MYRIAD ‘Champion’ For the Crypto Space: DASTAN President Farokh

Decrypt and Rug Radio’s parent company DASTAN brought its vision for its new prediction market platform MYRIAD to Consensus Hong Kong, with the company’s President Farokh Sarmad arguing that it will be “a good champion” for the crypto space.

Speaking on the ‘Predicting Media Success’ panel alongside DASTAN CEO Loxley Fernandes, Sarmad explained that the prediction market’s integration with Decrypt and Rug Radio offers a new model for aligning incentives in the media ecosystem. Historically, he said, “the person who’s gotten the least amount of value from media is the reader, and it should start from there. It’s supposed to be top down.”

Instead, MYRIAD’s dynamic participatory model realigns incentives “from the bottom back up,” he explained. “The participant actually gets a piece out of it, gets to put the reputation on-chain, gets to participate within the network and gets a piece of that network back to it.” The benefits flow upward, he said, to the “creator that is empowered by the participant, and then the people that are responsible for it all.”

The cornerstone of DASTAN’s new media ecosystem, MYRIAD seamlessly integrates on-chain prediction markets and Quests with content from Decrypt and Rug Radio. Since its mainnet launch on Abstract in January, MYRIAD has seen over 415,000 new signups via Abstract Wallet, and reached a total of 1.2 million predictions.

Through MYRIAD, users “more often than not, won’t be served ads, but rather served opportunities to participate in the content funnel,” said DASTAN CEO Loxley Fernandes, explaining that the platform creates a “reciprocal environment.”

“Instead of treating the consumer like the product and trying to extract from them,” he said, the platform enables users to “participate in the creation of the news cycle and help us find sources of truth, and then, of course, rewards them and incentivizes them for doing that.”

Rug Radio’s Web3 Art and Culture Summit

The on-stage discussion formed part of Rug Radio’s wider presence at Consensus, with the media company’s Web3 Art and Culture Summit showcasing brands, creators, entrepreneurs and developers using Web3 technology to redefine culture and art.

In a discussion on “Does Crypto Have a Culture?” panelists weighed in on how the landscape is evolving.

For Sophon Founder and CEO Sebastien, crypto culture has hitherto been defined by communities “making money together.”

He stressed the need for leveraging airdrops to build lasting communities around new projects, pointing to the launch of HYPE as an example. “They launched low enough that even if you didn’t use HYPE or you didn’t participate in the air drop, you could still buy it and continue to make money with it,” he explained. “Because they launched at a relatively low valuation, and then everybody becomes a community member.”

MOG Creative Director Mike Three noted that the crypto space is undergoing a “culture shock” as long-term crypto holders and crypto natives face an influx of “new entrants that don’t necessarily share the same ethos of decentralization and caring about freedom to transact in a permissionless way.”

“A lot of the friction happens with having expectations of new participants that are unfair,” he said, adding that much of the conversation around onboarding focuses on financial incentives. “But how are we onboarding them culturally or philosophically?” he asked.

Different Web3 brands require different approaches to building a brand identity and culture, said Pedro Gomes, Founder and Director of the WalletConnect Foundation.

For WalletConnect, “the best analogy that you can make is a little bit like Visa,” Gomes said, explaining that consumers use brands like Visa and MasterCard on an everyday basis while not consciously interacting with them. “Every bank relies on them for pretty much every payment that we use, on a daily basis—whether it’s buying a flight ticket to go to Hong Kong or to pay for coffee, it’s something that just exists and you trust it because it’s everywhere.”

WalletConnect is trying to replicate that “safe and seamless experience,” he explained, adding that, “as long as you use WalletConnect, you will have a great experience, and you are not bound by any partner that we have.”

For Sarmad, the key lesson from the day was that “People want to rally behind good products and apps.” He pointed to the examples of the panelists, with MOG being “an older meme coin that has built a community over almost two years now,” and WalletConnect being “a product that’s used by tens of millions of people.”

“People are starting to really want to support proper founders in the industry,” he said, adding that they, “really want a return to culture.”