About 3 months ago, a random group of college students from around the world was assembled by Splinterlands Co-founder/CEO Jesse “Aggroed” Reich to participate in the inaugural Splinterlands Summer Internship Program. Today, the group is known as “The Splinterns”, but at the beginning of the period we were just 5 college kids looking to boost our resumes with the hot word “blockchain”. Our project was simple; build a 3rd party Splinterlands NFT marketplace. Aggroed filled our Discord with the top minds on Hive to act as advisors and helped guide us along by meeting with us twice a week. How does a group of students with no blockchain experience pull off such a project? Daily Discord calls, constant texts, lots of research and a commitment from each individual to put in the necessary effort. It wasn’t easy and there were times when we couldn’t see light at the end of the tunnel, but we kept pushing and eventually it all came together… SplintX.com
The devs started off just getting familiar with Hive and blockchain technology. Hive is enriched with good resources for developers, so we got to building fairly quickly. With nothing to actually promote yet, the business side started to pump out as much content as they could. We started with the “Splinter Monsters. Ranked!” series that used the cost estimator on MonsterMarket to rank monsters in each splinter. We also touched on how innovative Splinterlands is by writing about the “Benefits of Blockchain Technology” and how blockchain gaming is an important avenue to mainstream adoption.
The Devs started to get rolling once Hive Keychain authentication was implemented and My Collection displayed. On the business front, we continued to focus on creating good content and promoting our social media handles on Twitter, PeakD and Facebook with giveaways. Eventually we added the buy Market to SplintX and soon after came My Collection actions that allowed players to list their cards for sale. The X in “SplintX” stands for “eXchange” and that’s what we finally were. Build a Splinterlands market. Ok...Goal completed :) Pride filled the Discord.
As the “Splinternship” period comes to an end, it’s nice to be able to reflect on how much we’ve actually accomplished. Obviously, we would be nothing without the support from the outstanding Splinterlands community and we’re extremely grateful for the love. Although we completed our goal, we still want to do more! We’ll continue to add bells and whistles to SplintX because we believe in ourselves to reach our full potential. Stay tuned for more features on SplintX and content from The Splinterns.
How can we be a better market? What additional features would you like to see? Comment below!
