Myria versus Internet Computer Protocol. I am going to compare these two here because I've been in crypto for 10 years, and it's all about making smart comparisons when you're doing your research. So I've researched Myria to decide whether I want to add it to my portfolio or not, and I'm comparing it to ICP, the cryptocurrency I believe has the best technology: fully on-chain compute. ICP has an Ethereum and a Bitcoin layer 2 on the same infrastructure, and it has the largest research and development team in blockchain. So compared to that, how does Myria stack up?
How Myria stacks up on market cap and tokenomics
Myria (MYRIA) has about a $150 million fully diluted market cap, which makes it roughly 20 times smaller than ICP. But it still has huge amounts of token unlocks coming, and in my opinion that may be contributing to a price that has mostly done nothing but dump overall. There have been a couple of small pumps that lost their gains, and the price is way down from there. The big question is: what exactly is this? And it looks like there are tons of token unlocks still coming, which I think is going to be bad for price action.
This is exactly why I compare ICP to every other crypto. If you just look at Myria on its own, here's how it presents itself: an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution built to scale NFTs, blockchain gaming, and more, built in partnership with StarkWare, offering instant trade confirmation, no gas fee minting, and a ZK rollup. If you didn't know about Internet Computer Protocol, this might look worth investing in on the surface.
What Internet Computer does that Myria can't
But when you compare it to what Internet Computer Protocol can actually do, the gap is enormous. ICP has a Bitcoin layer 2. You can serve web directly from smart contracts and connect to the web without oracles. It has Internet Identity, which signs you into everything and is the most advanced crypto wallet I've used. It has Googleable smart contracts that are 100% on chain, a reverse gas fee model, and DePIN. You can even mine Bitcoin. It has native Bitcoin smart contracts and an Ethereum layer 2, all on the same infrastructure. If you want to go deeper on why I rate the technology this highly, I keep all of that going in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Then you go to the Myria website and it's like, well, what are they actually doing? This is a gaming layer 2.
Gaming layer 2s are a crowded, brutal field
Now, that's a competitive field, because you've already got a lot of other Ethereum layer 2s. It's actually pretty easy to launch an Ethereum layer 2, but it's pretty hard to actually give it good value. So there are plenty of others already, and plenty of other gaming projects too. If you look at gaming, you've already got Immutable X, which, if Ethereum layer 2s are going to do well based on gaming, already holds the number one spot. I see Myria having almost no chance of catching Immutable X for the number one spot as an Ethereum gaming layer 2.
And then there are all these other gaming projects, but gaming projects tend to be a horrible investment, in my experience. Gaming itself is a massive industry that already has tons of different companies with billions of dollars in huge projects. Just making a couple of low-quality games and calling them blockchain games is not a sustainable business model, as we've seen over and over and over again. I've critiqued Gala Games relentlessly, and Myria looks like a not-as-well-done version of Gala Games. So to me it looks very far from investable. The big thing is that these games are not actually on chain. The site says it's "the only hub for serious Web3 game developers," which is ridiculous. To me, this is how these projects prey on you. Even if you didn't know about Internet Computer, if you knew about Immutable X, they've got a massive lead with triple-A games like Illuvium and Gods Unchained. I played Gods Unchained a lot. Myria looks very, very bad by comparison just to Immutable X. But once you factor in everything you can do on Internet Computer Protocol, where you can actually build a game fully on chain, this is clearly not the future of gaming on chain to me. If you want more of my thinking on blockchain gaming generally, I put it in my Games playlist, and I broke down a very similar gaming token in my Enjin Coin review.
Why a real Web3 game has to be fully on chain
If you look at the team members, you'll see a designer, a product manager, an art director. But if you're going to really make something that is true Web3 gaming capable, you need to do it fully on chain, and only Internet Computer actually does everything fully on chain. Why does it need to be fully on chain? Because a Web3 game is only valuable if the community has physical ownership, by code, of the token, and can actually change the game or control the team behind it. If you can't have the whole game on the blockchain, then it ends up being essentially a Web2 game that's funded by a token, which is what almost all of crypto gaming is. That's all the difference in the world. A real Web3 game must be fully on chain, and Internet Computer is the only place I see to do that.
Myria, based on being an Ethereum layer 2, has no chance of hosting a fully on-chain crypto game, because otherwise it would describe itself as blockchain compute or something like ICP does. It just looks very similar to Immutable X based on the technology, and it doesn't have nearly the quality of games that you've got on Immutable X. There are so many of these games, and games often release and almost immediately die afterward, because games are fundamentally about trading your time for meaningless rewards. Play to earn only works when the market is insane and artificially inflates the price of the token, and we've seen how much Gala Games has failed in that department despite how big they've been.
The token holders tell the story
If you look at the Myria token and check the explorer, there are about 31,000 holders, which is decent compared to the market cap, given that ends up being something like $2,000 or so per holder. But when you look at a token holders chart, it's very centralized. You've got a handful of wallets that are probably under the team's control holding huge amounts of the coin, and then exchanges. And this is an ERC-20 token. So in the middle of a bull market, where gas prices might pump, if you had a small amount of this that you actually took off an exchange, because you should never hold crypto on an exchange, and you only had a hundred dollars of it, you might not even be able to swap it at all, or you might get stuck with a ten or twenty dollar gas fee just to move it.
I reviewed this back in 2023, and I thought it was awful, and to me nothing has changed. There is a little bit more activity now with the actual use of the tokens, because it had very little use throughout 2023 when I first reviewed it. We have seen a small spike in the activity of token transfers, but it's going right back down to where it was before, and consider that this was with two big price pumps. So the activity is headed right back to where it started.
What you can actually do with ICP
I don't see why I would want to put my money into this instead of Internet Computer. To me, Myria is exaggerating its capabilities, playing it up like it's some incredible technology, and I don't think it is. You can't have real digital ownership and real Web3 gaming experiences unless it's all on chain. If you buy some NFT and the picture is hosted off chain, your NFT does not give you any control over the actual picture that's hosted off chain. As I've seen playing Gods Unchained on Immutable X, when the developer does everything off chain, hosting 99% of the computation and making all the decisions, they can kill the value of an NFT you paid $500 for. It tanks 80 or 90% because they change the game, or they change what the card itself does, and you don't have any say in that. So these Web3 game coins tend to do very poorly, and I'll say this plainly as my opinion: I believe Myria is going to consistently far underperform Internet Computer Protocol over the long term. The only reason I see for people to buy this is speculation. There's very little you can actually do with it besides connect your wallet, trade the tokens, and buy NFTs.
Compare that to Internet Computer, where you've got things like OpenChat, a fully on-chain Discord or Telegram, and applications like Tagger, which is my second biggest investment behind ICP and a fully on-chain, real Web3 social media app. Both of those are hosted on ICP, so if one does great and one fails, ICP still does great either way. That's why I keep telling people that if you want to actually reach me, you can join us in OpenChat and on Tagger instead of relying on the usual off-chain tools. You can also get that kind of direct access by being part of the Jerry Banfield Family.
ICP has the best infrastructure for gaming, the best infrastructure for scaling Ethereum, and it's the only place I see where you can actually build a crypto game fully on chain. And if it's fully on chain, there are amazing things you can do with the game. You could sell the entire game as an NFT, theoretically. You could then allow people to change the properties of the game without even coding, and play different versions of the game that all interoperate. That's the kind of thing you can do on ICP. As far as I can see, you have no hope of doing that now or in the foreseeable future with the Myria token. There don't appear to be very many engineers actually working on this, and we've seen that this business model doesn't work repeatedly.
My verdict on Myria vs ICP
So I think I've said enough about this. To be clear, this is my opinion and my own experience after a decade in crypto, not financial advice. For me, there's no way I would buy Myria, and if I held it, I would personally sell it immediately and get something I believe in more, like Internet Computer. If you're weighing your own bags, this is the same conclusion I keep coming back to when I compare coins side by side, which is why I made the case for choosing to sell altcoins for ICP. If you'd like to keep researching with me, you can dig into more of my coin reviews in my Money playlist, and you're always welcome to join the Jerry Banfield Family if you want to go through this research together.