So, thank you everyone for your time. I mentioned my name is Yat, chairman, co-founder of Animoca Brands. Today, I'm going to talk a little bit about how we see really the role of RWAs, a little bit on agents and what it means for the future of finance and why it's so important. So, this is going to be a little different than some of the talks here because I'm going to focus really on one of... Yep. All right. Slide. Okay, here we go.
Really sort of a problem we have in the world, which is the fact that this is a, you know, it's an older study but it's still relevant: 40% of Americans prefer socialism over capitalism, and America is supposed to be the home of capitalism. I think we see this already play out in politics, but the real issue is not that it's just, you know, a change of mind. The real issue is that we have a massive savings shortfall, and this isn't just true in America, it's global. This was an early 2026 report from SoFi, which basically indicated that something like 41% of Americans say they are unable to cover a $1,000 emergency expense, and 37% of all Americans don't have enough cash in savings to cover a $400 emergency, which is why things like healthcare and so on is such a dramatic thing in the US.
So in a world where most people actually are not sort of, where people aren't part or able to contribute to a capitalist system or be part of it, we shouldn't be surprised that they're so against it. And so what we have here in contrast, we're in Singapore, right? And you see a very different relationship that we have with money. People in Asia, in the Middle East as well, are very optimistic. They basically see how work and effort can bring them to something, to a form of financial freedom, in comparison to many young Americans who feel that they feel worse off than the generations before, which actually impacts hope and opportunity and all these things, and I'll get to that later.
But I want to sort of start off with, you know, as you think about this problem that we have not just in America but mostly in the West, about a phenomenon that happened a few years ago. And this was an article from two years ago when crypto was melting down, and everyone in, you know, places like the Philippines and Indonesia, as well, crypto was coming back in a pretty big way. And the experience we had back, if you remember things like Axie Infinity and blockchain games, wasn't around play-to-earn and blockchain games. It was the fact that people in places like the Philippines, where they couldn't have access to financial services, you know, during COVID, but had a wallet that could basically include them into a financial system, and from that essentially became financially included and started to learn a little bit about money, right?
And that's also the reason why in places like Africa or Southeast Asia or even in places like Pakistan or Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, these places where you typically have low access to traditional financial systems, blockchain has taken off because it has given them access to new tools that they wouldn't be able to access otherwise. And much of this started in the early days with, you know, the beginning of something like CryptoKitties, for those of you who might remember, in 2017, which was the early infrastructure of this kind of NFTs and eventually became sort of play-to-earn gaming. But it also was an infrastructure that demonstrated how crypto couldn't scale. That was basically 5 to 6 years ago.
And today blockchain can basically easily handle trillions of dollars of stablecoins. So now we have growth in crypto, a lot of financial, sort of, a lot of institutional adoption. But we have a problem in that the human experience of crypto remains pretty terrifying. I mean, how many people here still use MetaMask? Okay. I mean, we're, you know, it's Token so I expect that. How many of your friends use MetaMask? Okay. Smaller. Well, certainly many of my friends don't. The point is that it's very, very difficult, but we think actually AI agents are going to be the way in which that could change because it's natural language for them.
So everything that we've seen built in crypto, the kind of systems that enabled the people who were unbanked to become banked through blockchain, you know, in like the Philippines, the blockchain technology that is mostly terrifying for most users, but actually very friendly for people in the machine economy. Maybe everything we built for the last 5 or 10 years in blockchain was never meant for humans, but actually meant for AI agents.
And in a way, you could say that seems natural, right? It's a natural transaction flow that an agent can handle. Native settlement layer for AI economy. They can do things 24/7. They don't rest. They don't sleep. You know, we don't have a financial system in the physical world where you basically trade from 9 to 5 like a stock market or take a holiday. Basically, it can do it 24/7. We see this already happening today when there's a war in Iran and the situation happening with oil over the weekend. Oil prices can sort of move in a tokenized version of it versus the rest of the market that stays asleep because of human issues, right?
And agents are evolving from chatbots into autonomous economic participants more and more. So we think this is going to unlock trillions of dollars of machine-to-machine commerce, precisely because blockchain never sleeps and now has a resilience and scalability that's out there, but also is global, meaning that people all over the world can now access sort of these assets, which they couldn't do before because they were locked based on your nationality or maybe because you didn't have a bank account or maybe because you couldn't, you know, pass whatever systems was necessary for you to be financially included.
And tokens, the system that was designed and initially really only meant for network assets because they didn't have the regulatory framework to be something that you could own that would be like a security, has now become essentially the digital bearer asset of the digital economy. Now, by digital bearer asset, it's a little bit like the same share certificates or certificates that you have usually guaranteed by government or guaranteed by some central body, and tokens basically become the way you can do that in a decentralized global way using blockchain technology.
It started with concepts like network tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and today has emerged into things like globalized tokenized stocks, which I'll get into a little bit later. But that technology does not depend on an intermediary, as you all know. It basically can be done entirely, you know, in a permissionless manner. And so this again is not just for human consumption, as it were. It becomes much more suitable for an agent who can then trade and basically handle this. And really, I'll talk about this later. This opens up a whole breadth of spectrum in terms of how we can make the world more financially included.
So the other thing, of course, is that for AI agents, you know, you cannot traditionally bank an AI agent in the same way that you couldn't bank, you know, most of the people who lived in the villages in the Philippines, right? And now actually that same technology that worked so well for people in those places can now actually work really, really well for an AI agent who does not have, who also cannot be banked, and probably at least in the foreseeable future probably can never be banked, but give it a wallet, all the DeFi primitives open up, all of the abilities to stake and create yield, even purchasing sort of, you know, particular financial assets on chain that you maybe not might even be able to buy from a bank or have access to globally or around the world. Basically, you're now able to do that with a wallet.
Now this is perhaps, you know, one of those examples of where tokenized equities become interesting. You see recently the fastest growing and most exciting area in crypto has been tokenized equities and commodities. And it has to be remembered that one of the reasons that this market didn't exist before is because of the regulatory framework.
We had memecoins before rise, but memecoins didn't rise because it had value. Memecoins rose because people in places like the Philippines or in, you know, sub-Saharan Africa or in other areas who wanted to own something or trade something or do something with these assets couldn't because they weren't allowed to, right? You know, the US was at the time waging war against anything tokenized, unlike the current administration that basically says that most tokens are not securities, whereas the previous administration was saying almost every token was a security, and so anything that went in that direction was essentially considered sort of problematic, whereas that has changed.
And the result has been that in a way, rather than crypto eating TradFi, TradFi has been eating crypto, where people who used to trade those meme coins have now moved over to trading basically tokenized equities and stocks, which is in many ways a positive because it means that someone far away in Africa can now buy Tesla or SpaceX or gold, which they couldn't do before, right? So this is kind of part of the thing about sort of how we see the world grow and why tokenized equities and RWAs are so exciting, not just because they sort of enlarge these primitives, but also because they give access and provide knowledge as to how to participate in these markets.
Now one of the things though that is still missing is how do they know about the space? How can they basically compete against people who have knowledge in this area? And one of the things that we like to say is that, you know, when we first started thinking about the metaverse, the metaverse was a place back during COVID where we thought we would spend more time in the metaverse, we would be going inside it, you know, wearing these goggles and doing all that kind of stuff. But actually maybe the correct way to think about this isn't that we were going to be in the metaverse, but rather that the metaverse is coming to us, and that is in the form of these AI agents.
They've got model intelligence that from an IQ standpoint are going to surpass that of humans. In some cases, they already do for certain functions, but they help you with your calendar, with your schedule. They help make you money, all that kind of stuff, right? And so these virtual AI agents are actually coming to you, helping you basically with your day-to-day life. They just happen to be born from the digital world, as it were. And so, you know, we do this with Hello Minds, but generally just broadly, you can think of an AI agent, you know, similarly in a metaverse concept, literally like a game.
I don't know how many of you have played things like Sims Online or Civilization or these type of games, but you're managing characters. You're managing basically a sort of, you know, a cast of agents, if you will. They're game characters with a simulation, but actually these simulated characters, whether they are sort of agents that you're using from Facebook or agents using Hello Minds, they're actually the ones that actually help your life, and the game itself becomes the productivity gains and sort of the expansion that you can deliver from that.
So we think of imagining the virtual worlds that you've been playing games as essentially becoming a kind of administrative layer in terms of how you sort of experience AI agents. And so just quick examples, whether they help you lower your grocery bills and make you save money or whether they help you manage your investments, it's kind of all the same thing really, which is an AI agent basically does things for you that helps your life, but the visual expression and the way you interact with it like a co-worker can feel very much like a game.
There's like 3.6 billion people in the world who play video games. We think that they're going to basically understand that construct better because essentially gaming NPC characters are a form of very primitive AI to begin with. So everything we've experienced in virtual worlds are actually coming to life and giving us this understanding of this new agentic framework.
And before we start dismissing this idea that video games and simulations aren't reflections of how real life can work, actually Nvidia started off entirely as a company that was focused only on video games, building simulations, which eventually then led to the world we have today, which, you know, enabled, you know, of course, crypto mining and later on the entire infrastructure of the AI economy on an infrastructure level.
And now what we're saying now is that basically this whole agentic layer is coming in from a usability standpoint, but the framing, the most successful framing will come from this idea that we've been simulating this in video games. In the same way that Nvidia has been simulating the infrastructure, now we're going to be simulating the experience layer, and agents will come to life in a productive manner rather than just purely entertainment.
So you can think of basically personal agents as really just this playable home for personal AI, real tasks, real life progress, but effectively running and operating sort of the game of life and teaching and helping you to do things that, like if you think about the early days of the internet, you were having access to information and they kind of democratized knowledge, but you still had to distill the knowledge. And with an agent, it no longer just distills the knowledge, it can help you understand it in the way you want.
I mean, how many people here use things like ChatGPT to help them learn it or explain things to make it easier for them or express it to them in a manner that they couldn't understand versus just, you know, looking at it from a generalist standpoint? Now they can actually get it customized to them, and this is the next level where essentially you get much more deeper knowledge and appreciation of this.
So getting into sort of some of the final piece of slides. So if I asked the question here in the room, how many people think they're going to have more than five or 10 agents in the next 5 years, raise your hand. Okay, that's most of you. Well, we're here for Token, so maybe not a surprise. But basically, by that calculation, we're going to have at least 50 to 100 billion agents. If you go to San Francisco, they'll tell you, you know, we're going to have hundreds of agents each.
Whatever the number is going to be, it's going to be more than humans. But now, each of these agents are going to have a crypto wallet. They're going to be banked. They're going to have access to financial assets that are tokenized. They're going to be trading on your behalf. They're going to be transacting on your behalf. They're going to be purchasing things on behalf, and they're going to also teach and educate you.
We're going to enter a world where most of the commercial transactions are very likely going to be agentic rather than run by humans. And some of the constructs that we've seen in the crypto world, like DAOs for instance, might be the ways in which we will govern these agents. It was very difficult for humans to operate DAOs because we couldn't do daily voting or even weekly voting. We just didn't have the attention for it. But an agent doesn't have that limitation, for example.
So the projection as we see where we are today: AI is mostly a tool. 95% of the world uses it as chatbots, and you create an output, you give it a question, you get an answer. The next level where we are, which is still a single-digit percentage of the world, where things like Minds or Muse or Instinct are, is AI as an autonomous agent. Most of the time they use it today for things like manage my flight bookings, tell me about my calendar. That's kind of very early, but this will evolve into things like help me with my trades, help me optimize my life, you know, tell me how to save money on this health bill. That's actually where it's going to go.
And they'll manage that for you. They're not just going to sort of give you advice. They're going to manage the process. They're probably even going to communicate with the other agents to be able to give you a better price, all that kind of stuff. And then very soon we're going to have AI as an economic actor, which is the real unlock, which basically means that AI agents are going to create net new GDP and they're going to sort of help you build skills, make revenues for you, but it's all going to be in these cryptoeconomic circumstances, essentially tokenized.
And what that means is that AI agents are going to be asset holders, and in many categories perhaps even the largest asset holders when it comes to digital assets. Meaning AI is going to be the one that might own Bitcoin in itself or crypto assets because that's something accessible to them, which is not possible for them to buy stocks or bonds or real estate, but a tokenized version is accessible to them. And because they're autonomous and they're intelligent and they're acting on your behalf, they're going to be the ones purchasing that.
So if you're not tokenizing yourself, then you're not available to the new economic actor buying your assets or, you know, participating in them.
Now one important thing is that who owns the agent. So this is another reason why blockchain is so important because that becomes the infrastructure in the same way that, you know, you can own your Bitcoin, you can own your agent. Decentralization, digital property rights, the ownership of these assets, we believe has to be something that you as an end user have to own.
If this is an agent that manages your digital life, manages the finances, has access to all these assets in the future because they're basically transacting on your behalf, then it is very, very critical that you own them or have a way in which you have sovereign ownership of it. And I want to give you an example of Muse. So Muse is of course the new Meta agent. So everyone's talking about it, but it's important to understand that when you use an agent from a platform like Muse or possibly even OpenAI, they can suspend you without any prior notice. You do not own it. They can delete your chat, but the memories belong to them, and they train on your data.
Now it's one thing if you lose your social media information and a few thousand followers on Instagram. It's hard to value. It's annoying but may not have that much value. It's quite another if you depend on an agent that handles your schedules, does your trades, manages your life, and two years later they remove it or they may charge you 10 times the fee for you to keep it because it was never yours to begin with, right? And blockchain technology actually provides a way in which you could own an agent without having to host it locally, but still have a way in which you have sovereign ownership over that, right?
With that in mind, I don't know how many of you here have tried or used Facebook's Muse, but would you trust Facebook with your data? Something to think about.
So decentralization and permissionless matters a lot more for sovereign agents for that reason, right? So consumer agents talking to each other, being able to sort of find the most optimal route, you know, where you store the data instead of a central database, but in a decentralized one. Basically in this agentic future, to be sovereign and to have ownership, decentralization matters more than ever.
Okay, so coming to the final pieces, this I think is a big unlock for tokenization and frankly also agent AI in the world of tokens. We think the biggest problem we have in the world is not politics or access. Yes, it is part of that. It's the financially literate versus the illiterate. There's a very small percentage in the world, most of you in this room that are probably somewhere in the top 1 percentile or in that category. You have access to money and you will continue to do well because you're capitalists and you think about that. While the rest of the world are not in that area, don't understand money and are continuing to decline. And that has been happening really over the last couple of decades, causing all the stress that we have in our political systems.
When you think about when you graduate from school, this is a recent study: nine out of 10 people feel completely unprepared for the world of money after they graduate. And maybe for those of you who have children or yourself, you can probably sort of empathize with this because they don't teach you money in school unless you go to economics or maybe business school, which is only one category of school. Most of the digital world lacks financial understanding, and 75% say they've never been educated about finances in school. Yet the entire world runs on money. So you don't know anything about it.
But there's also another thing, which is that the places that have higher financial literacy have much higher GDPs. Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, right? Makes sense. Versus the places that don't. And so even developed economies like Europe, where you have a low financial literacy, eventually start to stagnate because they have a net low financial literacy compared to the population in comparison to these other places. That's it. That's factual.
And when you think about the rest of the world, not even talking about places like in Europe or US, you can see that the vast majority of the world do not have access to formal or semi-formal sort of access to traditional financial services. Again, we're in Singapore, so we have all the privileges of the financial accesses of the traditional banking system, but we don't have that in many of these other places because they might not even have a bank account, or if they make $5 or $10 a month, it is too unprofitable to bank them in the first place.
This is why we think RWAs are particularly exciting, not only because they open up an addressable market of trillions of dollars for existing assets, but because they make them more widely available to the rest of the world that wouldn't normally have access to them. And I think of it as two categories. One of them is the one that, hey, I do want to buy Tesla or I do want to buy some kind of stock or I do want to buy gold, I just can't. We're seeing that happening in crypto today, especially on-chain, where you don't even necessarily need permission to do so. That's one category.
But the category that we're much more interested and excited in is a category of financial assets that are not financial assets in a traditional sense, but can now become financialized because of tokenization. And I want to give you this example of where a few years ago we tokenized sort of a Stradivarius, which is an expensive violin. And I think most of you here probably would never care about that, but my mom is a musician. She will never buy Tesla. She'll never buy Bitcoin. She doesn't care about that.
But when it came to an opportunity for her to buy a piece of an expensive violin in which she had an emotional connection with, that was interesting for her, and through that journey she started to learn about money. Most of us here, you know, especially if you come here for Token or for milk, we know money. So we understand it, and so we think about money. And frankly, we're in Singapore. You know, most Chinese people think about money. It's a culture. We grow up with this. But learning about it comes from a point of passion and interest.
When you think about my children, for instance, they didn't learn about money because they learned it in school. They learned it because they were trading Pokemon cards or whatever other assets they were doing that came from a point of passion. So most of the world does not think of money in itself as a means to an end because of money itself. Money is a means for something else, for a better life, for more enjoyment, for more culture, for more entertainment.
So it's very hard to teach someone about money just for the sake of teaching money or a stock market. But if we can do this with assets that they care about, whether this is cultural assets, gaming assets, entertainment assets, things that they care about, that's how they start to learn about probably the most important social construct in the world. And this to us is the big unlock because tokenization makes this possible. You can literally make a stock market out of anything, even something small.
So for instance, Pokemon cards because of NFTs. Everyone wrote off NFTs, but the number one use case for NFTs today is Pokemon card trading. It created the market out of a very popular category. And for those of you, I don't know how many of you own or trade Pokemon cards, but it's been exploding over the last couple of years precisely because it was tokenized, because it created a market and unified the world into one category. And you can do this with big and small categories around the world.
Everything becomes a financial asset, which in a way it is, but now these are financial assets in which you have a passion point or interest in, where you start learning about the world of money.
So my final slide: I think we will make the world a better place if we can make everyone more financially literate. But I don't think the solution is that we just teach people about money for money's sake. It's about starting with the passion points we care about through tokenization and using AI agents to teach them about that, who are the ones who can execute on that. Thank you very much.
