Where Is Web3 Headed Next? Yat Siu on Crypto Markets, RWAs & Institutional Adoption

So very quickly on the Animoca side, well, I know what we have is we've basically launched Nuva, which is basically our RWA marketplace, currently offering, you know, 15 billion dollars worth of HELOCs, which is basically MB Prime. The innovation there is that it's an RWA marketplace where you can get yield roughly 6% that you can withdraw hourly, right? And that's the kind of thing that you can do with DeFi, right? We have quite a bit of additional activities in the space with Moca, new partnerships and new growth of the Moca ID, and, you know, most recently we also started to support projects like Open Campus, which is the EDU token, where we basically can see how we can now introduce buybacks into the actual tokenomics, right? And this is important because we think a general trend, not just related to EDU, are going to be essentially the kind of revenue-backed tokens.

That was something that wasn't possible before the SEC came up with a new guidance, where essentially you are allowed to buy tokens back as part of treasury management, right? This is something that previously would be considered a security, and now under this new guidance has been articulated as treasury management. And the community can now understand how value accrues into the actual ecosystem as a result of that, right? Before, people were not allowed to say that. And, you know, in the case of EDU, it had impact on the token, there was interest and excitement, and this is where projects and companies involved in the ecosystem effectively spoke about how they're going to sort of, you know, buy and accumulate. And then, this is the other beautiful thing about blockchain, is that you can then prove how much you purchased, and you can put it on chain for other people to see, right? So, it's auditable, right? So, we think there's going to be a natural trend in the future where more and more tokens are going to look for that. We at Animoca are going to be looking for projects like that to invest in and support as well, that have that kind of transparency, right? So, that's a general trend, right? So, that's kind of how we see that.

Of course, we also have a joint venture called Anchor Point with a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin that is still running essentially trial phases and essentially sort of experiments. But, you know, we're one of two license holders, and obviously hopefully that will also be quite substantial. But yes, that's on the institutional Animoca side. And then, on the sort of, you know, consumer side, we still have a portfolio in Web3 gaming. We still have over 600 portfolio companies. Um, you know, one of our leading portfolio companies, interestingly, is a life sciences company called Colossal that basically, you know, brings to life extinct animals, which is kind of cool, right? Um, and then, uh, separately, of course, uh, we have what is now Hello Minds. It used to be called Animoca Brands when we first spoke, but called Hello Minds, which is one of the leading AI agents, um, packaged a little bit like a game on Open Router. We're in the top five personal agents today, uh, just behind, you know, Hermes and Open Campus. And of course, the market has changed a lot because we now, you know, have Instinct that has raised a billion dollars at 10 billion just recently. And we have of course Muse from Meta that just launched as well, which we think is great because it's educating the market about the opportunity.

Well, I mean, first of all, what we do is education all the time, right? I mean, if you think about what's the largest platform in the world, YouTube, in terms of video consumption, what do most people do? A large part of it is education. If you want to learn something, you go on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. But the thing is you go there to learn about stuff, right? So, that in a form is education. Um, when you think about the Open Campus sort of ecosystem right now, it has one of the largest — I think it's the only one that does blockchain certification, I think both in India and Vietnam. It has a large number of people basically certified their degrees. So, it's actually accumulating a big student base for job opportunities and so on. And blockchain is perfect for that example. And then most recently also, I think we, you know, last year we did a sort of deal with Pencil Finance, which is on the Open Campus network, a way in which you could actually sort of provide student loans on chain, and they just repaid the loans with a really healthy coupon, no defaults. And the entire platform together with the ecosystem actually helped fund up to 6,600 students, I think it was, right? Which is amazing, right? So, again, it's not just a good use case, it's also a profitable use case. So, you can see all of those businesses are now basically building on the Open Campus EDU ecosystem, trading value. So, it's really creating these powerful network effects. And then of course you have, you know, companies like TinyTap that are basically selling education content by teachers, and they're making revenues, and they're also basically looking to buy EDU tokens as well to bring into their treasury. So you've got that kind of pressure that's coming in because people are believing in this. And of course, you know, my dream of course would be that an education-based token, which by the way is a five to seven trillion dollar market. Like education is huge. I mean, ask any Indian parent what would they spend money on, right? It's going to be education, right? Just how much money do you spend on education? It's so clear, right? Anyway, so it's a five to seven...

...seven trillion dollar market, but wouldn't it be incredible if one of the top tokens in the world was an education token? It's not just reflective of the market. I think it's good for crypto. I think crypto will have a better reputation if a token that serves people, provides student loans, helps educate them, make them grow, is one of the biggest tokens in the world. So that to me is kind of what we're trying to do with that. Obviously there's a lot more work to do. It's just the beginning stages. We've just made the first initial announcement on this one and basically sort of building that out, and we certainly hope that education can be revolutionized by basically bringing it on chain, which we believe it can, particularly in places like India or Philippines or like Vietnam and so forth.

Well, we're also doing AI stuff.

I mean, I think it's a growth phase because now that you're using agentic tools, many of those companies are already making money. So, you know, and you see this because of AI, you don't have the same staffing, you don't have the same costs. So really you can have single founders or small teams that are already basically creating cash flow positive businesses with basically using AI tools, right? So I think that's changed. But before, when you win investment, it might take several years for the business to become profitable. Now it could be actually three to six months, right? So that's kind of one shift.

The other thing though I would say is that AI payment rails and AI systems, there are so many of them, right? So I'm not saying that they're not important, they're very important, but the competitive framework is very large. But when I look at education, and again we're investing in some of these companies and supporting them, however, when you look at education, to me, you know, what is the world going to? The world is going towards real world integration. What is the hottest thing that people are doing and trading? It's real world assets. It's tokenized stocks, tokenized commodities, right? Those are the things that people are excited about because there's a value transfer, there's a clear idea of, oh, I'm buying a stock or a commodity as opposed to a meme coin. I'm not saying meme coins can't be fun, but the value of meme coins is clearly speculative, right? Whereas if you're buying tokenized equity or tokenized gold, at least you have some element of understanding where that value would come from, right? And now you know, what is the one thing that we do in society that we spend most of our money on? It happens to be education. And I think one of the reasons why education, you know, hasn't really taken off in the world of blockchain is because blockchain tends to be a very young demographic. They all just left school. The last thing they're thinking in their mind is going, oh my goodness, here's education, because also they're not necessarily the ones paying the bill, but at the end of the day they will, and they're not going to just buy for primary or university education. It's for further education. It's for new job training. That's kind of where it's all going, right? So, we do think that education, you know, in the same way that it is such a massive industry in the physical world, has to be a massive industry in the digital virtual world, right?

Um, and also, there's an implied scarcity, which is that, you know, similarly to whether it's Hype or Zcash, right? Um, you know, when you look at a project like this, there is scarcity of which project to look at, right? You know, if I look at Web3 gaming, um, we still believe in the thesis, and, you know, we'll talk about it later with Minds, right? However, how many Web3 gaming projects are there? Even today, right? Thousands and thousands and thousands, right? So, the dilution of the attention, right? It's not just about — you know, one of the reasons why Sandbox was so big in '21 is because there were maybe six or seven, maybe 10 gaming projects, right? So, there is also — it's not just scarcity in terms of the, you know, scarcity of the attention, scarcity of the project. You know, oh, are you Sandbox, there's Decentraland, there's Axie Infinity. And then there's a few smaller ones, right? You know, but generally speaking, those were the main ones, right? Today, like everything has a gaming angle, and if you do the collective market cap of all the gaming tokens and gaming adjacent tokens, it's I think 8 to 10 billion. Okay? So, it's not small, right? It's just diluted across many, many more projects, right? Um, so, you have to look at that as well.

When you look at the privacy sector, there's only a handful of tokens. There's not a million tokens that are doing sort of privacy, right? Um, and I think for education, really, I think there's only one, right? Which is the EDU. So, that's also part of the thing. So, we're not only looking at a project that is specifically focused on sort of the sector only, that makes sense, but also, what type of attention is there? How many people, you know, um, we don't think the biggest opportunities come when everyone's already talking about it. Right? The biggest opportunities come when very few people are talking about it. And then, but we think it's going to grow or we believe it's going to grow, right? So, I think that's why it's education. But of course, AI we have to for infrastructure. Agents are important, like when we launched it, you know, now Hello Mind, but Animoca Minds, we launched it in February, right? And we pushed it, and today everyone's talking about AI agents. But we were there since February, right? So, it's the same thing, right? Which is you want to be early to the market so you can capture share.

The opportunities.

Well, first of all, there are thousands of solutions that need to be solved in education because education is one of those industries that is still stuck by almost 50 to 100 years. I mean, if you go to school, you still use pen and paper. You still learn math like I learned math and my mom learned math. I mean, just think about this, right? Like there are so many elements. Like the things that we should be using with AI, you know, and then technology that should be so much more faster and accelerate, right? And think about also the classroom. Why are we learning with one teacher and 20, 30, 40 kids in one classroom? Why shouldn't it be personalized to every student, right? You know, so what I'm trying to say is that one of the reasons why we're also fascinated by education is because the spectrum of opportunity is this big, okay? Like, you know, where are the opportunities? Where there's a problem. And I think we can agree that education has many problems to solve.

It's the one industry where we spend so much of our disposable income. It's also the one industry where very few people are satisfied with the results they get on their spending. Right? If you think about it, right? You know, and you want to get them into this university or you want to get them into this degree, how many parents succeed in the money they spend to give the outcome that they want their children to have, right? So, and but also there's the other aspect. Maybe that is not the right outcome for the child, right? Like maybe the child wants to be an artist. He doesn't have to be an engineer or a doctor for instance. How would you know that, right? These are things that AI agents can do. AI can do this much better, right? Also, job opportunities. I can now execute. If everyone's a programmer and everyone can do stuff, then what's important is creativity and ideation, right? And that's something again that an AI agent can execute for you, and you have to be able to know that and do that. So, there's so many things in education, right? Uh, and then of course financing as well. You know, one of the things we love about the financing with student loans is that so many people don't have a pathway. I think the statistic was 97%. 97% of the people who got the loans were underprivileged. Um, and I think more than half have never even received formal credit before.

I mean, that is amazing, right? That means you were able to provide financing to students who had never had a loan before, right? And that's kind of what this is about, right? So, you see all these pockets of opportunities that you could be addressing, right?

Well, I mean right now, you know, we now want to give every student that essentially has signed up with Open Campus an AI agent, right? So, it does two things. One, it will have millions of users join Hello Mind that creates a network that have the agent capability. Um, and it also enables a student to have more powers, right? More capability. So, everyone says, 'Oh, I can use ChatGPT and that kind of, you know, you could have a Claude account.' But, how much do you have to pay for Claude?

Right? And you might say, and I mean, I know that quite a few people might have a Claude Code subscription. That's $20. Um, do you think a student in India can afford $20 a month?

Maybe. But, it's hard, right? But then, how far does a $20 take you?