Loxley Fernandes is CEO at DASTAN, the parent company of MYRIAD, Rug Radio and Decrypt. He served as CEO of Rug Radio before co-founding DASTAN. Prior to this, he spent more than a decade as a serial entrepreneur, founder and operator with a focus on financial technologies advancing the direct-to-consumer movement. The intersection of blockchain and media represents a culmination of his passions and experience.
You previously led Rug Radio and co-founded DASTAN. How did those experiences shape your approach in building Myriad?
Ultimately, we are a culmination of our life experiences. Myriad was born from a shared vision that we had at Rug Radio and Decrypt. Leading media platforms like Decrypt and Rug Radio teach you that incredible content deserves equally incredible engagement. The way people consume content has changed. Attention spans are shorter every day. The more we saw this trend, the more we wanted to engage users as a central part of the media cycle. That was the impetus for Myriad.
What was the insight that made you realise media, knowledge, and opinion could be tokenised in the same way as narrative?
This story goes back years, but I have to credit James Dale Davidson and The Sovereign Individual, a book I read in 2017. A few points that resonated with me were the concept of information as capital, and the idea that knowledge and intellect would become the most valuable resources. That shift would require a medium by which to trade them, in other words, markets for information.
This only came full circle years later when we had the chance to leverage our distribution and information infrastructure to build a system or product that could put this idea into practice.
Myriad has just crossed $10m in trading volume across 5m predictions from more than 500,000 users. What do you think drove this adoption, and what do these numbers tell you about Myriad’s user base?
We spent years building a loyal audience. Many of those people were also comfortable with speculative investing and onchain activity. We gave them an opportunity to participate in the value cycle of media by replacing banner ads with predictions. They embraced it immediately.
The numbers are a huge milestone, but they are also just the first stress test. We now know we can scale, offer more markets with deeper liquidity, and onboard users who want to dig further in. The key takeaway is that the appetite is there. Now we just need to give people a big meal to dig into.
What type of markets are resonating with the Myriad community currently?
Crypto and economic markets resonate strongly, but we are also seeing significant adoption in culture. That includes sports, esports, gaming, and cultural events such as auctions for rare collectables and real-world assets.
How does the Abstract Global Wallet integration shape the UX?
AGW has given us a captive audience among a group of true fans. The Abstract team and the Rug Radio audience had strong overlap. The user experience continues to improve daily as we expand our capabilities and as AGW broadens its market penetration.
How is Myriad balancing being both a consumer product and a B2B protocol for other prediction apps?
The consumer product gives us the chance to have open conversations with users and incorporate their feedback into rapid iteration. Our larger vision is to change how people engage with media and how they see event contracts. Predictions are not just gambling. They are a form of consumer sentiment aggregation and one of the most powerful data tools available. That larger role will be realised through the B2B protocol. At the same time, we cannot create powerful infrastructure without the feedback loop of end users, or at least a subset of them.
Can you explain how ERC-PRED fits into your vision of creating a new asset class for prediction markets?
ERC-PRED is a project name that was leaked. It is a framework that looks similar to an Ethereum EIP. It is essentially a thesis and whitepaper on standardising token features and parameters. If widely adopted, this standard could unify liquidity across prediction markets globally.
If everyone uses the same blueprint, the bricks to our houses become interchangeable. In practice, a user could buy a position on a platform like ESPN and then sell it on YouTube, Uniswap, Kraken, or anywhere else that abides by the standard.
What regulatory paths do you see prediction markets needing to navigate?
The main path right now is through the CFTC with DCM licensing. That means predictions become regulated financial derivatives, similar to commodity futures or options. This matters because it requires brokers of event contracts to establish clear and fair rules so that users can participate safely.
What’s next for Myriad?
The future is bright. We are breaking volume records weekly. We are pursuing regulatory progress for ourselves and for the industry as a whole. We are breaking down barriers and helping media and tech platforms offer predictions to their users.
Mainstream recognition and adoption is on the horizon for Myriad. Keep your eyes peeled.