Background

The best kind of plays are the ones where the founding team finally starts caring about the token price and deliver accordingly — and there’s a decent chance that Mythical Games ($MYTH) is following this path in the upcoming 6-9 months with the recent OTC deal to place ~20mm USD worth of $MYTH to a group of hybrid / liquid funds (including ourselves).

For those unfamiliar (and rightfully so), MYTHOS ($MYTH) is the native gov token of Mythical Games — one which through history raised north of $250 mm USD over the past 5-6 years from the likes of a16z, Galaxy, Binance Labs, and the likes and almost in-stealth launched its token in late 2022. For most new liquid funds or new-cyclers in the space, they may not have even heard of this name previously; but it was a really hot deal back in the ‘18-22 era — and I still remember learning about them during my EOS days where it’s basically the 1st real / legit gaming team taking a chance at this blockchain thing. For more background you can find a couple of articles here:

• Modular’s thesis (good overview): https://twitter.com/vincentjow_/status/1768662097087365457

• ARK’s thesis (we think it’s pretty crap tbh): https://ark-ventures.com/commentary/mythical-games-investment-thesis/

• Naavik (decent overview on background info): https://naavik.co/deep-dives/mythical-games-overview/

• Vader’s piece, more recent, good overview: https://twitter.com/VaderResearch/status/1766535735673291201

The token trades at roughly a 65% float (whereby ~20% is free float, 30% team, and 15% treasury / ecosystem). At $0.5 per token, it’s effectively a measly 100 mm circulating market cap coin (excluding team), comping to the likes of MAGIC, PORTAL, MYRIA, OASYS etc, and a 4-20x difference to that of the leading “gaming beta L1/L2” coins like IMX, RON, BEAM, GALA, SAND, PRIME, ILV and the likes.

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Why does it trade poorly / why does the opportunity exist?

In our opinion there are a lot of reasons why $IMX is the crown jewel gaming beta people own (vs. say something like $MYTH). So let’s name a few:

• Disregard to token historically: Despite the C-Suite’s minute efforts, the company basically didn’t speak to retail / crypto-native investors historically. The list of VCs should get a D- for their efforts in putting the thesis out there and drumming up investor attention, and the communication via token-holders relations is virtually non-existent; which brings to the next point:

• Lack of ways to track progress & narrative: the lack of coingecko / dune / tokenterminal / clean ways to track how the company is doing, + no coherent tokenholder pitch basically prevented anyone from getting to know the story. Most liquid managers I talk to don’t even know the token exists. What the public saw is a bit of soundbites here and there — they may hear about the fund raises, they might know Blankos, but no one can really put a coherent investment thesis around the token or know what’s really going on.

• Not “playing the game”: the listing on uniswap without fanfare via a ETH testnet + no liquidity is not how one gets a big valuation. Funds couldn’t get any size; KOLs are not incentivized to talk about it; and the lack of market-makers + lack of CEX listings basically means no one cares.

At its peak, we believe Mythical was burning around 5-10 mm USD per month. The burn had since been cut dramatically to ~2 mm; and from the size of treasury position (20mm USD + 130 mm in MYTH tokens) + recent raise of 20-25 mm + Polkadot foundation grant of 5-10 mm USD, we believe there’s finally a strong sense of urgency at Mythical Games to make the token and the narrative work. With the runway extended + management finally “getting it”, we expect a path towards more transparency, a cleaner public market story, and a string of catalysts in the next 6-9 months that could lead to a clean rerating towards perhaps a “tier-1” gaming token where “this is what you own if you want North American + US studio gaming beta”

The Sum-of-the-Parts

If there were a way to shape the $MYTH narrative, I’d pitch it as 4 good things rolled into one:

• Downside support from the 3Q24 launch of Blankos Mobile — a mobile Party Game that’s a sizable TAM category and can support a 300-400 mm FDV coin in itself. Eggy Party / Stumble Guys and the likes are massive DAU hits with 10-50 mm, and it’s one of the most popular categories in mobile aside from MOBA, FPS, and various action titles.

• 1P/3P Optionality from leading NA BD & Sports franchises — you get franchise 1P opps w/ the likes of NFL, NBA, FIFA and more, each generating good cashflow, all while opening the floodgate w/ 3P opportunities w/ other studios in North America given the company’s solid relationship in the industry. The pipeline once ramped up should be no worse than that of other “gaming L1"s”.

• DMarket & Gaming Infra — 300 mm USD worth of volume annualized (3% take rate) as one of the larger CSGO skin trading marketplaces integrating Web3 along with all the backend infra for on/offramp & like-kind swaps / advanced features should accrue a “gaming infra” premium

• “The fastest horse on Polkadot” — we don’t love the narrative side of choosing Polkadot (but then again, it didn’t hurt Bittensor); but we also feel that with DOT at ~10 Bn, MYTH at 150 mm could be a “fastest horse” if one want to get some DOT x 2C / gaming exposure on.

The secondary market model worked for their NFL title (and Nitro) where adding a P2P marketplace adds 15-20% to net-revenue (of which a take-rate accrues to MYTH via fee to treasury, not burnt yet). If MYTH can just telegraph this well to large sports franchises + 3P titles and winning them over launching on the DMarket Infra, all of this combined should lead to sizable MYTH token sink & chain usage similar to what IMX / RON is telling investors. And if the company were to nail its launch of Blankos Mobile (that one is tbd), I think we have a solid 1P + 3P Gaming Infra narrative to be had.

We haven’t included streaming tech like Polystream in the SOTP. Think the team needs to nail the narrative above first (walk before run) — if they can crush Blankos, nail 6-12 3P studios, and lace up the narrative around gaming, I think we have a 5-10 bagger in our hands in the next 6 months.

The catalysts & risks

So here’s the list of things we think need to work (and we expect to see them) in the next 6 months:

• KOLs — well, small KOLs can still just buy in the market but company may want to consider do a small round of KOL OTC just to get people on-board + get the story out there. Fortunately of the captable that bought the OTC, I think one would expect to see a lot of noise around this in the coming 1-2 months. (including this piece).

• Tokenholder relations — MYTH needs to get on Coingecko gaming sector, it needs to be on TokenTerminal, the Dune needs to be set up, the company must have Rollbit-like metric tracking on its MYTHOS website, and it should work to get similar levels of tokenholder relations page / pitch deck like Ronin, as well as having John Linden the CEO going on roadshows like Robbie at IMX is doing. The combo needs to hit hard in the upcoming 6 months.

  • Risk obviously is if they can execute on this.

• Showing of #’s apples to apples: importantly MYTH touts high UAW + very strong onchain data but there’s really no good apples-to-apples comparison vs. the high FDV darlings out there. Once the data is readily available for all to see & compare, the transparency itself is a solid catalyst. Would also recommend the team to get on paid research with the likes of The Block, Messari, Delphi, Chinese media, and hop on podcasts left and right.

• Uplisting on CEX & Liquidity improvement - afaik MYTH is talking to all the CEX for listing in the coming few months; and have engaged multiple market-makers to improve liquidity. Hopefully with ARK + a16z relationship in the US, getting on Coinbase itself shouldn’t be that big of a problem if we can speculate.

  • We do think that poor liquidity is what prevented the token from dumping further — so there’s probably a lot of supply above once liquidity improves; something to watch out for; then again it’s probably in every c-suite / investor’s incentive to improve the liquidity picture.

• Execution of #’s: some of these things ideally would hit.

The upside target is obvious — to become the “go-to” gaming beta coin people want to own. MYTH has the chance to have solid 1P title (like PIXEL : RON, which by the way we think Blankos should go out and raise separately) all while being the “go-to” beta if funds want to own the US studio onboarding narrative (similar to RON: Web3 native games onboarding). We think there’s room to take mindshare from the likes of IMX, BEAM, APE, SAND, and GALA as the “institutional gamefi coin”. Getting there would mean easily 3-5x upside from the $0.4-0.5 area today.