Mainstage. Block O2O Summit. Hong Kong. Good crowd for Beach Head 2020, a VR universe built on a crypto economy and featuring a legendary first person shooter game.

Looking out over the crowd I see a healthy mix of ties, collared shirts and t-shirts. Attendees were glued to their seats, with everyone seemingly determined to sit through each and every speaker — bathroom breaks be damned!. Some big names here, like Juwan Lee and Nick Spanos. I was feeling a mixture of apprehension and pride at presenting on the same stage with these crypto OG’s.

We’ve been preparing the Beach Head token sale for months and it’s rewarding to step out and tell people about it for the first time.

The team for this trip was Pepe Moreno, Chief Visionary of the Beach Head game, Alexis Sirkia, our Blockchain Architect, and myself, token sale Project Manager.

The PMQ building, near Hong Kong Central, sits among the pencil-like skyscrapers and has a layout like nothing else: three 7-floor buildings with an atrium and a glass hall. You can spend all day staring around. It’s a wonder that people aren’t constantly bumping into each other because they’re looking up and not where they’re going. Only around noon did we figure out that room was the mainstage, where the action was.

Show time! The MC introduced us in just the right way, referring to Pepe as “the genius from the movie ‘Ready Player One.’” That was exactly how I’d planned to intro Pepe so although he sort of stole my line it worked! Good start.

We kicked off with our video — eyes in the audience started to look up from phones. They were paying attention. Good. We launched into the potential of digital assets and the qualifications of the team. Eyes stayed on us and we must have made an impression because people came to the stage afterwards to introduce themselves.

Later the crypto-fanatics came to our booth to try Beach Head out for themselves — me too! I had seen a few demo scenes of Beach Head before but in the afternoon I experienced the playable version of the game for the first time. It’s awesome! There’s footage of me wearing an Oculus Rift rig, turning around killing off virtual enemies with a smile. Pepe calls that the”VR-smirk”.

As the interest grew and more visitors came to the booth I explained our vision of trading digital assets on the Ripple trading engine, crafting rights and virtual real estate — all empowering entrepreneurs to earn a living inside Beach Head City. I could see imaginations being fired up and people started asking which types of e-commerce will work best in virtual reality.

One Westerner with a base in China gave Alex his business card with two hands and a bow, Asian style, saying our project “is very investable.” I felt a VR-smirk coming on.