Yat Siu at TOKEN2049: What Animoca Is Betting On Next | Insider Take Ep 5

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. You know, a month ago feels like a year in crypto. So seriously, it's like... Yeah. But yes, thank you.

You know, the way I tell people about when you come to a conference like Token 2049 is that if you're down in crypto, come to a conference and you will be re-energized, right?

And that's actually how what it feels like. It's not just because you're around friends or people that know you or are excited and building in the space. It's also that there is a genuine excitement around what's happening, and everyone's very future-oriented. Yes. And I think, you know, that's what you need because obviously sometimes you could say that the present state of the world seems a little bit sad, but then when you think about where the future is going, you can be excited about that. Come to a crypto event, you'll get pumped up and you're ready to fight for the fight for the future.

Well, I mean, look, I think it's very bifurcated because there's one segment that talks about tokenization and RWAs non-stop, and we have an institutional business in that area. Um, but I am much more excited to talk about AI agents, and much more excited about the consumer space, which I don't think is getting enough attention, which I think it ought to, right? And I think it has to do a lot with, you know, the fact that in those conferences we're getting a lot more suits coming in, right? Um, and which I think shows that there's some growing up, but that also means we're losing a little bit of the fun of the space, right? If you remember five years ago, it was just fun, right? We enjoyed sort of the spirit, you know, we had artists, we were in culture, all sorts of interesting, diverse people. And in the last couple of years, it started to feel more like a digital version of Wall Street.

And, you know, like nothing wrong with that, but, you know, crypto is much bigger than that, right? I know that some people in the industry said, well, you know, it's good if it's, you know, being significant in the finance industry is meaningful enough. Like yes, but that wasn't the vision, that wasn't the mission. It was supposed to be much more all-encompassing, and in a sense finance spreads to everything. So the hope is that we can bring that back again, and I think we can. And I think the conversation needs to shift away from, you know, just the RWA institutional side, which is, you know, in tokenization, which is important, don't get me wrong, but how do we bring everyone else into the space? Because, you know, what is the promise of crypto? We need to remember it was around democratized access to financial products and assets, right? You know, that someone in Africa or in India could buy the same product as someone in America, that someone who, you know, who could spend $1 buying the same product as someone who spends a million dollars, right? Like that's the promise, right? And while it does fulfill it, if we don't bring the regular user into crypto, it doesn't matter that the technology can do it, he still won't do it, right? And that's why I think AI agents are going to be able to drive that in. Um, and that's why we're so heavily focused on it.

Well, I mean, since we last spoke, the agent space has completely exploded. I mean, if you look at, for instance, Instinct raised a billion dollars at 10 billion, but Instinct's user count is about 100,000. So it's not that big, right? And then, you know, Facebook launched, right? Yeah. Um, and, you know, everyone's talking about the record-breaking numbers and all that kind of stuff. Um, I have a different take on that, which I may get into, but the point is that Facebook, you know, has I think said that the growth is faster than OpenAI with the agent, right? Um, but, and we like that because it's educating people on AI. Now, why do you need that, right? But we actually think that, you know, in the case of Facebook, we think there's a trust deficit. So for instance, if you think about an AI agent where it is today, and by the way, um, Minds today is probably the third or fourth largest AI agent, um, on OpenRouter.

So it's growing, a personal agent. It's growing pretty fast. Uh, and also at the moment we are still the only ones growing in Asia. Right. I mean, you can't really use Muse in Asia yet. And also, Instinct and some of the products, they're not even focused on the market. Right. I mean, we have a few people who get the invite code, but generally speaking, they aren't focused on here. Right. Um, and, you know, um, we also support, uh, not just WhatsApp and Telegram and email and iMessage, but we also support, you know, KakaoTalk and Line, and we also support, because we're focused on this market, right? This is a larger, larger consumer market.

Anyway, um, you know, maybe I would ask the audience, for instance, you just think about it. This agent handles your calendar, your schedule, um, you know, with your groceries, maybe is able to sort of, you know, do your finances, knows about your job, knows everything about you. Do you really want Meta to own that data? Do you want them to run your life? Now, something else. If you read the terms of service, which of course we did, they have the ability to remove your agent anytime at will with no condition. By the way, that's the same as social media. Right. I mean, if Meta removed your sort of Instagram account, what's your appeal? Almost nothing. Right. And it could be for anything. It could be, you know, it could be completely invalid. You don't have an appeals process. So it's one thing if you lose a social media account with a thousand followers or tens of thousand followers. That's hurtful. That's devastating. Could affect your business.

Yes. Your entire life that you depend on, right? So actually I think it's very difficult, um, for people to trust that. And I actually think in many ways this might be the calling for, you know, how we're all about digital property rights, right? That might be the calling as to why you finally understand why you need to have digital property rights, right? Digital property rights is super critical. But beyond the concept of I need to have sovereign money, right? It's hard for people to understand because when they say you need to value your data, everyone agrees. But then people go, but the convenience of having everything on Instagram or on the platform, and what's the value of my data anyway? Like I don't know what it's worth because they never articulate that. You can't quantify it. But a personal agent is different, right? It knows your salary. It knows what you're looking for a job. It knows your relationships. It knows what your problems are. Um, it knows everything.

Yes, exactly. Numbers. That's huge, right? So, that's one issue. But then I think the bigger issue isn't even that it knows this about you, which is bad enough, right? What if it's removed? Suddenly, your gateway to life is gone. I mean, imagine, I give this comparison. Imagine you wake up one morning and your mobile phone is gone. Everything on your mobile phone is gone. You don't even have access to a phone, right? You can't communicate with the world anymore because your phone is gone. And you don't have the ability to buy a phone. You're just on a blacklist that's not allowing you to, like some kind of block list that doesn't allow you to buy a phone, right? A doomsday scenario. Okay? Like just imagine that anxiety where you're disconnected from the world.

That's what your agent's going to be, right? Like if your agent runs everything, we don't believe the phone will be the main interface. We think the agent will be the main interface because it knows everything about you. And then, you know, if you depend on a centralized platform that will remove you for whatever reason, then you're toast. So you need a sovereign agent. And with Hello Minds, you know, we're building this on blockchain. Um, you know, you have the ability to have a sovereign agent, but it's set up in a cloud way, right? The same technology that can give you effectively self-custody of, you know, basically blockchain and digital assets or crypto assets is the same technology that can give you now essentially control of your, um, sort of agents. And to me, if I think about that, is perhaps the most critical thing we need to fight for, right? So, we're pushing that really hard.

Um, most of the users of course don't care about that yet, but they do care about the fact that, you know, it is an agent that can do things for you. Um, and we do it in a fun way. Our agents are basically gamified. Um, the app looks pretty cool. You interface it kind of like a more like in a fun way. And we also believe in multi-agent orchestration, meaning that it's not one agent that does everything for you, but it's multiple agents. I mean, you know, imagine if you have an agent that knows everything about your life. Will you share it with your work colleagues at work? No. You'd only share, you know, maybe an agent that knows stuff about work, but you wouldn't want to share everything about your personal life because it's none of their business and, you know, just in case, right? So, there's stuff like that that matters why you need multiple agents as opposed to just one.

Well, I think right now at least universally, if everyone's using MetaMask, we all have the same difficulty, right? Which is like, okay, and MetaMask is a great product, but the point is that you have to remember your seed phrases, you have to store it somewhere. Now they have the email login on, but the point is that at the end of the day, you know, it's still a cumbersome interface, right? And the issue isn't even once you're familiar with the interface, because I certainly believe that once you... it's a learned interface, once you understand it better, then you will use it, right? Like I'm comfortable using MetaMask, but it's very difficult for, you know, my mom for instance to imagine using it because she has to sign the contract and then there's these hashes and she says, okay, what am I signing here? Can I trust this? Do I know this? Right? An agent can do this, you know, in a heartbeat. And so we think that the main interface for particularly the on-chain world, right, is going to be effectively, you know, a human talking to an agent, and the agent will do the work, right? And that's actually the interface that makes it easy and also safe for them to do, right?

Right, so I feel like that's a mechanism. So, you know, today maybe only 10% of people who own crypto are actually on-chain, right? And so we think that will change, but not because a human is directly on-chain, because his agent, who's representing the human, will be on-chain.

Well, yeah. First of all, next big thing. First, I think we've barely touched the surface of the agents, right? I mean, you think about it, like a lot of people talk about, oh, Muse has grown so fast, 3.6 million users or now 4 million, 5 million, whatever number of users are grown. My response to that is, Facebook has access to billions of users. Why do you only have millions? You know, it's not the same as OpenAI where they started from zero, right? That this was truly viral. Um, you know, to me, I mean, Facebook will get there by sheer sort of, you know, basically brute force. However, the fact that they only had single-digit millions at start, to me is a bit of a surprise. I wouldn't look at that as being super successful. I would look at this as, huh, why don't you have at least another zero attached to that, right? Given the size of your network. So, that's my first point.

Um, but they're educating the market. That's one thing. And through, I do think Meta has a trust deficit. It's hard for them to say, you know, uh, to have a terms of service that basically says the agent isn't yours and you could lose it. That's a really hard argument, I think, for someone to persuade to put all of their data on, right? A lot of people were worried about when OpenClaw came out that it's going to mess with the email. Well, here it's not going to mess with the email. It's someone who knows about my email, and it's not someone that's my agent exclusively. So, I think there is that concern. Now in terms of where we think the next big mega trend will be. So first of all, I think the confluence of agents and blockchain are going to be much, much bigger than people anticipate. And I know a lot of people might also say, well, so what, right? An agent can exist without blockchain. It's true that an agent can exist without blockchain, but an agent with blockchain is infinitely more powerful because it has money, it has the ability to transact. It can do financial primitives, um, that a normal agent cannot do. Right? Um, and if we believe this, which is what we certainly think, and many of the other partner companies out there also believe, is that most of our revenues will come from transaction-based revenues. How do you have a way in which you can, you know, like share a piece of the transaction revenue? That's what blockchain is perfect for. It already scales. It's resilient. It's fault tolerant. It's like all these things. Why reinvent the wheel? And on top of it, you can tap into global liquidity that is in the trillions of dollars of basically volume that you can basically access, um, if you wanted to, um, you know, on different chains. But you can certainly sort of, you know, basically, um, swap between them. So absolutely. So you've got an infrastructure that is already essentially a standard of sorts that, you know, we think is the, so let's call it the native machine banking ecosystem.

Is that our cue to say bye-bye? I don't know. I have no idea what... but looks like it's a general power outage because outside it's also not...