“As gamers ourselves, we very much understand the need for fun games first and foremost. That’s a big part of the reason why we have Myria Studios because we trust ourselves to build great games.”– Brendan Duhamel, Founder
Myria is a blockchain platform that scales games and DApps on Ethereum with fast, carbon-neutral, gas-free transactions. The platform includes in-house AAA game studio Myria Studios; SDKs and APIs for developer onboarding, plus its own L2 wallet and NFT marketplace.
Myria has taken the space by storm with over a million registered users, 250+ game developers building on it, and over half a million community members spread across its social platforms. Even in a slower market, Myria has continued to expand and onboard new users and partners!
In your perspective what are the benefits for gaming studios, players, and investors when it comes to your platform’s offerings?
We are an L2 built on Ethereum and we are excited about people getting involved in the ecosystem. As big Ethereum believers, we think any involvement, specifically one that allows you to bypass a lot of the downsides that exist on Ethereum such as high gas fees and the like while keeping all the perks of the biggest blockchain network in the world.
As an L2 built on Ethereum, everyone can build and trade with both gamers and developers in mind and that has a slew of great benefits. As gamers ourselves, we very much understand the need for fun games first and foremost. That’s a big part of the reason why we have Myria Studios because we trust ourselves to build great games. We also know it needs to be a seamless process for players to make the space thrive. We knew that paying $50 worth of gas just obviously wasn’t going to work.
Of course, the whole pitch of Web3 games is that you should have genuine ownership of your assets. We didn’t want to substitute high gas fees with a custodial solution where in fact, you’re not trusting the game studio, but you’re trusting some other party. There are high-quality games in Web3 that we think could benefit from what we’re doing, but especially those in Web2 where they’ve spent decades honing their talents in that arena and haven’t spent the last several years figuring out what is going on in this new world. Going through the ins and outs of how smart contracts and GameFi support work and coming out on the other side with toolkits that allow our partners to use those insights without knowing much about them is an awesome benefit. The last thing I would say is not gamers or developers specifically, but anybody excited about the future of gaming has valuable opportunities to get involved in the ecosystem.
One of the best ways to do that right now is to get a Myria Node license, become a node operator and earn daily rewards for supporting the decentralization of the Myria network.
You recently had a Public Node Sale, for those new to the industry can you explain what a node is and the benefits for those who own them within your ecosystem?
We’ve seen a lot of projects where during each step of the development journey there is additional decentralized computing required. As is often the case, somebody completely outside the space may not know this at all, but blockchain networks depend on it, not just for the core aspects of the network, but for auxiliary functionalities as well, such as decentralized storage and oracle capabilities. Decentralized computing is really important for networks like ours. And why we have this node network is because we’ve seen projects where every time they roll out some sort of additional auxiliary bits they then need to kind of go and make sure that they have the decentralized computing available.
We thought it would be nice to just have a guaranteed pool of this decentralized computing wherein every time we take the next step into a new area where we need those nodes to do other stuff, we have them available to do it. That’s just a nice way to ensure that we’re not going to be slowed down at all by not having the computing available.
Why are people buying them?
Because this is genuinely helpful for our network and will become more so as our network begins to do even more than it’s doing today. Node operators are rewarded for their contribution with daily distribution in MYRIA tokens and if you look closely at our tokenomics, 36% of the total supply of our native token is earmarked for those node emissions. Node operators will also be given voting rights in general governance, and we fully expect this within game-related concepts as well. That’s going to ensure that Myria’s decision-making process isn’t just for myself and my co-founders. As impressive as we think the team is, we want this to be a community-driven platform.
What sets Myria apart from other competitors?
I have loads of respect for all of our competitors and in more ways than one. We wouldn’t be where we are without what they’ve done. We’re excited to see what they continue to do for the space, and we are competitors in certain ways with selling products to similar types of buyers but we’re also excited to drive the entire space forward.
As I talked about earlier, the Ethereum ecosystem is extremely important for us, and like Vitalik, I think that it is the future of blockchain scaling. We’re very excited to be part of that. I think that one of our larger differences with the competition is that we were games-focused and only games-focused right from the beginning. One of my co-founders and our CTO ran technology for Ubisoft in Asia before joining us, and we have many other individuals on the team who have worked at almost all of the top studios.
We knew gaming was what we wanted to get into from the get-go and we haven’t veered from that. Some of our competitors started out as sort of just general NFT scaling. Again, it could have been a timing situation where NFT scaling was really important, and then games became clearly what you needed to be scaling NFTs for. Myria has been laser-focused on blockchain gaming from the very beginning.
Myria Studios is also creating games in-house, can you tell us more about this and give any insight into games that are currently being developed?
Metarush is the first game developed by Myria Studios, it’s a battle royale type obstacle runner. The game had a closed gameplay demo in March with special guests, including the European Fall Guys champion. We have taken a lot of inspiration from Fall Guys for this specific game but our main idea is to involve the community as much as possible. We have also partnered with larger guilds and communities that have given us a lot of valuable feedback on our 2023 Roadmap.
We have another game that has a public pre-production release that is targeted for the second half of the year, barring any delays. It is not Myria Studios directly, but we’re very fortunate to have been able to partner with AB de Villiers. He’s a cricket legend who’s building a game on Myria and it is a very exciting time! First and foremost, the game is going to be free to play because we want everyone to enjoy the game. So that’s also something to look out for in our ecosystem.
What strategic partnerships or investors have you secured so far? What are you most looking forward to in Q2, any specific announcements you would like the community to know about?
A few strategic partners we have secured are some of the largest gaming guilds in the space like YGG, and of course, the cricket star I mentioned earlier and many others. When it comes to Q2 and beyond, we have some major developments coming, specifically to our platform and developer SDK. If you’re a developer and you’ve given us any feedback about things that you’ve tried to launch already and anything else, then definitely check this out because a lot of that feedback has gone directly into our latest update. This means as well, once we get this going there will be a lot more launches on the Myria marketplace.
The last thing is added utility to the MYRIA token. Keep your eyes out for announcements on this, there will be staking opportunities and much more!