#328: Myriad - Combining News, Quests, Loyalty and Prediction Markets

Over the past year, several themes have emerged:

• Quests and points: This has become a fundamental pillar for almost every project’s go-to-market strategy (Blast, Pirate Nation) and has led to significant growth for platforms that enable this (Intract, Layer3, DeForm)

• Prediction markets: Although they’ve been around for a while, they’re now popping up everywhere, led by Polymarket and their explosive growth from the start of the year. There’s a decent chance they maintain relevance post-election season, which would be notable.

• Gamification: Blockchain has enabled unique mechanics and layers on top of existing platforms, creating additional avenues to drive attention and retention for users (Fantasy Top, Pacmoon, Holdium)

So what does it look like when you mash all these elements together with…news?

To understand Myriad, we have to go back to December 2023, when Decrypt (crypto media outlet) and Rug Radio (crypto content and creator network) announced their merger and the creation of the parent media company DASTAN.

Myriad launched yesterday, connecting these ecosystems more meaningfully while incorporating the elements of questing, points, prediction markets, and gamification which I highlighted earlier. Their launch video gives a better idea of how it works:

If you’re sitting at your desk (or on the toilet) watching this video, you’re definitely rolling your eyes at yet another prediction markets product. Yawn, next please.

Upon first glance, Myriad positions itself as a prediction markets platform, enticing users to ‘engage with content and predict the future’ with lines going up and to the right in the first 3 seconds of the video. However, it’s much more than that and provides a glimpse into how content platforms, especially those with onchain capabilities will begin to position themselves for attention and retention.

As a Rug Radio NFT holder, I had the perk of getting early access to Myriad and got to play around. Breaking down the homepage’s top-of-the-fold layout into its various components:

1. Profiles are tied to a Smart Account wallet, making it easy for anyone to make onchain transactions when there’s an eventual reason to. Myriad operates on a points system currently, but this suggests that there will be a reason to make transactions or purchases related to the Decrypt, Rug Radio, and Myriad ecosystems at some point in the future.

2. Points balances are broken out into ‘available’ and ‘portfolio’ categories. The available points balance are liquid points that can be placed into prediction markets while the portfolio points balance is the amount of points placed into the prediction markets. The latter balance can fluctuate up and down based on their respective performance

3. The homepage carousel features cards highlighting certain prediction markets and content pieces published by Decrypt.

4. User points balance is highlighted again, with a daily cap of 500 points. This is likely to encourage more organic activity and prevent bots from farming too many points at once. It’s possible these caps can be dynamically adjusted based on user behavior.

5. Daily streaks, a feature that exists pretty much everywhere these days 😉

6. Trending prediction markets, self-explanatory. Note that Myriad’s prediction markets use the platform’s points as a medium of exchange vs. actual money.

7. Featured content, self-explanatory

8. Recent predictions highlight the user’s prediction market activity and performance. I placed a bet on Solana’s price yesterday after completing some quests because I felt the odds were favorable. Decent return, although it’s just Monopoly money 🤷‍♂

For those of you who are still in 🙄 mode, it’s important to remember that games have become an emergent business vertical incorporated by some of the top non-gaming content platforms in the world.

New York Times has built out a casual game portfolio for the modern news reader, along with the notable acquisition of Wordle in January 2022. NYT Games has over 10 million daily players and over a million paying subscribers.

The professional social network is exploring games as well, launching the Games section in May 2024.

Results are meant to be another way to connect with your network, or provide a different avenue for you to pitch your services to that prospect.

The content streaming platform has been investing in gaming for several years now, launching titles that complement and expand the brands of the respective shows.

So if we think about prediction markets within this context, they’re in a sense a minigame, especially since they’re points-based (for now).

The quests can be broken down into 2 categories in its current state.

• Interact with the article: User is taken to the Decrypt article. This activity is completed when the user scrolls through the whole article.

• Take Quiz: After reading the article the user answers a 1-3 question quiz as a way to confirm the user actually read the article

• Related prediction market: Some of these quests have relevant prediction markets, which are displayed next to the quest

• Retweet, Reply, Verify: Pretty standard social quests structure. Note that the the requirements don’t focus on likes, which are less valuable for the social algorithm

• Related prediction market: In this case, we see a prediction market that is irrelevant to the quest, but is still valuable promotional real estate

How does Myriad confirm that the article quests are completed? With a Chrome extension of course!

The extension operates in a way similar to Solana Blinks, injecting UI elements on Decrypt’s website.

And if a topic has a relevant prediction market, the extension injects the prediction market into the article and side bar as well

Do you use Chrome extensions? If so, share or subscribe!

When I first saw the announcement, I was frankly a bit confused. Why create a loyalty platform focusing on prediction markets, a hot space that is getting saturated quickly?

After playing around with Myriad and taking a step back, it makes more sense.

How Decrypt benefits from Myriad

• Gains a richer data set about its readers coming from Myriad via email, connected Twitter account, and the content they’re reading

• Can see what topics are more popular via the points wagered and the number of users wagering on specific topics. This can provide an additional data point on what topics to focus more or less on in terms of coverage

• These additional insights can be packaged in a way that’s valuable for advertisers

• Users that install the Myriad extension can earn points from organically reading Decrypt articles (don’t have to start from a quest page). These readers will see the points incentive as a bonus for reading an article instead of the points being the primary reason for reading an article.

• Separately, I’m seeing the Myriad extension UI pop up on a Coindesk article and on YouTube videos. Is something brewing between Coindesk and Myriad? 🤔 (the ‘collect’ CTA is unclickable though)

How Rug Radio benefits from Myriad

• Rug Radio network grows from its social quests with creators and their respective shows increasing their social following

• Rug Radio quests can add deeper engagement requirements, eg: listen to this Spaces episode and answer this short quiz within an hour after the show concludes

• Rug Radio increases its moat attracting the top creators in the industry with an additional tool that can be leveraged to benefit them

For now, Myriad serves as a complement to Decrypt and Rug Radio. Eventually, it can and makes sense as an ad and distribution platform itself:

• Advertisers can promote their content directly on Myriad, or as part of a larger advertising package across Decrypt, the Rug Radio network, and Myriad. This can be done via featured quests, featured predictions, or points boosts.

• The types of advertisement can grow beyond awareness. For example, if a project or artist wants to promote their NFT launch, they can create a quest that requires users to read an article about the project, follow their socials, and then mint with their Smart Account wallet.

• Myriad levels up from an advertising publisher to an ad and engagement network as evidenced by the Coindesk screenshot above. This would certainly be an interesting development.

If we’re seeing crypto publications like Decrypt incorporate prediction markets as an extension of their content, what does that imply for more mainstream news sources?

Shayne Coplan, Polymarket CEO, shared a clip of CNN featuring Polymarket and its Presidential Debate prediction markets.

In the world of sports, we have ESPN’s dedicated sportsbook, ESPNBet, calling out games, stats, and lines, which are all effectively prediction markets. We have ESPN talking heads constantly sharing their predictions with no real stakes, a form of all bark and no bite.

That bark is still valuable though, and we’re seeing it incorporated in the world of content. How it all comes together remains to be seen, but we’re getting a decent idea of what it could look like.

See you Thursday!