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Yat Siu
Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Animoca Brands

MAD Society S1: Ep.1 Yat Siu - Animoca Brands

📅 Jul 08, 2026 madsocietytv 20 MIN 6 VIEWS 13 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Are AI agents the real life NPCs? @ysiu was the first guest on the livestream's season pilot, where he painted the picture of what a future full of AI agents will look like.. 00:46 Why Yat is obsessing over AI agents after being known for Web3 gaming 05:28 When will we trust AI agents to use our credit cards freely? 09:53 Why do AI agents need stablecoins instead of bank APIs? 14:25 How are AI agents reshaping the internet? 14:40 If people trust AI more than influencers, how will marketing change? 15:20 Will brands need to influence AI agents instead of humans? This interview features: @ysi...

What Yat Siu said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Yat Siu, executive chairman of Animoca Brands, argued that AI agents and gaming are adjacent, and that agents will become 'metaversal beings' that manage users' lives and transactions. He stated that NFTs still generate about $300 million in monthly sales, citing Pokemon cards and other RWAs. Siu said he personally has 300 to 400 agents and predicted hundreds of billions of agents globally, which will reshape the internet into an 'agentic framework' he calls web 4. He argued that blockchain and stablecoins are essential for agent payments because they enable programmatic money and financial inclusion for the nearly two billion unbanked people. Siu predicted agent cards will emerge as a first step, but that agents will ultimately choose the cheapest payment rail, favoring crypto. He also discussed how marketing will shift to agentic optimization (AEO) and that classic advertising revenue models will decline.

Key takeaways

  1. Siu predicts hundreds of billions of AI agents will reshape the internet into what he calls 'web 4'.
  2. Siu stated NFTs still generate about $300 million in monthly sales, citing Pokemon cards and RWAs.
  3. Siu said he personally manages 300 to 400 AI agents.
  4. Siu argued agents will choose the cheapest payment rail, favoring stablecoins over credit cards.
  5. Siu predicted agent cards will emerge as a first step toward agentic commerce.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
$300 million monthly NFT sales volume metric 0:56
300 to 400 number of AI agents Siu personally has metric 0:56
2 billion people without bank accounts globally metric 10:09
95% share of Facebook revenue from attention economy metric 15:44
77% share of Google revenue from attention economy metric 15:44
10% potential savings agents could find using stablecoins other 10:09

Chapters

  1. 0:00AI agents and gaming
  2. 0:56NFT market and metaverse
  3. 6:12Agentic commerce and trust
  4. 10:09Blockchain vs traditional banking
  5. 15:44Marketing and agentic optimization

Questions asked in this interview

1
  1. 4:48And realistically, what does that look like?
Host 0:00 ↗
Please welcome Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands.
Yat Siu 0:05 ↗
Thank you for having me.
Host 0:06 ↗
Hi Yat. It's a pleasure to have you. I know it's very late where you are. So I appreciate you finding the time to join us.
Yat Siu 0:15 ↗
Well, not as much as you because you're going to go through non-stop interviews. So I feel like I have it easy.
Host 0:22 ↗
I feel like I have a really easy start with you because we've had a few conversations like this before. I found it very interesting when your assistant told me that you wanted to talk about AI agents because we always talk about gaming and consumer, but I find this very fitting. Because everyone knows you more related to web 3 gaming and you've been obsessing with this recently. I want to know why.
Yat Siu 0:56 ↗
Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, I think gaming and AI agents are actually very much adjacent to each other. I think it may have mentioned even at one of your earlier sort of shows about how we felt that one of the biggest movements that's going to change basically sort of, you know, web 3 in particular was going to be when we get to true agenda AI because they're going to use a blockchain. And one of the areas that we always thought would have potential is actually gaming agents originally as an NPCs, right? And if you think about the way that we have relationships with sort of, you know, game characters and the way that we interact with them with a very dumb AI layer, right, that's actually really now when you think about what's happening with AI agents, our mental model of AI agents is not how other people look at it. They look at it at, you know, like Open Claw and Hermes and personal agents and that's one way and our agents at Hello Minds can do exactly the same thing. But we take a slightly different perspective. In fact, we think of AI agents as really sort of metaversal beings, if you will, right? In other words, they're actually sort of real live acting NPCs that are actually intelligent and can do things for you such as personal agent stuff like you can do in open call, but many many other things as well. And they're going to run your whole life and they're going to assist you and they're going to basically sort of get you the news and get you the materials and do all the transactions. And they're going to be sovereign, which is why you need blockchain. And if they're going to be truly autonomous, they need money. And what kind of money is more fitting than essentially tokenized as in crypto money for AI agents, right? And I think the big thing is, you know, one of the things when we talk about gaming and the metaverse, which is always a fun topic because as you had sort of started earlier, every time I go to a conference or I meet some people that I haven't spoken to for a while, it's always like how's the metaverse? Haha. Right. It's like your usual type of commentary that people get or sort of, you know, tell me about web 3 gaming. Haha. Right. However, I think the and just to be clear, right, I keep telling this to people, unless you're not paying attention, which most of them aren't, NFTs still are about $300 million of sales sort of a month. And is really become a big area in things like RWAs, like for instance, Pokemon cards as an example, and other such assets versus, for instance, you know, basically the traditional type of sort of let's call it traditional, you know, basically the digital only ones. And also you know board apes and crypto punks, you know, still actually are actually quite high in terms of value of ETH right. But I think the thing is the way that we express it now is that you know we may have made a mistake when we said that you know we would spend all this time online you know the metaverse is coming basically we're going to spend time in the metaverse but actually what AI agents are doing today certainly in my life and other areas it's more like the metaverse is coming to you as it is coming to our physical life it's helping our physical world. It's basically doing things like handling our shopping, managing our life, maybe being our friends, helping us with sort of connections, right? So, so it's actually much more real today than it was before, right? And I personally have, you know, something like three to 400 agents now, right? And of course, a lot of them are experiments. But the thing is, you know, when you think about where the future is going, I mean, if I asked you the question or even the audience, how many agents do you think you'll have? It's going to be more than one probably, right? And most say it's going to be five or 10. If you go to San Francisco, it's 200 to a thousand, right? It depends. It depends where you go. But the point is that wherever you are, everyone's it's more than one human, right? Generally speaking. So that means that between a ratio of 5 to 10 to 200 to a thousand or maybe even more than that, not even including corporate and work agents, which is going to definitely be a thing as well. We're going to have hundreds of billions of agents in the world, right? And that's going to completely reshape the internet. Everything's going to be different. The internet is going to be much more agentic. And as a result, everything will redraw and reshift and you know who's going to power the economic engine behind that in an autonomous fashion. We think it has to be the blockchain.

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Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Siu, Y. (2026, July 8). MAD Society S1: Ep.1 Yat Siu - Animoca Brands [Interview transcript]. madsocietytv. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1078114/

MLA

Yat Siu. "MAD Society S1: Ep.1 Yat Siu - Animoca Brands." madsocietytv, 8 Jul. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1078114/.

BibTeX
@misc{siu2026_1078114,
  author       = {Yat Siu},
  title        = {MAD Society S1: Ep.1 Yat Siu - Animoca Brands},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, madsocietytv. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {jul},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1078114/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}