Myria ERC-20 Wishlist Campaign AMA Transcript
As part of our ongoing ERC-20 Wishlist Campaign, Myria community members had a chance to participate in a recent AMA with Myria’s Product Manager. In case you missed the event, you can catch up with the full transcript below.
Tarji: Alright, welcome everyone. Let’s let everyone come by in their own time. I’m glad you can join us today. You may have encountered our latest campaign around an ERC-20 token wishlist. We’re going to be talking more about that in just a bit and how you can jump in. I’ve gone ahead, well I’m going to go ahead and pin that to the space. It’s going to be up top if you want to check it out. Andy’s here with me too, and we’re going to be touching on the role that this will play in expanding the ecosystem and lots, lots more. How’s it going, Andy?
Andy: Good, thank you Tarji, happy to be here.
Tarji: Thank you for dropping by. Yeah, I think it’d be good to recognize first and foremost that the Web3 world is so full of many different chains, each with obviously their own little set of perks and quirks. We can’t really talk about ERC-20 without talking about Ethereum, and I wondered what you think about the Ethereum ecosystem, and whether it will still remain a vibrant place for gaming. If so, why? And if not, why not?
Andy: Thank you, Tarji. Welcome everyone. I hope you can hear me alright. So I’m Andy, as mentioned, a product manager here at Myria, have been building the ecosystem for a couple of years now. And as Tarji just mentioned, a good place to start might be just talking about, I guess the fact that we are in support of the Ethereum chain effectively, and we are a Layer 2 built on top of that. And what that Ethereum ecosystem and obviously what Myria is building on top of that helps to do for game developers in essence.
So what makes the Ethereum ecosystem a vibrant place for gaming? Ethereum had a meaningful early mover advantage in the space with blockchain smart contract utility in mind from their early development. When you think about Ethereum, they’re considering how much utility we can create that can mimic maybe what exists already but helps to support the idea of security and decentralization. So technology that allows projects to build and create and be imaginative, but to have the support of the security and decentralization of a blockchain behind that.
The sort of net outcome of some of that development on Ethereum led to them developing a huge market cap and therefore a large flow of investment and projects coming on board, becoming very quickly the second largest blockchain next to Bitcoin. As mentioned, underpinning a lot of that was their best-in-class security and decentralization of the blockchain network, which attracted many to want to build projects there, knowing that there was a level of kind of safety net and security around how the blockchain network was set up and what they could expect from it.
The growth overall, the market cap, and the investment attracted large numbers of developer communities from decentralized finance and soon expanded into gaming projects after that, realizing that the utility that was being used for decentralized finance projects could also potentially be used in a gaming context. The coding language and the third-party technologies that were built on Ethereum, many of which were needed to support successful blockchain platforms, were being built in numbers on Ethereum, and that attracted many others as well and created economies of scale.
The most recent, I guess, period, had the growth of building Layer 2’s on top of Ethereum, which has somewhat negated the need for alternative chains due to the increase in scale and the reduction in gas fees, allowing Ethereum to almost serve as a foundation for these scaling applications, maintaining all of the great security and decentralization of the Ethereum platform, but beginning to bring some real use cases to Ethereum. And to the world where game developers can essentially execute what they need to to become popular and exciting games for players.
Tarji: Yeah, still one of the OG blockchains out there, and ETH will always be one of those chains, I guess, where gas will either be a hindrance or at least a sour taste at the end of each transaction. But I guess it’s great to see that there are ways to skirt around it and have your cake and eat it too. Okay, now we can talk about ERC-20 because Myria is no stranger to ERC-721 tokens.
So these are the non-fungibles. Myria’s partners and users have been interacting with these NFTs on the platform for a while now. And so enter the ERC-20 token standard, a.k.a. the fungibles. Could you please help underline briefly some points as to why fungible tokens are core to Web3 gaming?
Andy: Sure, I’ll do my best. So ERC-20 is a fungible token, which essentially means that it’s not unique, and many of them can be generated. Many of them are held in different wallets and they are for all intents and purposes identical. Allowing game developers to design economies and use cases for these token volumes is centered around the use of the ERC-20 token.
Token volumes can act as things like coins where you’re measuring, I guess, the value someone has in a certain token just by the volume that they have. They can act as purchasing tools in that relation as well or act as governance rights just by the volume that you hold, for example. And it creates a level of flexibility around the use cases that’s important.
The ERC-20 sets the standard for how all of these will be used by different developers and the developer can then come up with different and imaginative ways to utilize that token within their gaming environment. As mentioned, whether that be as a purchasing tool of some kind or as governance rights, what dictates that is just the volume of tokens that individuals hold and how the game wants to actually execute use cases on top of that.
For the ERC-20 token itself, one thing that makes it valuable is its interoperability.
That’s the ability for your token to move seamlessly between games and platforms on the Ethereum network. So you want to essentially use your token in a game in some way just by holding a volume. Maybe you want to withdraw that token and then sell it on the open market, for example.
That’s all very much possible and enabled by the ERC-20 standard and it plays that role. It’s also secure in the form of being supported by the Ethereum network and therefore the blockchain standards around security and decentralization are in place for ERC-20 just like they are for ERC-721. There’s a level of standardization around the use of ERC-20.
It makes it a repeatable and understandable asset for both developers to build with and for users to engage with. It also leads to digital asset ownership. So users have true ownership over the tokens they hold and they can make decisions about what to do with those tokens independent from what the game developer may be doing at the time.
The tokens are held by that individual user in their wallet and they’re therefore able to make decisions as to how they want to utilize that. The key idea of Web3 gaming around ERC-20 is that this fungible token, essentially that can be minted, distributed, and utilized, brings monetization opportunities for game developers. Essentially cycle through building value in the game and make development more sustainable by bringing back value over time as people use their tokens.
Things like the price of the token rise, for example, if the popularity of the game and the token rise together. Game developers can create unique tokens for their games which can be used for in-game purchases, used to be distributed as rewards, and be a part of play-to-earn or win-to-earn type of models to essentially build a sustainable economy between the game development and the developer’s growing at the same time.
Tarji: Really, really accurately put there. It reminds me of a convo that I had with their blockchain lead, Brendan. He always used to say that Web3 is a way to convert the time and energy spent within gaming into real-life value because you’re talking about liquidity that gamers plug into participating in any given game. So be that through, like you mentioned, battle passes, skins, it could be weapons or what have you.
All of this value isn’t just confined to a pool for studios to profit from, but can then be later vented out and withdrawn to where they primarily belong, which is in the real-life inventory of the gamers themselves. And so ERC20 is core to that, hence this important step in that direction. And on a slight tangent, do you know where the term ERC20 came from?
Andy: Yeah, good question. The term ERC20 stands for Ethereum Request for Comment 20, originating from a proposal made in 2015 to the Ethereum project.
As you can imagine, that proposal was really about how can we support a fungible token of some kind that could be used by developers on this blockchain ecosystem to essentially bring value to projects that are building, but to users that are utilizing the technology built by those projects as well. How the name came about was the proposal via the Ethereum platform was the 20th comment, and therefore it was assigned the designation ERC20. The proposal for this new standard of fungible tokens was officially accepted in September 2017, so we’ve effectively been working with this particular standard since then.
It is all quite interesting to see kind of how these things develop over time on large-scale platforms like Ethereum, coming from the proposals that are obviously reviewed and then coming to be developed and therefore used by many, many people.
Tarji: 100%. I’ve come across these terms in many different instances and I always wondered, you know, is there some big calculation behind it? Like, why is it 20? Why is it 721? And it just happened that it’s mostly happenstance and it was codified to take on that designation, but then it was kind of less complicated than I thought it was. So that’s always good to know.
GitHub is still a wondrously mysterious place to me, I’d say, because I haven’t really gotten sucked into the rabbit hole there, but I do appreciate it being like this ocean-deep compendium of open-source code and great ideas.
So from a developer perspective, why do you think there’s still a large volume of game studios continuing on with ERC-20 as their in-game token of choice, despite Ethereum being super notorious for gas fees and scalability issues?
Andy: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. I think there are a couple of things probably to touch on in relation to this, some of which were discussed maybe in some of the details responding to question one. The way Ethereum has been able to develop and grow its network size, the volume of projects and third-party technology that’s built on top of it, the familiarity of the coding language for developers and transferability of skills, etc., all have played a role, I think, in setting Ethereum up for success and being a platform with which people can, I guess, use and develop on top of the technology that’s been created there.
And so I think there’s just an economy of scale that plays a role in why people continue to use it, despite some of the challenges around gas fees and being able to make it scalable, so to speak. I think one of the major things that has impacted this environment and will continue to, and we’re a part of this journey, is Layer 2 projects like Myria making speed and gasless transactions a reality for developers to utilize with their game technology and for users to obviously benefit from.
A really simple example of this would be if you, as a game developer, traditionally in sort of a Web 2 environment, quite often when people play game rounds in any form of the game, they’re distributed some form of XP or reward as a result of concluding that game. Historically, this was just stored in a database and that number was updated to whatever you should have received based on your performance in the game.
In the case of a blockchain world where you want to distribute true digital asset rewards, which is traditionally done with ERC-20, yeah the challenge there was needing someone to pay the gas fee to move a token reward from the treasury of the project to the user that earned that reward for the completed game round. And because of the gas fees traditionally it was really hard to make that happen at scale because people weren’t necessarily willing to pay the gas fee to receive the reward.
Layer 2 makes that a reality not only for the speed of the transaction occurring but also for the fact that you don’t have to pay a gas fee. It mimics a lot of the behavior that happened for game developers in a Web 2 environment and can now be also executed with true digital assets in a blockchain environment. It’s very very exciting and something that we’re passionate about and want to develop.
During the interim period, many developers did try to find ways to do price balancing so the price of their assets tried to factor in the fact that gas was high or low at the given time and they tried to manage those things to try and I guess represent true value when purchasing but it’s a difficult thing to balance. You’d have to be constantly updating and moving prices to manage what’s happening in the market which can be very tricky for people to sort of get their head around but also to keep up with. So we’re moving to a much better world with Layer 2 projects being able to support all of the security and decentralization but at the same time make things speedy and gasless.
Tarji: Sweet. I think of gas very similar to the shipping fee where it could be that the end-user or in this case the purchaser would be covering the shipping fee or if the seller chooses to sponsor the shipping fee then it’s still integrated within the price itself. It really pains me to see things be more expensive than they have to be especially in this economy and especially in gaming. Where does Myria jump in to make it easier for both studios and also players in this regard?
Andy: I can definitely empathize with shipping fees being from New Zealand. We’re a fair way from the rest of the world, unfortunately. But on the developer’s side, Myria is making it easier for developers by allowing them to build a game successfully and giving them the option to use an ERC-20 token. They can then distribute it into users’ hands which is the ultimate goal for the game ideally and to have that value come back in some way through purchases, transactions, price rising, etc.
So to start off with, we have got through the first stage of building SDKs to bypass a lot of the coding complexity of building services on blockchain. What those SDKs do is essentially give you a way to bring your ERC-20 token onboard onto our platform and be able to support and then distribute that to end users in some way. We’re really just giving developers the SDK tooling to bring their ERC-20 token to our environment and for them to then come up with interesting and imaginative use cases for leveraging their token within our ecosystem.
A developer may build their game and want to attract players and they want to distribute token rewards through the Myria Wallet on our Layer 2. What they would do in such a situation, is build their game, use our Myria Wallet SDK to onboard and register users to Myria Wallet when they’re joining the game, and then when that user earns some form of token reward for their performance within the game is that the developer would then be able to run a request to transfer x amount of token to that user based on their performance. Again that’s all entirely gasless and happens almost instantly which is fantastic for operating a game you don’t want people to have to wait for things.
As a part of that as well we already support the listing of collections on our platform and gasless transactions for trading on our marketplace whether that currently be with Myria or with ETH and over time we will most likely provide different token support for purchasing or transacting on our marketplace as well so we’ll go beyond just the couple of tokens that we support today which is very very exciting because that adds another utility and use case for those tokens is that they could potentially be used on our marketplace for transacting as well.
On the side of the players, gasless L2 for trading assets on our marketplace as I mentioned is of course a benefit to players as well so they can jump in and trade assets on the marketplace and pick up items without needing to pay gas. Easily explore new games and earn meaningful rewards by creating a valuable exchange of time with the game. As you’re competing in tournaments and completing tasks or achievements within the game over that period you’re earning the right basically to be distributed tokens from many developers based on your performance. You as a user benefit from that transaction and our support of the ERC-20 as the developer can decide to distribute real asset rewards to you.
Finally, for players, interoperable ERC-20s mean that if you receive many of these tokens and assets and you want to decide to take them out of the Myria ecosystem and trade with them on centralized exchanges or decentralized exchanges, that would be a possibility due to the ERC-20 standard. It makes it very very easy to move your token between sort of the layer one network and the layer two network which is of huge benefit to people being able to move it within those two environments.
Tarji: I love that you low-key also included the leaderboard and achievements SDK because generally speaking, it’s one to earn that could potentially save you know perfectly sensible game economies from being mined and exploited by people just running click bots. It’s much harder to run a cheat code on games that reward players for being genuinely skillful and intelligent in the game and I mean I think if there’s one thing that blockchain is really good at it’s proving things.
I feel that the more the team improves on making hard-earned achievements codifiable and irrefutable and deserving of valuable rewards that also happen to be gas free then the likelihood is that this brand of blockchain gaming would be in an even better place. So yeah cheers to that. And from a player’s perspective say I’ve finished my 100 hours of gameplay I bagged some points that could be converted into an ERC-20 that is either as you mentioned listed on an exchange and I want to cash out or I want to do more with it inside the game and dump it back. What would that look like for me as a player in the Myria ecosystem?
Andy: Yeah I think there’s there’s a lot of ways to probably think about this and a lot of use cases. People could have some of it dictated by what the developer creates imaginatively in terms of utility and use cases but there are some probably pretty general examples that I can go through.
So I guess the first thing to kind of bear in mind is almost the loop that most game developers are trying to create with the game design. Once you’re registered and in the game and you have your wallet you have your account etc you’re essentially trying to do one of two things probably potentially both. One is either you’re trying to grow at your own pace through a kind of XP or achievements and that would lead you to unlocking rewards. Battle passes and things like that are a good example of this where you quite often have a progress bar and various things unlock over time based on you reaching certain levels.
The other is being rewarded for the performance itself in relation to other players, particularly in multiplayer games where there’ll be a leaderboard or a ranking of some kind. So in both those situations, one is you’re sort of just competing with yourself and your own progress the other example is you’re competing with others but what they’re trying to do with those two I suppose loops is offer you rewards in relationship for the time that you’ve dedicated. As a result of that, one of the rewards that could be given is NFTs the ERC-721 standard but also ERC-20 as a result of dedicating your time.
Receiving ERC-20, you would be able to go and view these tokens and manage them from your Myria Wallet simply by whitelisting the smart contract that that particular token belongs to which would allow you to view your balance in your Myria Wallet and myria.com. The game might actually query your wallet balance so it can show it via the in-game UI as well so that you always have an idea of how much of the token you hold within the layer 2 ecosystem.
The exchange of this may also allow you to trade for other types of rewards over time so by receiving ERC-20 I might also be able to make the decision within the game to go to their shop or their in-game marketplace in order to transfer some of my ERC-20 in order to receive an ERC-721. As an example or some form of in-game benefit that would be sent directly to my wallet and sort of replace the ERC-20 that I held I would now have an NFT instead.
You also would have the option to discover NFTs listed by others on Myria’s marketplace and use those ERC-20 tokens to complete purchases on the marketplace for different NFT assets that others have listed and within Layer 2 you can also send your ERC-20 to other wallets. If you were really excited to onboard your friend for the first time to a game and you wanted to send them some tokens to get started that’s very much a possibility.
The final thing as Tarji mentioned is if you made the decision that, hey actually I’ve completed all my gameplay I’ve bought all the NFTs I wanted to within this game I’ve still got some ERC-20 tokens left over that I’m not sure what to do. Actually, I want to go and sell it on the open market you could withdraw it out of the Layer 2 ecosystem and go ahead and do that if that is listed. So all of that is a possibility and it’s trying to really just support the loop that game developers want to create which is around achievements on one side and playing against yourself and developing over time. Or you’re playing against other people’s ranking. In either case, you’re probably earning a reward as a result and then we want to just give you the utility as a game developer to build those basically what the actions are that the user could take.
Tarji: Wow what a treat that would be and in fact I’ll take the time now to inform everyone in the audience right now and those listening later in the recording can play a part in making new ERC-20, ERC-721 pockets of activity sprout in the Myria ecosystem. Just let us know what ERC-20 token you’d like to see whitelisted on the platform. An ERC-20 that you’d like to earn or trade on Myria’s L2.
Our ERC-20 wishlist campaign is still active until this Thursday so you have until then to go ahead and tag your favorite Ethereum-based blockchain game in the pinned post up top. You can also win $50 in MYRIA. So yeah thank you in advance for your participation in the campaign and to all those who have made their suggestions throughout the week. Now back to you Andy just to wrap things up for all the devs and studios already listening what’s the simplest way to get started as a developer on Myria?
Andy: Great question and I might premise this answer a little bit with I guess talking about our development process a little bit and how we’re trying to support developers in their onboarding.
So three aspects are critical in the game onboarding and into blockchain and being able to build on it and one of those is the smart contract world. Myria has templatized smart contracts for onboarding as a developer that you deploy and as a result of doing it, that sort of allows you to interact with the Myria layer 2 ecosystem and that’s almost step one.
Step two is to then leverage our SDKs to interact with your smart contract in various ways so we mentioned ERC-20 today so any actions you need to take on ERC-20 can be executed via the SDK or any actions maybe for ERC-721. For example, minting, transferring, etc., all can be done via the SDK. And the final step I guess in this sort of development cycle is you have the ability to execute some of these actions via some form of UI or portal. So you don’t actually have to make direct requests to an SDK that then takes an action. You can make various decisions and complete various actions completely via UI.
A really good example is something like updating your username. For example, that’s something that when you go into settings and change your username, you’re just making an SDK call but the UI is helping you to execute that. Essentially what we’re trying to do is do that and make everything as simple as possible for developers as they’re onboarding. All of our products are in various stages of that movement across that product cycle to make it as easy as possible for developers.
In the case of ERC-20, we’re primarily in the phase of being in the SDK phase as opposed to everything being in the UI but that’s where we’re headed to. To get started they essentially just need to access our developer portal from myria.com and complete the onboarding process. It requires from developers to make a few calls to our service to onboard yourself for the first time and show us that, hey I understand exactly what’s required to interact with your platform.
Once onboarded successfully they’re able to submit a whitelist ticket via the developer portal to want to list their ERC-20. The developer would take that action there and then once whitelisted would proceed to leverage Myria and our gassless network to move the ERC-20 token into the hands of users via our SDK. They onboard all of their users to Myria Wallets via the Myria Wallet manager and then they follow that up by distributing ERC-20 using the SDK.
This allows them also to read users’ balances of their ERC-20 and provide them with unique benefits within the game title as a result of holding that. So for example, if you held a thousand of a particular token maybe that means that you receive a reward of some kind as a result of holding on to that and the developer can see that. Eventually, we might also be looking at adding support for marketplace transactions using other developers’ tokens helping complete the idea of a loop. If you play the game you earn token rewards in the form of ERC-20 and then you can potentially upgrade by purchasing different NFTs and things that support your in-game development and growth.
All of this is to say this network that we’re building out Myria’s developer portal to support ERC-20 onboarding and we want to make a lot of these steps as easy as possible via the UI. Some of it does still require some interactions with our SDK as well to make it all work as a nice loop at this stage.
Tarji: Awesome stuff and for projects out there who like the idea and want a bit more proof of concept and might need a little bit more hand-holding to truly understand the requirements as mentioned you can very well message us on X as well. Our messages or DMs are open on the Myria X account and apart from that you could also file a ticket on our Zendesk. If you’d like to reach out a request or a demo of sorts and walk through the SDKs to better inform your decision of whether or not you’d like to implement the solution to your blockchain game.
Awesome well I see that we have one person who’s requesting to speak and maybe ask a question. I’m gonna go bump him up and see what he has to say and then maybe we could wrap up as well. Yeah, Crypto Gun, I see the hearts I’m gonna promote you as a speaker now do you have a question? Looks like he’s connecting. Okay, so you are now a speaker you can feel free to unmute yourself.
Hello. Good morning can you hear me? Good morning. Yeah, we can hear you.
Crypto Gun: Yeah like from what you’ve been saying, is Myria only for ERC-20 projects or is it also included for other ecosystems?
Tarji: Okay so Andy he’s asking if Myria is only for Ethereum-based projects.
Andy: Sorry I just missed that do you want to repeat that Tarji?
Tarji: I think he’s asking whether Myria is exclusively for Ethereum-based projects or if there’s any value to other ecosystems outside of the Ethereum sphere.
Andy: Good question I suppose the answer is yes and no. Essentially, if you want to integrate with Myria then yes you would need to be deployed on Ethereum. However, we aren’t necessarily isolated in that if you had also listed elsewhere on different chains and were considering listing on Ethereum and Myria as well. That would be absolutely fine and we would be supportive of that. We actually have some projects already that are listed on other chains but also have chosen to deploy on Ethereum and integrate with Myria as well.
Tarji: Great answer.
Cryptogun: All right thank you so much yeah I love the project and I’ve really been going through it and I love it. If there’s any opportunity I’m just asking I’d like to be part of the team.
Tarji: Yeah thank you so much for the kind words and yeah we definitely try to get the participation of our community as much as we can in any form or shape that might be. A ton of the community members have already forwarded a lot of suggestions also either from the L2 side or on the game development side in Myria Studios in the form of our flagship game Metarush. We’re always happy to see vibrant community members letting us know what they think and also suggest for future endeavors.
Awesome I see another hand raised up I’m gonna bump you up now, thanks so much for your question, Crypto Gun. So now we’ve got Everything Crypto up as a speaker, do you have a question for either me or Andy? Yeah in your own time feel free to unmute if you would like to.
Everything crypto: Okay good morning, yeah I heard you from the past answer you gave. If someone is from another chain trying to deploy to the Myria ecosystem, what is the required procedure?
Andy: Oh I’ll give the very simple answer but most of it should be within our documents that you’ll be able to find on myria.com but the simplest answer is that you would need to effectively deploy the Myria contract on Ethereum. It’s effectively a template for allowing you to deploy ERC-721, and ERC-20, and to be able to have that deposited into the Myria ecosystem to transact around the Myria ecosystem and to be withdrawn out of the Myria ecosystem.
That’s essentially what the smart contract supports and then that’s the I guess transactional flow that needs to be supported after the deployment of the smart contract that we’ve created a template for.
Everything crypto: Thank you.
Tarji: Thank you for your question. Specifically, the place you go to on the website would be myria.com slash developer and there you’ll be met with a link to our SDK doc where you can read in your own time. You can also explore in a sandbox with the developer onboarding.
Awesome, so I think that would be our last question for today I’m not seeing any more hands raised up but if anything comes to mind as an afterthought feel free to just ping us on Discord. We’ve got a community there and some moderators that could also help answer any queries that you might have especially to those listening at a later time who can’t join us live today. The Discord is very much available for your queries. All right, well I’ll just take the time to thank Andy for his time and for joining us today and for all the insights that he’s provided for us, and yeah I wish you guys a great rest of your day
Andy: Thank you, everyone, thank you Tarji for organizing. Cheers, good day, everyone.
About Myria
Myria is a blockchain game development studio and an Ethereum Layer 2 solution powered by StarkWare, to scale digital assets, NFTs, and blockchain gaming. Myria utilizes ZK roll-up tech to supercharge its ecosystem and bring the next generation of gamers to the blockchain. Myria has a thriving community of over 500,000 users, and more than 270 blockchain projects are already building on the Myria blockchain. Thanks to ZK technology, users can expect high transaction speeds, 0 gas fees, and free NFT minting.
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