Guardian of the Week — Edition #14 Meet ‘Bedu’
Welcome to Edition #14 of the ‘Guardian of The Week’ series!
This is our way of acknowledging and celebrating all the contributions, love and hard work you have all given to this family 🖤
We appreciate every one of you, and we hope this series gives you an insight into the brilliant people that make this community what it is!
In this edition, we honour Bedu—a renowned member, gamer and moderator here within the Guild of Guardians community.
From helping the Guild of Guardians community, especially our Portuguese members, Bedu has paved his way to becoming one of the most renowned members of the community. Currently representing as a Guardian Moderator, he still manages to give time to chat and answer members who need help. He even submitted a very entertaining entry in the “Thriller Dance Move Competition” to inspire others to submit their own entry. He is also a Guild Leader of the Spartans Guild and manages their awesome Twitter account @GoG_Brasil. Talk about dedication and commitment!
This remarkable newly-wed GOTW has given us insights into his journey and his outlook in the space.
Tell us about yourself and your crypto journey towards Guild of Guardians.
Hello, GOG fam!
Many of you know me from Discord as Beduino Albino (or Bedu), but IRL people call me André. I’m originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I grew up in a small neighbourhood in the city’s north zone, playing on the street with friends, playing football (or “soccer”), video games and flying kites. I graduated as a Biomedical Scientist, which means many hours in the lab doing experiments and research on many different topics, from malaria, to Aedes aegypti mosquitoes’ metabolism to ovarian and brain cancer, until I finally settled down writing my thesis on cardiology area. Today I work as a Management Consultant in Health & Life Sciences, and beyond spending time on Discord, I like travelling, playing video games, spending time with my family and friends and going out to hike or eat!
I have loved playing games on consoles or PC since I was a small kid. From Master System to PlayStation series, passing through Dream Cast — been there, done that. I remember playing Doom on my father’s computer back in the ’90s when I was only 5 or 6 years old (IDDQD IDKFA, IYKYK). Some years ahead, I remember when my father brought home the CD Rom for Warcraft III — Reign of Chaos. I spent countless hours playing that game (mostly with the Orcs, LFG HORDE!), but curiously never got into WoW. Age of Empires II and III and Counter-Strike also sum up a good chunk of played hours. During high school, a friend of mine got me into an MMORPG called Rappelz. I would go into the night playing that and change days overnights during the vacation period, becoming one of the highest levels on the server. The grind was real! During college, I got addicted to Guild Wars 2 and would spend more hours playing it than I should have.
But life goes on, and our priorities change. It’s been over a year since my gaming PC was broken and sitting on a corner… 2022 has been quite a ride! I have been working a lot and got married, so that has consumed most of my time during the past 6–8 months. Everyone says it, but we have no idea how much work goes into organising a wedding until we actually do it (and how much money you can spend on it, lol). It was a small ceremony for only 100 people, but the list of things to resolve was endless. Find a church, a place for the party, choose a dress, choose the food, choose the colours of stuff, decoration, music, and hundreds of etcs! But, in the end, you get to enjoy a wonderful moment, and thankfully everything went smoothly, and it was perfect. The place was beautiful, the food was great, the party was fantastic, and we had a blast! Couldn’t have asked for anything else. Now that all the stress over everything related to the wedding is past and work is a little less demanding, I have more spare time to be present on Discord and am excited to play Guild of Guardians with the friends I’m making in the space. The fact that I can play it on mobile will certainly help me find the time to accommodate it in my life healthily.
Talking about space, I first heard about bitcoin at the beginning of 2011. I remember its value had just had a spike, and I, a 20-year-old college student with 0 knowledge of anything, thought to myself: “wish I had heard of it 1 year ago”. Time passed (I think it was in 2013), I saw the news on bitcoin again, and I thought to myself: “damn, if I got into it back in 2011, I would have made a lot of money!” — And moved on. Time flies, and it is already November 2020. Bitcoin and crypto are all over the place. People are getting millionaires, and I’m like, “Ok, better “late” than sorry”. That’s how I got into crypto.
Like most, I started out buying some $BTC. Soon after, I bought some $ETH, started dabbing in some altcoins, trying to flip some tokens, and playing around with futures. Mostly buying the highs, selling the lows, and getting REKT! I quickly understood that I would need a lot more time and studying if I wanted to try playing the markets — and that I should stay away from futures completely lol.
At that time, Axie Infinity was rocking but already had a considerable entry barrier. I was searching for an early opportunity when I stumbled upon Guild of Guardians. I first heard about it on a YouTube video beginning in 2021. I immediately started following it on social media and waiting for the first founder sale. Wave 1 was my first experience buying NFTs, and I got myself an Adventurers Guild Token and a legendary hero. Over 1 year later, here we are :D.
You started out as a translator in Portuguese. What motivated you to start this initiative?
It is a reality that many people can have some degree of difficulty with English as a second language, and on some occasions translating tools won’t provide an accurate translation of the information. I noticed many people would misunderstand the information shared on announcements, especially during the past year when we had Founder sales, whitelists and token sales that could cause a lot of confusion, lost funds, and frustration. Thinking of making information more easily accessible for those that speak Portuguese, I started trying to translate things, especially during these important events. At that time, @Firebolt was also putting out some amazing infographics with tons of cool information on pets, heroes, raids, etc., so I contacted him about translating one of his works on Raids, and he was more than happy to do it, I just had to translate the text. Unfortunately, real-life commitments have prevented me from working with him on more of those.
Congratulations on your promotion as a moderator on the GOG server. Tell us about the experience. What has changed since?
This kind of mixes with the translation story. In 2021, with the bull market and the Founder sales going on, a lot of people (new to GOG and/or to Crypto) would arrive on the server almost every day. At that time, I was very active in the Brazilian channel and was trying my best to help with information regarding both the project and crypto itself. A lot of people would come wanting to participate in the sales, but that was their first experience with the Ethereum network or with moving funds out of an exchange, and they did not have a clear understanding of what a blockchain was and how to move their funds from one place to another.
I found myself constantly helping people get acquainted with the project, translating and sharing the information that we had and also playing a “tech support” role, hoping that people would not lose their hard-earned assets in scams or because they did something wrong when moving it around. All that led to me being selected as a GOG moderator when a new batch of moderators was onboarded. It was a really nice feeling as it felt like recognition for all the hours spent helping others and allowed me to keep doing it with better tools and information.
Let’s talk about a sensitive topic. There has been a recent setback on the timeline of the roadmap. What are your thoughts about it?
Personally, I received the news with a positive sentiment and remain bullish on the project. Here’s why:
Like I have said before, I’ve been following the project since before its first NFTs sale. My first real interaction with it was during Wave 1 of the Founder sales, and already at that first contact, the team showed what they were about. Due to an issue, several transactions failed during the sale, and the team refunded the gas fees of all those transactions, showing a lot of commitment to the community.
The team has shown this commitment in the form of transparency on many occasions, and this time with the alpha postponement news, it was no different. They did not hesitate to inform the community about the delay as soon as they understood that this would be the best way forward. No fuss or “last minute” updates.
The project has the ambition to be the gateway to onboard millions of players into the web3 world. A challenging mission, one would say, but one that sets high-quality standards to be followed in development. For GOG to be the hit we all want it to be, the team must get all the details right, and this is not achieved overnight. The challenges are many, often almost impossible to predict. It’s the price to pay for working with new, disruptive technologies, aiming to do what no one has ever done. Blockchain integration, app stores policies, seamless wallet integrations. Lots of details to get right!
Details that can make the game an absolute success or be its ultimate downfall. First impressions do leave their mark! One of the reasons I’m positive about the extra time in development is ensuring that the alpha version is the best it can be — not that we’re far from a great result. The community has already had the chance to test parts of the game through demos and closed tests, and the overall quality seen for such an early stage of development was impressive (we’re still in the pre-alpha phase!). The feedback, in general, was very positive, and the team continues to make constant improvements.
Talking of improvements and developments, Active Staking has just been announced, together with news of the Dev tokens re-lock for at least another 12 months, which brings me back to transparency. Updates are always being shared, and the development progress and quality of the work being done are constant and clear. This positively reinforces the expectation of the results that can be achieved with more time for the team to ideate, test and develop.
Despite the bear market, the team is very well funded to guarantee years of work if necessary. This brings trust and confidence in the work that will be delivered, done without rush, and shows how big investors are also bought into the project.
And speaking of big names, the team recently announced an official partnership with 8 major e-sports teams, which has brought a lot of attention to the project and further increases confidence in the work being done.
Another factor that I see positively is timing. Taking advantage of the bear market to build and launch an even better finished and polished alpha in a (we hope) bull market in 2023 seems to me an extremely solid strategy, capable of multiplying the chances of success countless times.
This extra time to launch, combined with the current market, also helps ensure that NFTs remain more accessible for longer, allowing more players to learn about the project and invest in it, ensuring a healthy asset division and a strengthened community, which is an important point if you want to have a strong and balanced economy in the long run. This is actually one of the main concerns of the developers that have a team of economists studying the market, creating mathematical models and analyzing every detail of the data generated in order to create a game of lasting success with a solid, foolproof economy behind it.
All this gives me confidence in the quality and seriousness of the work being done and makes me convinced of how positive this extra time is and of the huge success that GoG will be.
As usual, NFA!
How do you feel about the exciting news about the Esports team collaborating with the Guardians Team?
This is absolutely hot and awesome news! These Esports teams have grown a lot over the last years, amassing a huge number of followers and gamer fans. The fact they jumped into this partnership and trusted the team to associate their brand with GoG tells me they believe in the long-term success of the project and are interested in being part of it. They are here for the journey. It will certainly bring many of their fans into the game ecosystem and draw a lot of attention to us, which will be very healthy for our community and help GoG achieve its milestone to onboard the next 100 million players into web3 gaming! I can’t wait to see what lies on the road ahead. 2023 will be packed with good stuff!
Now running at 600,000 pre-registrations, any advice to our newly onboarded members?
As general investment advice, I’d say that 2022 has been a hard year for almost everyone, but it is during these difficult times that great opportunities can be found. It’s cliché, but for a reason: HODL on tight, don’t invest more than you can afford to lose, and always, always DYOR!
Regarding Guild of Guardians, all I can say in my possibly biased view is that you stumbled upon a great project with an awesome community and team behind it. Again, always DYOR! Read that whitepaper, deep dive on the medium, ask questions on Discord and get to know all the details you possibly can. If you choose to stay with us, be respectful to everyone, and I’m sure you will receive a warm welcome!
Oh, and join the Horde (the best faction, as everyone knows…)!!! #join_a_faction !
Where can we find/contact you?
You can always find me on GoG’s discord server lurking on gen chat or the Brazilian channel!
Alternatively:
On Discord: Bedu#1534 and on Spartans server https://discord.gg/kRJPD6xNsE
On Twitter: @beduinoalbino1 & @GoG_Brasil
We hope you enjoyed our fourteenth edition of ‘Guardian of the Week’. Every two weeks, we’ll introduce a new community member to acknowledge and celebrate their valuable contributions and achievements.
A very special thanks to Bayrd and Firebolt, who are the driving force behind this community-run initiative.
Until next time, Guardians.
