Yat Siu, Chairman of Animoca Brands at Blockchain Life 2024

Very good, thank you. And thank you again for the invite. I'm very happy to have you here again.

Well, right now for Animoca we're very focused on the Mocaverse, which is basically about the reputation layer in Web3. That's a big thing for us. We think about how you build better trust, better network effects in Web3, which I talked about last time, and that's basically building stronger reputation. We're building the reputation layer omni-chain across multiple partners through Moca. The second thing that we really like is in the education space. We're trying to basically solve student loans with DeFi, which I think would be a pretty big space. Education student loans is a $2.2 trillion market right now. It's not just about creating better financing; that's one solution. But if you can solve student loan problems through crypto, then those students will become crypto users for life, at least that goes to theory. Many of the biggest financial platforms like Venmo and PayPal actually grew through the student market. So we're thinking of what we're trying to do with Open Campus and EDU in a similar way: if you can solve financial issues and solutions for students, then we will onboard people long-term into Web3.

Well, I think we have over 540 portfolio investments, and we try to solve problems based on the problems our portfolio and our companies have. So for instance, for reputation, one of the problems we tried to solve was essentially airdrop bots. The ones who do airdrop farming are actually not real users, as we know. You see many token projects, everyone says 'low float, high FDV' – none of that is actually the reason. The reason many of these projects have a problem is that the users on the network, whether it's an L1, L2, a game or so on, they're not real. You just go on YouTube and search airdrop farming and there's a thousand ways to do it. We saw this with our own game: you have tens of millions of users, but then you have a much smaller number that actually have wallets. That's true for Hamster Combat, Catizen as well. They have all these users, which is great, but then it turns out many of them are fake users. So how do we solve this? The way to solve it is to build reputation. Why? Because if I have a good reputation, then I can get better airdrops. If I don't have any reputation, just like in the real world, I will hesitate to do business with you. We need to build that over time. You have a reputation; for instance, you're a journalist and you work in a certain area over time, you don't want to lose that. Whereas in Web3, you're dealing with a new identity every single time. You can build a society. There are statistics that show that any nation that has high trust has a much better GDP. It makes sense. Any country that has low trust has a low GDP because you can't trust to do business with you. That was the beginning – we were trying to solve a problem for us and our companies. Then afterwards we discovered, 'Oh wait, if we solve reputation in Web3, we open up a much bigger market.' That market is unsecured credit. Think about how much credit we get based on our reputation. It's actually trillions of dollars. Also think about jobs: you're not hired in a job because you have collateral; you're hired because of reputation – which school did you go to, how many years did you work. So these are markets that we will open up. That's an example of what happened. With education and students it was kind of similar. We're just trying to say, 'What problems can we solve for people that have financial issues?' Loans is a big one. I know DeFi has done a lot in the loan area on the collateral side, NFT loans, that kind of stuff, but when it comes to education students, they are kind of quasi-unbanked. Their first experience is to have a loan, especially in places like America, and we can actually give them a solution and then onboard them. To me, that is the evolution: solving a big problem will actually help us create potential solutions.

It's new, but it's related to gaming as well. For instance, when you think about reputation, we're building reputation through gaming. In other words, I play a certain game, I receive certain tokens. Do you sell the token right away? Do you keep it? These are all things that affect your reputation as an example. It's a bit more harmless, but over time these become things in which you can add a credit score, and that credit score gives you value down the road. That's a major area. To participate, you can just go to mocaverse.xyz. You can participate and get a free Moca ID. That's how you begin. Then if you want, there's the NFT, there's also the Moca ID and Moca tokens if you want to participate. In Open Campus, you can do this through EDU. That token is also live. It's basically building an ecosystem, and it's actually a blockchain – an education blockchain that you can participate in. Currently at testnet, we've already surpassed millions of transactions beginning just in the early days, and many companies are building on it.