“Enjin enormously helped me…even mentally. Not only as a programming "teacher", but also in real life way of thinking…I would dare to say it pretty much changed my life!”
Alex, known as xProe throughout the Enjin community, is far from your average developer. With steely resolve, he learnt programming on his own in 2022.
He shows us that you don’t need to be a genius or possess years of development experience to start and make an impact in this welcoming industry.
The 30-year-old from Paros, Greece is the founder of Enjin Community Greece ( community-driven X and Telegram group with over 1,000 followers) and the creator of the BeamHubBot (a Telegram bot that manages Beams).
Grinding out 15-hour workdays, Alex has been working hard to make the Enjin experience easier and more efficient for all.
Alex’s venture into the space began all the way back in 2016 after he heard the word ‘Bitcoin’ in a random conversation. And as random as it might have been, this was all he needed to dive into this exciting new space.
“Believe it or not, the more I was understanding cryptocurrencies, the more I was feeling a more advanced form of it was coming, like 'cryptoassets on steroids'. That was NFTs…”
In 2017, while scrolling through Facebook, xProe finally discovered the hidden gem that he was searching for - Enjin.
“...the feeling was like so 'natural'. It's like Enjin is doing everything in the same way that nature would do it, if NFTs were integrated by default in it,” he recalled.
Through Enjin, Alex learned about NFTs and he has been laser-focused on the platform ever since. By this time, he’s tried every single tool that Enjin has released and joined every Enjin related community.
When NFTs first gained prominence in 2021, more of Alex’s friends got interested in Enjin. He saw this as an opportunity to form Enjin Community Greece.
In the Telegram group, Enjin enthusiasts throughout Greece answered each other’s questions, shared beams (Enjin’s proprietary QR code distribution system) and giveaways, and promoted Enjin to the world. While the community is based in Greece, Alex encouraged people all around the globe to join.
His new community also opened up connections to the rest of the Enjin world. Long-time members such as Spitfire (creator of Enjin Beam Club), George Miller (actively promoted the community on Telegram and X), and Yiannis Siemos (well-known Greek artist) played a huge role in Alex’s journey.
“My personal favorite Greek artist is Yiannis Siemos. I simply love his creations, and now he is even bringing something beyond the digital realm!”
Soon after the beta launch of NFT.io and Beam QR in 2023, Alex saw numerous people posting beams in the Enjin Greece Telegram. The innovative new feature enabled users to quickly create and disseminate their creations.
“I believe the process is easy enough for Beam creation and management even for non tech savvy users. They only need to understand more or less what an NFT is, and what the Beam does….”
The influx of beam posts clogged up the Telegram threads and it became difficult for new users to figure out what was going on.
“I felt the need of a bot which does several management jobs, like deleting Beams that are already posted, and also replying with a constant (but efficient) updating message,” he narrated the inspiration behind BeamHubBot.
Capitalizing on newly acquired programming skills, xProe developed BeamHubBot.
The Telegram bot enabled users to claim beams, showed the remaining claims left, and displayed the status whether the beam had ended or not. A functionality was also built in to allow cross posting to other BeamHub supported groups such as Enjin Beam Club.
Furthermore, Alex used his programming skills to pack on additional utility such as TeleBeam (inspired by Enjin Beam) and BeamHub Tokens (BET), an off-chain token within the BeamHub ecosystem. The said token could be gained thru posting valid beams as well as thru reacting in the Telegram posts.
Meanwhile, TeleBeam enabled the distribution of off-chain assets such as BET and empowered creators to make conditional NFTs Beam campaigns.
It is hard to believe that all this technical work came after one year of self-taught experience.
“Since I started programming last year, there are multiple 'mini-proud achievements' happening all the time! But as a relatively new programmer, these small technical achievements are nothing special, yet,” Alex recounted.
Aside from Enjin Greece Community and BeamHubBot, Alex has also been working on developing an Android application for shoppers and businesses and a game on Unity Engine 5. Rest assured, he said “...everything will be Enjin powered, and also an internal Multiverse of NFTs will be formed.”
For Alex, exploring Enjin has paid off with everything he’s received thus far. While the overall crypto and NFT markets have been down, he’s been rolling forward since 2022.
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