Animoca Brands Chairman Yat Siu: Digital Ownership, Going Public & What Web3 Founders Get Wrong

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Yeah, so a couple things. One, we announced go public plans. We're doing a reverse merger with Currency Flip, which is a massive exclusive company fintech player. It's quite strategic for us. We're super excited. The NASDAQ ticker is CURR, but of course that closing will take around 9 to 12 months, so that's the initial. We're also doing a joint venture with Standard Chartered Hong Kong telecom called Anchor Point that is applying for a stablecoin license in Hong Kong, and we have a partnership with Provenance Labs on NUA, which is a real marketplace. But of course, Animoca Brands itself wants to really present itself as the ultimate levered bet on altcoins in the space to allow a way for traditional investors to have access to the broader crypto market.

Well, digital property is essentially the ownership of property that is online and basically digital in nature, right? And up until blockchain, we didn't have a way of doing it. For instance, you might have an Instagram account with a million followers or 10,000 likes, but that is not your property. It's the property of Facebook, and they decide what to do with it, and you can't monetize it and you can't own it. So what we're saying with blockchain is that actually you can now own these digital assets. The granddaddy of digital assets and digital property is Bitcoin, right? You own the Bitcoin, but it's truly your Bitcoin. You don't need a bank, you don't need custody. You can own it as yours. And of course, you can extend it to everything else. Think about everything you do digitally online right now. When you're playing a game, you have a skin or an asset or an item. Is it yours? It's not yours. But with blockchain, if it's tokenized as an NFT, it could be yours. But the foundation of digital property rights isn't the fact that you can own an item per se. It's the foundation of capitalism because now that I can own something, I can have rights in it, which means I have the ability to monetize it, to do financial services, to do something with it, and essentially raise the foundation of capitalism. That's what's exciting for us, and that's where we think the future is going to go. With Animoca Brands, we have 628 plus portfolio companies. Each of them has a mission to essentially advance the future of digital property, and that means it becomes financial in nature. It's not just gaming, it's DeFi, it's AI.

Tokens. So blockchain-related assets.

Well, the very simple thing we explain to people is that obviously Web3 and crypto is the future because people are using it. But basically, why would you invest in Animoca Brands? Because we're access to the altcoin space. What are altcoins? It's utility. People joining crypto today because of altcoins. They're not joining it because of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is important. It's a reserve asset because it's like gold. Gold today is $27 trillion. Stock market is $180 trillion. So Google, Facebook, and Apple are never going to be larger than gold. Collectively they are larger, and that's what we think altcoins will be as well. So if you believe in crypto and if you believe in blockchain, then it's not enough to have Bitcoin. You need to have Bitcoin, probably your Ethereum, your Solana, and then you have to have the whole rest of the market, which is 30 to 35% which is altcoins. How do you do it? You can buy some altcoins yourself, but good luck. There's millions of them. So maybe your audience might buy directly, but most traditional investors have no idea how to do this. That's what Animoca Brands becomes. We become the vehicle for access into altcoins and the way that they can participate in this growth. Also, we're not a fund. That's important because if you're a fund, you have to have a fund cycle, which means you sell or you liquidate the fund after 10 years. Imagine if you invested in Apple or Google or Facebook in 2000 and then your fund expired in 10 years, you sell in 2011, 2012. You make profit, but you do not capture all the value. The second issue is that if you are putting money in a fund and it's an evergreen fund, you have no liquidity because the fund is trapped. The money is still sitting there, whereas if it was tokenized, if it was on the stock market, then you can trade it. That means if you believe or don't believe in it, at least you have an option of liquidation, and that's basically what Animoca would represent.

Well, I think there's so many things. It's not just one thing, but if there's one thing that I really think is important, what I would love for Web3 to do more is basically we need to be more inclusive. We need to make it easier for people to join the ecosystem. Money is important, don't get me wrong. Financial literacy is important. That's a key component. But what we really need to do is educate the benefits for it. If we talk only about the short-term gains, about the trading or the patterns, yes, it's important, but that's not how you get regular people in. It's not that they don't necessarily understand it. It doesn't interest them that they're entering the space because of trading patterns or pure alpha. They want to understand utility. They want to understand the potential. They understand what it means for them longer term. If we can get those people in, then we have a much more stable space.

So many. But without specifically trying to talk too much about our own portfolio, because I can't talk about third parties that I don't know, the two ecosystems that I particularly like a lot obviously is Mocaverse, which is digital identity, and Open Campus, which is education. Why do we like Mocaverse? Because at the end of the day, digital identity is perhaps one of the most important things for us, and with digital identity we solve essentially privacy and reputation at scale. I want to be clear, it's not about anonymity, it's about privacy. The whole world needs that. The leading digital identity privacy correlated chain we think is going to be Moca Chain. And the second one, with EDU, which I think has even better potential in many ways because of its market cap and so on, is that the EDU ecosystem is tackling student loans. Student loans is a $3 trillion market. That is massive. I know EDU Chain is a lot more, but that's one of the big things we're doing. If they can solve that, with companies and investments like this finance, they think there's a good chance, then that will be a big breakaway success because you can also bring hundreds of millions of students into crypto because they get their student loans that way, and services a market that at $3 trillion is roughly 10 to 12 times or more than the total TVL of today.