Why Yat Siu Believes Altcoins Could Outperform Bitcoin

Very good. And thank you for having me.

Well, I mean, I think generally, I think the state of Web3 before we go into gaming is, I think, going through a little bit of a recovery. I think one of the theses that we had is that altcoins are going to outperform Bitcoin, and in a way, select altcoins have, right, in actually a pretty significant way. And I think this is the beginning of that shift that we're seeing, that certain altcoins are going to basically excel. You know, basically Bitcoin will still be the single largest asset class, but we're going to have collectively a basket of altcoins that are going to be larger and more successful, broadly speaking, than Bitcoin in a way that we have gold versus the stock market. If you look at the top 50 companies, they, you know, clearly outperform gold. But gold as an asset class is still the single largest. Right. And I think that development is happening. I think the trends that we see in Web3 with our side, you know, we've moved a lot into institutional area. You know, we've got the joint venture with Figure, basically Nuva, which is our RWA marketplace. We've got the, you know, the joint venture on the Anchor Point, which is basically a stablecoin sort of joint venture with Standard Chartered, you know, one of two parties that have a license in Hong Kong. And then, of course, all the other institutional products that we have. And then on the consumer side, you know, Web3 gaming obviously continues to have a little bit of a rough patch. However, I think the big shift that is changing is coming through AI agents. So, you know, the one thing that Animoca always gets every once in a while, you know, when I'm, you know, off stage or even on stage, sometimes it's like, how's the metaverse? Right? And everyone's sort of asking this question and obviously expecting a little bit of a sort of, you know, like a snide remark. Um, and I actually tell them the metaverse is alive and well, and they go, what do you mean by that? And actually, you know, the mistake we may have made around thinking about the metaverse, remember, it was Covid, is that we're going to immerse ourselves in the virtual world. You know, some of us are going to wear these goggles and we're going to be just inside there and, you know, and we're spending more time virtually. But of course, what happened was that people ended up being, you know, when there was travel, people liked to get in direct interface. Conferences were blooming, travel was exploding again, right? And so it turned out that we weren't wanting to be digital as much as we were, even though the world is moving towards becoming more digital. However, now with AI agents, it's flipped the script. Meaning that maybe it wasn't about us entering the metaverse, maybe it was about the metaverse of beings, essentially creatures that were born from the metaverse, entirely digital, but who can now help us in our real life, like handling our calendar, maybe making some trades for us, you know, um, you know, booking our flights, you know, saving money on groceries, whatever the service that they're doing for you, or even helping you socialize. Those are actual metaverse beings. Do you think the digital beings that are actually now coming to life and helping you in the real world? So I would say the metaverse is doing really well now, right? Everyone's talking about AI agents, including, you know, what we're doing with Mocaverse, except now it's about the metaverse coming to you rather than us going into the metaverse.

And I don't disagree. So, so, you know, maybe even before we go into trading, you know, what is the distinction between an AI agent that basically allows all sorts of capability from programming, from research, from deployment, from all these capabilities? What's the role of the human? And ultimately, I think the role of the human is your particular divergent thinking approach, which is individual to you, and which basically means your taste, right? So when you think about trading, even trading has taste, right? In terms of my preference or my knowledge, right. So if we all ask the same question, like ask ChatGPT, for instance, as an AI, right? A chatbot, you know, about a particular trade, chances are a thousand people ask the same question, a thousand roughly similar, if not exactly the same answer, right? That's how AI works. Where the distinction happens is the questions you ask thereafter, right? Because the question you ask thereafter speaks more to how you think about it and say, okay, well, what about China? Or what about us? Or what about the war in Iran? What about these factors? Right? Suddenly you query and you ask, and then your taste or your ideas or your thinking starts forming into it. And that becomes essentially the essence of that trading model versus the other trading model. And so you have a divergent thinking approach, whoever's right? Who knows. But the point is, is that they're not the same. So if we're all giving the agent an autonomous task without actually having a human give it more input and, you know, and by the way, the agent can have that input over time, he will learn what, you know, I prefer and what you prefer, and then it's going to end up basically trading along those lines. And you know, that's the area that creates the sort of, you know, wonderful thing. So our agent is going to do most of the trades, I believe that. But are they going to do all the trades? No. And are they going to be the ones that are going to be trading entirely autonomously without human input? I don't believe that either. By human input, I don't mean human in the loop that approves it. The human might simply be just the advisory. But the human is the one that ultimately is going to say, wait, you should look at this. An agent goes, ah, I haven't thought about this. Or, you know, even, even though we can think of all these permutations, because humans can factor in some of the emotional and feeling type of areas. And as we have clearly seen in the market, a lot of the irrational trades aren't necessarily based on logic or P multiples. They're based on the sense of, you know, memetic quality, a sense of, you know, you know, implied or potential network effects, a sense of feeling, a sense of hope or a sense of despair, right? Like all these things come together that essentially give you an idea of where that goes, right? And I think this applies to everything, right? And so, um, but the powerful thing about AI agents that have a wallet, I think, you know, when we first launched Mocaverse, we called it Animal Commands. And a lot of people basically just dismissed it as a trading agent because crypto company, this agent must be trading, right? And that's why we had to rebrand it. So people understood that an AI agent running on blockchain actually is, it's much more powerful than that because it's for your digital identity, is you can have data sovereignty. Where does your data sit? You know, do you own your agent? Right. Um, I mean, in simple terms, you know, Meta AI is all the rage now because Facebook is pushing it, like Meta is pushing it. Um, and the question I would ask the audience here, for instance, is, you know, you could have Meta AI, which is the Meta agent, but would you trust your data with Meta AI? Right? And, you know, we studied the terms of service, and the terms of service is very unequivocal. The agent does not belong to you. They can remove the agent anytime. And the data, they can train from that data. It's basically, it's basically there by default. Right? And how many people have studied the terms of service to go, wait, hold on a second. It's one thing if you're training my social media data, maybe the location I'm in and how many followers I have and what kind of followers I have, that's already pretty bad, but okay, great. You know, what about your personal finances, what income you make, who your closest friends are, what do you love to shop, you know, you know, how many times you walk your dog? I mean, these are small little details that they don't know about you, and now they have permission to know that about you.

I think it's crazy. I mean, I'm not saying that you shouldn't get input information, but imagine you're giving this information to an advisor, a third party, would you give him everything or would you might scrub it? Like you could, for instance, you can still give them your CV without giving your name. Mhm. Right. I mean, you know, there's a reason why, you know, in HR policies, you're supposed to destroy your HR record once a person has left or is no longer had his application, or why, you know, some people say you don't have to reveal your age, right? Or you don't have to reveal certain things, but your job is relevant, but maybe everything else isn't relevant, right? You know, I mean, these are some things that are the same concept of privacy. So, so, so that's kind of the way I would say. The thing is that it's not that they know much more about you. They learn stuff from it, right? And then frankly speaking, they build a profile around you, and that becomes valuable data that it's not only about, hey, you have privacy data about me. It's about you've gained something in which I have, you know, zero rights to. And, but I think the more insidious part isn't I'm giving you the data. Maybe you could say there's a network effect implied with that, right? The insidious part is that you could lose it. So, you know, let's say you depend on, on an agent. And by the way, that's happened with Claude. A lot of people in Hong Kong were using Claude, using VPNs. Just watch the news the last couple of weeks. They're all being removed. So imagine you built your business relying on Claude, getting in all the data and having it analyze it and know so much about you, and then gone. Not even an appeal. Right. And by the way, that's, uh, that's what's going to happen with Meta AI. You're going to have these nightmare stories where people are using, you know, the Facebook agent, and then one day Facebook says, we don't like you. For whatever reason, the terms of service gives you zero ability. It's like being evicted from your own house with all the capabilities and sort of, sort of opportunities attached to it, and that's it. No, no sense of appeal.

Well, I mean, I think the absolute worst thing that could happen isn't even the fact that you're given the data, that is obviously bad. I think the worst thing is, is that you could lose access to all the knowledge that is built, which you've come to depend on. Imagine every morning you depend on your daily sort of decisions as to what you do for your health, because it knows everything about your health and what you should do at work, and maybe even what markets you should look at, because it knows everything about you. It has a multi-year history about you. And then you log in and it's gone. It's the equivalent of not having a smartphone, just worse. So just imagine you wake up and you're like, yeah, waking up and you're trying to figure out, okay, who messaged me, and your phone's gone. And guess what? You're not allowed to buy a phone anymore. And all the history that's in your phone, all the information that you have in there that's valuable to you, for you to make life decisions, is gone. How would you feel?