Matt Dyer is the CEO of Zilliqa, a high-transaction throughput blockchain, and the interim CEO of Roll1ng Thund3rz, a Web3 entertainment company. ^[1]

Education

Dyer graduated from the University of St. Andrews with a Bachelor of Science in 1998. He later earned his Masters Degree in Information Systems from Robert Gordon University. ^[1]

Career

After graduation, Dyer worked for 19 years at Sabio, a customer experience (CX) technology company, where he held various positions, including operational engineer and Head of Consultancy. ^[1]

Zilliqa

While working as a General Manager at Sabio, he discovered the whitepaper for Zilliqa while stationed in Singapore. ^[2]

“Starting to read the white paper around Zilliqa, it became very clear their ambition to drive enterprise adoption of blockchain was something that I could lean in on based on the background I had working for a large system integrator who managed the likes of DHL globally over the years.”

He met Max Kantelia through Oliver Bell, CEO of the XCAD Network, a tokenization platform for YouTubers. He became a Zilliqa community member in 2017 and head of sales in December 2020. ^[1][2][3]

“We live in a world that craves trust, transparency, value creation and community. That is why I am so excited to be moving into the blockchain industry, which embodies these core tenets. To be working for Zilliqa who are one of the market leaders globally from a technology and community perspective makes my move into the space even more exciting.”

In October 2022, he became the interim CEO of Zilliqa and Roll1ng Thund3rz. He then became the permanent CEO of Zilliqa in January 2023. ^[1]

Interviews

Zilliqa 2023

In a 2022 Twitter AMA, Dyer answered questions about his role at Zilliqa, the company’s biggest successes, and his vision for Zilliqa’s future. He started with how Zilliqa has established itself in the blockchain space and also expressed his understanding of some criticisms from the community: ^[2]

“Zilliqa is five years old in this space, that's a massive testament. I know there's a lot been going on in the space the last couple of weeks particularly. We've been here for a long time - we’re an established brand, we’re a credible brand. I know that's frustrating sometimes. Maybe we don’t market as aggressively as people would like, but I think the reality of the blockchain space is about building that credibility. And I think Zilliqa is very well placed in terms of the way we've operated over the past five years, and that's testament to everyone that's worked in the organisation.”

He then shared some of the biggest accomplishments of the company: ^[2]

“EVM compatibility on testnet, that's massive. I know people have said why has it taken so long for Zilliqa to enable that? It's not an easy feat to achieve, but the cadence has picked up, technical debt is being dealt with, and Richard and the team are doing a great job in hitting key milestones. Another area that people have been a little bit frustrated potentially around Zilliqa is the focus on gaming. But if you look at what we've done with WEB3WAR, where we've already had over four and a half thousand downloads in terms of that game - when you think about trying to drive awareness and build a product that’s sustainable, that's a clear use case. It's been a great success story for Zilliqa being able to punch outside of just the Zilliqa ecosystem.”

He discussed the future of EVM and multi-chain development on Zilliqa: ^[2]

“We created a smart contract language, which to be fair, is very secure and offers a lot of value. And I think there is going to be a battleground around smart contracts and security in the coming years. However, there's obviously a challenge in that it's a new language that people need to learn. And it's been a bit of a challenge getting a lot more developers to build applications on our network. By offering the EVM capability, we feel that it's going to allow us to attract a lot more developers to build applications on our network to for existing applications, bringing to our network and ultimately attracting a lot more users to get exposure to what we're doing from a blockchain perspective and even from an institutional perspective.”

At the end of the AMA, Dyer shared his vision for the future: ^[2]

“A key one for the end of the year is executing on Zilliqa 2.0 from a technical perspective. We've talked about moving to proof of stake, which is something that is going to be going to be happening...While the focus has been on gaming a lot in terms of the external presence in terms of what we're doing, there's been a lot going on behind the scenes and a lot of work in terms of a strategy on what we should be focussing on from an infrastructure perspective, what we need to be building from a DeFi perspective. I think with what we've built or has been built by others on the Zilliqa network - I think it is going to be a lot easier for people to start to lean in on Zilliqa and say, ‘you know what, that is a real credible blockchain. Let's look to connect potentially and invest there’.”

Zilliqa: One Year Later

In December 2023, the Paul Barron Network interviewed Dyer about Zilliqa, its status, and its roadmap. At the beginning, he shared what Zilliqa was currently going through: ^[4]

“Zilliqa is currently in transition. We were among the original chains and launched our mainnet in 2019, pioneering sharding which provided us with a first-mover advantage. While it was an exciting time, the market has since caught up in terms of layer ones. Zilliqa acknowledges this and is evolving its blockchain as part of the narrative of our journey forward.”

“So when you think about the likes of Solana, you think of it as a Binance or even Avalanche, where I'd probably see ourselves going in the next period of time. We're probably going to be seen more as a layer one that offers that public-private ability to define where your shards sit through PoW, all the things that enterprises who are looking to build blockchain subnets require. We're very much going to be back on par around the UX, I guess around finality and all that good stuff. So there's a lot we're doing specifically around the blockchain layer to get us back to the kind of the top tier.”

When asked about Zilliqa piloting to focus more on fan loyalty, he responded: ^[4]

“ZIL has really transitioned. We obviously have the layer one public blockchain, which has not changed in ethos – anyone can come and build on it. But from a Zilliqa perspective, we've got a structure under the Zilliqa Group umbrella whereby we've got verticalization and capability specific to whether that's gaming, whether that's metaverse, whether that's loyalty. And then behind the scenes, you've obviously got things like wallets, custody, market making – you've got the whole gamut of complexity that sits behind driving a token economy where we've got, I guess, cradle to grave capability within Zilliqa to deliver that.”

He then shared what Zilliqa was doing in GameFi: ^[4]

“We've got WEB3WAR, which is going to be a first-person shooter. I think by the start of February, we're going to enable that skill-to-earn capability within that application. There's another game slated not too far after that, which is going to allow the transition of NFTs from WEB3WAR into the second game, which is pretty cool. So, quite quickly, you're starting to see a GameFi construct starting to build in terms of tokenization. And then if you think we're starting to put some DeFi rails.”

“I guess Zilliqa starts to offer some reach maybe the other projects don't offer. And if you think about some of the partnerships we have in place that are not just sponsorship partnerships, and then even when you think about we did a partnership with GMEX who just won an award at COP. And this is really about how do organizations maybe do an offset whether that's carbon, water, whatever else, and then offer the agency back to their fans or customers to dictate where the offset goes. So, we're building out a kind of a platform that's I guess the inflection point potentially is loyalty, but quite quickly as part of that kind of interface or funnel, we can start to embed tokens, we can start to embed the ability for brands to do offsets, which is quite cool.”

When asked about the status of the Zilliqa Game Console, Dyer responded: ^[4]

“Our ambition was to have a console that would enable people to play via the console with the upside of being able to mine from said console. At the time, proof of stake potentially wasn't the big thing, and Zilliqa was definitely not a proof of stake blockchain. We've got proof of stake for I guess 98% and then some proof of work construct to kind of get your ZILs mined as part of ZIL 2.0. That capability is going to go fully proof of stake, which kind of links back to being able to talk to brands from an ESG standpoint.”

“So there was a kind of a pivot or a parking of the console construct, which I know has been a frustration for quite a lot of people, and I put two of them in my house so that I'm as frustrated as everyone else. But if you look at our approach to our go-to-market from Web3, I think if you look at the games that we've got from Roll1ng Thund3rz, they're all copyrighted, doing all the boring stuff that you see in Web2. And that's actually stood us in quite good stead because we were able to get onto the Microsoft store in terms of being able to download The Hub to then be able to launch and play Web3War.”