Fireside Chat with Yat Siu, Founder of Animoca Brands, in Davos 2026

Thank you for having me again.

Well, last year, this year will be I think much more of a year. I would say last year we announced our plans to go public on the NASDAQ currency group, that was in November. You know, I think it's been exciting in the sense that last year was very much an institutional year. We also announced partnerships around basically our arts with like which is our province labs, and you know we are in a joint venture with Standard Chartered and telecom around essentially sort of state in Hong Kong as well. There's been a lot going on, but I would say also last year was an interesting year. I think Anthony sort of touched a little bit on this in a sense that I think last year everyone was expecting for the market to be much bigger and better than it ended up being. And so our general thematic for 2026 is that it's kind of deferral. So all the things that should have happened in 2025, which includes clarity, are going to happen more likely in 2026. But yes, the foundations are laid up and preparing to go public. We think we are a strong institutional window for our sector which is mostly in tokens other than Bitcoin. And our mental lens really is that the future really belongs to these alternative and utility tokens because that's essentially where we enter the space, right? Basically we use altcoins like Ethereum or Solana or gaming tokens or whatever to join the world, and then from that we might save some of Bitcoin. But yeah, that's the only company in the world currently that can offer that window because of the fact that it's also our balance sheet at point isn't a fund manager, the assets are in the...

Yeah, I mean we think of ourselves as the sort of ultimate gateway to the altcoin economy. It's very much around our view that the world is going to be tokenized. Everything will be tokenized. And so even when we talk about RWAs and people launching new tokens, actually even if it's an RWA it is in the altcoin economy per se. Bitcoin to us is basically like gold, right? It's just a digital version of gold. And so just like the markets today, gold will always be the bigger asset, Bitcoin will always be the largest asset in the digital space. However collectively, just like the stock market which is roughly five, six times the value of gold, basically all coins will be similar in that equation. But how do you as an investor actually participate in the altcoin space? I mean, one of our portfolio companies, Alphon as well, right here, just saying that doing that together with Quest Moon is an example of one in the ecosystem, right? And that's just one token in that ecosystem that drives utility for hundreds of millions of users. Many of the people who are coming from that space, how do you know which token to invest in? It's not that different from 25, 30 years ago thinking would you know to invest in Amazon or eBay or Google or Facebook or Apple back in the day, you wouldn't exactly know that. And through us, you have a window of internet gateway. The other thing is also because we're not a fund, you have the ability to take the long views, which is you could trade in and out especially if you're public. But imagine if you're a fund and you got to invest in 2000, 2001 or 2005 companies like Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, that kind of stuff, you'd be forced to basically liquidate that position 10 years down the road or years, which would have been a great return, but the real returns came out much later, right? And of course, because tokens are very liquid instruments as well, we can generate yield. And so we've been generating nine-figure revenues and positive basically the last four years precisely because of the fact that in crypto it accelerates much faster and you can actually make yield from that. But really, we're about the long tail of the asset and bring exposure to the space.

Yes.

We were forced to go private, so to speak. So we were a public company in the Australian Stock Exchange up until 2019. And a fun fact for those of you who care, in the summer of 2019, the Australian Stock Exchange, and you got to remember, for those of you who've been around just sort of the space, 2019 was not a good year for crypto, right? Bitcoin was like $3,000. Everyone talked about the scams, recovering from post-ICO trauma, shall we say. And the Australian Stock Exchange really did not know crypto. So they created a rule in July of 2019 that specifically, you have a gaming background, essentially disallowed gaming companies to issue a token. There's only one company on the stock exchange that was basically doing that. So they tailor-made a rule and then one month later we got suspended for future rules, right? So it just also goes to show that essentially centralized regulatory overreach isn't only happening in places like America. It happens all over the world, right? So we were forced to go essentially sort of private. But actually funnily enough, it was right after that that we then had the freedom to do things that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to do, especially in the areas of token knowledge and our investment portfolio. And that's actually when we became sort of a much larger company. We got our first unicorn valuation in 2021. When we were delisted, our market cap was around 40 million or 50 million Australian dollars, so very much smaller back in the day. So I think we would not have been able to grow if we were restricted under that environment.

So there's no valuation set per se. So what happened was it's a reverse merger. So the merger is fixed. It's 95/5, which means that the target company will sort of own 5% of the business. And what's interesting that some investors have done is that they basically take that and then you multiply the valuation by 20 as a way to indicate market price. You know, this is not financial advice so do what you want with it. But if you were to take that measure, it was trading very wildly on that day. At one point I think we were like 20 billion, but you know it's come down to earth a bit. But yes, we're generally speaking, our last round was raised at several billion dollars many years ago.

Well, I mean ultimately what is the idea of digital asset ownership as digital property rights is sovereign ownership of your assets which is essentially a proxy for freedom. If you have the ability to own your property totally then you have essentially a mechanism in which you can secure your freedom in some form or another. And if you believe in that conceptually then there is long-term you're aligned. And I think a lot of people struggle with that initially because they haven't experienced what the platforming is like. Pre-ASX, we were one of the largest video game sort of mobile...

But pre the whole experience, we were actually one of the biggest app game developers on the Apple App Store. This was in 2011. And in 2012, they didn't like something and they removed all of our apps, were completely gone. 180 or so apps, I don't know, some crazy number of apps were gone. 106 people in our office essentially going, what the hell's going on? We didn't have anyone to call because, you know, the king of the Apple App Store basically said, 'We don't like you.' But they didn't actually say anything. They just said breach of rules. That's it. When you think about where the world is headed since and really before that in preparation, whether this is Facebook, whether this is X, I mean you can talk about sort of freedom and sort of, you know, but the reality is that the owner of a platform basically gets to decide whether you can exist or not in many ways, right? And I think this is the crux of a lot of the issues that we have in the world today. And so there needs to be a technology that allows that freedom to exist. So at least you have not just the ability to express it but also the ability to be in an area where you can basically sort of balance that power dynamic. And blockchain is, you know, a lot of people looked at it from freedom of money perspective, right? Bitcoin as an initial way of protecting and hedging against inflation but also as a way to having this sort of asset in your pocket as it were and to basically have a store of value that government couldn't touch or centralized authority touch, right? That's kind of the thing. And it's also the reason why so many people in crypto are sort of bemoaning a little bit the ETF scenarios and sort of the institutionalization, which by the way we think is important, but a lot of them are owning it because they're saying aren't the institutions coming in and taking that over? And our view is actually as long as enough people have it then it's okay. It's kind of like democracy, you need enough people to vote, you don't need every person to vote, but if you have enough people that vote in it then you secure at least the basis of the democratic framework, right? And that's basically for asset ownership the belief that this would be the case. We started off with games but we realized it was much, much more than that. And also, we had in hindsight, we entered into crypto with NFTs in late 2017, early 2018. So, we entered when Ethereum was $80, right? So, from our perspective, we had generally good experience, right? If you invested in Ethereum when it was 3,000 or Bitcoin was 10,000, went all the way down, we may have been more jaded, right? So I think as is with everything in life, sort of circumstance, luck, fortune, yes, conviction, but of course all these things color you as well. You say the same is true for people who may have entered the space shortly before FTX, they would have been traumatized. Doesn't matter how solid your thinking is at the moment in time, you would have told people then, hey, you know what, crypto is the future, blockchain is here to stay, much harder, right? For us it was frankly much easier because yes, Bitcoin went all the way down to 16,000, that's because they haven't experienced Bitcoin at 3,000, right? So from their lens it's a disaster, from our lens it's like, well, generally it's up, so positive.

Okay so I mean look, I think for me, I think we're in a fortunate position where it's, you know, I don't have to worry about the sort of the day-to-day. So it's about the impact, right? So the uneasiness comes more around is this something that we think will hurt people, that would be uneasy, right? Is it something that will affect my family negatively? That'd be uneasy. But generally speaking, I feel that what we're moving forward to is for public good. So that keeps me going. Doesn't really matter that there swings or there cycles. The other thing also, people are critical of volatility in crypto. And I understand the sentiment, but I think it's a mistake to not embrace volatility. And what I mean by that is that we say we live in a capitalist environment. Even though most people aren't capitalists because we don't have capital, that's a different topic. And capitalism is about volatility. The stock market, commodity prices tell you what's going on in the world. And so some people respond to it by saying we want to be more open and we want to be more informative around this and embrace it. But many places, Europe especially, are trying to tame capitalism. It's not so much that they don't see the mechanisms and say this information is valuable. It's that we don't like that volatility. They want to control it. The ups and the downs which I think to me essentially creates a kind of distortion of the true nature of it. Which means that we don't get true information if we try to tame it this way. So take the job market. I mean if you actually were to measure the number of people that lose their job every week, gain their job every week, it's not a flat chart. It's like this. If you take a look at how many companies close and open on a daily basis around the world, it's super volatile. But we don't measure that. Our statistic is annualized, we take the average around, right? But for the person living these lives is absolutely not stable, right? It's very, very volatile. And what blockchain, the 24/7 and crypto and tokens do, they just simply show the reality of what's happening in the markets. I mean, what if the stock market was trading 24/7? We wouldn't have 9-to-5 circuit breakers and stops. It would go volatile as well. I'm not saying there shouldn't be safeguards. I'm just saying the true nature of it is volatile. And as humans, I also think of ourselves generally as risk engines. I mean, if we were not risk engines, we would not have innovation. We would not have growth. We would not have development. We would be still, frankly, in the stone age hanging around with the animals, right, that are out there because we would never innovate and change. Every innovation comes with disruption that comes with change that can be very dramatic and sometimes also deadly unfortunately but that is the part of our nature and capitalism is just let's call it a financial version of this but it is the same nature, right? So I don't think we should, we should understand it better but I think we should embrace that understanding rather than reject it which I think is part of the problem we have in the world today.