the Foundation, in order to mint the initial batch of VIMs. They sell their VIMs to their community and as they grow in sales and additional merchandise, will come back to mint more and more VIMs. Sherman: I would add on to say that, while staked EHrTs caps at around 2mil EHrTs, the number of Colored Tokens it can contain is unlimited. If there are 10 companies offering 10 colored tokens, 100 each, as prizes, and you have 100 VIM that collects them all, you have taken 1mil EHrTs out of the economy. And that only scales more and more as more people adopt the VIM system. Question: Are your products gonna be available globally soon? John: We’ve started planning the release to regions outside of North America, and our main tentpole season is going to be this year’s holiday. We’ll have limited releases on a global scale to start. Question: And once I feed the vim the EHRTs I can get them back? Sherman: If you haven’t fed the VIM for the duration of the lockup period (30 days), you can withdraw the EHrTs at no cost. But it’s probably worth more on the market than the EHrTs inside it at that point. Question: How big is your team and What is the hardest part to make developers come and build on 8Hours project? John: We’re a small team, 14 people at this point. It’s quite easy to onboard developers / brands, since there is a very big need for digitization of products now. But the limiting factor is the size of our team and how quickly we can build tools that scale. The hardest part is getting fun games that also use blockchain mechanics, which is where VIMs come in, since they seamlessly integrate to any in-game items already designed Question: How many VIMs for a small IP? John: For example, a small IP would do a Kickstarter with tens of thousands of backers. Onboarding that brand to our platform would mean an immediate need for thousands of VIMs to start We’re working with a company that had a Kickstarter that did $200k in revenue and their backers were in the tens of thousands range. They have enough varied IP and SKUs that we would mint about ten of each. So a few different VIM types * thousands of VIM customers Question: At different tiers? John: Yes, the high tiers would be complementary to the “super backers” that donate heavily to the project. High VIM Tiers, like S and A, have to be earned or bought through our P2P marketplace. Typically Kickstarter backers are waiting months or years to get their goods. With VIM-enabled goods, they can get it delivered right away to their wallets! Sherman: We’re also planning on depositing 100 “Genesis” colored tokens into the first batch minted of any new VIM type. 100 EHrTs for every VimType * number of genesis VIM per type. Question: where can you buy EHrT now, and do you plan on having Nodes? John: We are newly listed on Bitrue exchange. Our VIMs system is architected similarly to Nodes where it encourages staking of EHRTs into VIMs to maintain its status Question: Any difficulties that 8 Hours need to solve? Sherman: We want to engage non-crypto users too, someone who is interested in collectible card games could be a customer for us. Our biggest hurdle is how to make blockchain accessible to those people that don’t know what a crypto wallet is, they just want to play games and collect toys. That’s why being on Vechain is actually a huge benefit to us. We are using MPP to sponsor users’ transactions so they never have to see the underlying blockchain technology if they don’t want to. Question: I don’t know who the partners are. I know their names but I don’t have any context to figure out how big. Can you go into more detail on some of the bigger ones that we might have missed if we are not board game people? John: We’re working with brands across the board, and many well-known IPs have been converted to board games. We have almost the whole board game industry already locked down with our key partners, who are craving for a system that can digitize their collectibles a la VIM. Question: So if EHrTs were to go very high in value it would make it more difficult for gamers to level up. So I would imagine the goal would be to keep the price from going to high. John: If EHRTs are very high in value, that means that VIMs are very high in value and it encourages people to play more to win those rewards. EHRTs aren’t required to play games, so a high price isn’t prohibitive to new players, but rather gives them heavy incentive to play more Question: Is there any reason why you need 15 people, $4 million and a crypto token to build an NFT dApp when MPP is supposed to remove that barrier and others seem to be doing it rather easily? John: Our NFT ecosystem is more than a dApp and we’re aiming to be the best of the best. We want NFTs to be mass-adopted, which means more than any dApp has ever had before. EHrTs and VIMs will be used by people outside of the blockchain space in ways that seamlessly fit into the new games that they’re playing nowadays. Question: NFTs are already being adopted and dApps being made. And NFT ecosystems being made. On Vechain. Without funding. Without a token. Without having to pump it full of EHRTs to make it invincible. John: We’re setting ourselves up for success beyond what we think is currently the limit for NFTs being used. VIMs are a way to understand NFTs without being in the blockchain space because they provide real value to users and are awesome to play with. Mass adoption is still in the future, and we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg for the kind of demand and usage a true NFT ecosystem can do. Our business development team has been phenomenal at acquiring new licenses for big brands that are still very new to the space and these big corporations are biding their time to choose the correct platform to work with, not the easiest. Question: What are the differences between VIM in 8Hours ecosystem and Enjin? Sherman: We’re pretty similar to Enjin from a tokenomic standpoint (utilize game developers themselves to create value for the token), but we are a different utility in that they are creating “in-game items” and we are creating the characters. Our VIM tokens aren’t inherently valuable like Enjin’s tokens (they require you to spend tokens to mint their NFTs), we add value over time through the colored token system and staking/tier system. It’s the difference between buying an item vs leveling up your character. More fun, and more possibilities. Question: What are the goals for a business to become your partner? and benefits? John: We provide 4 main things for businesses that partner with us: 1) a whole new digital revenue stream 2) ways to build customer loyalty 3) access to larger customer bases and more sales 4) a second-hand market for the trading of their collectibles Typically these businesses are stuck in the old ways of doing things and have all physical merchandise for their inventory + sales. We help them convert to blockchain platform and give their customers access to great games as a bonus. Question: Is it true that if I have enough money I just pay for my vim to be best with no skill needed? Sherman: We’re creating game systems where powered-up characters benefit both the whales and the free-to-players. Question: Will the wallet on the Playtable have direct fiat to EHrT option? John: Yes, users will be able to use their EHrTs to buy games and buy VIMs directly with fiat. If you have any additional questions about 8Hours, EHrT, and VIMs, we welcome you to ask in our Telegram. We’re always here to hear your voice!