Yat Siu Reveals the Journey of Animoca Brands, AI, and The Future of Gaming

The world is gamifying. Gaming culture is essentially the Gen Z and Gen Alpha culture. They want to make money, but it is just as much about entertainment and doing stuff together.

I'm the founder and executive chairman. The company develops and publishes games such as The Sandbox and works with well-known intellectual properties including Disney, WWE, and Formula E. Today we have over 600 portfolios. We have probably one of the largest balance sheets when it comes to altcoins. We were seed investors in Axie Infinity. We acquired Sandbox for $4 million. We invested in OpenSea when the valuation was like $15 million. It actually obviously turned out to be some of our most successful investments.

You are in the process of being launched on NASDAQ this year. You can freely buy what you like, index themselves on what today is roughly 30 to 40% of the market through Animoca Brands, right? That's kind of the high-level vision that we have here.

Thank you very much for the kind introduction and it's a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, I'm not sure that I would analyze it this way because often life as you know sort of random things happen and you'd never think of it as sort of something that is important until it happens much later, right? So I was born and raised in Austria actually, so I grew up in Europe. But when I was born and raised there actually it was from the 70s, so I'm a child of the 70s. And of course for those who might remember that time, Europe was still divided by East and West as in you basically literally had the communist block and you had the Eastern block countries. And my mom was an opera singer first and then became an opera director and she used to work on the eastern side of Germany as in you know the eastern side of Berlin initially at the Komische Oper and then afterwards also in Leipzig and Görlitz. And I would visit her as a child and also often back in the day you know people in Austria would go to basically the other side, Hungary, which of course was communist at the time and you know buy cheaper goods or have cheaper travel because really the economy was not doing so well. And you know, you see the stark contrast even though you know back then it was more like you know you don't want that but you didn't really understand what it was necessarily about other than you know reading about it in books and the theory. But then you see a supermarket in those communist countries literally they had the cans of food basically literally like one meter apart from each other and spread them out because it was just so much space because there weren't that many goods in comparison to the West where essentially because of capitalism you had essentially entire supermarkets full of goods and full of things that you could buy, right? You know, and all the benefits that come from that as an example. And so growing up in this environment sort of made me think more around essentially these type of systems and what I didn't like and what I certainly thought was better. And growing up also with a perspective and mindset of the fact that you live in a way where the worlds were really you know that contrastingly different but within literally maybe an hour or half an hour away, right? Like you don't really have it quite that way. You do have obviously within nations and borders and districts differences but they were not politically that stark like you'd have to travel a long distance to go somewhere where the political system is entirely different and here it was literally next door and you lived with that every single day, right? And that's something I think most people today would find very alien or very strange. And so that certainly shaped me in a way in thinking about the world because of course later on what happened was that I went to the US partially because of work and studies and I saw essentially capitalism and all the problems that capitalism had as well because Europe and the western side was really more socially democratic and had a sort of you know capitalist system that wasn't quite capitalist as we would define it, right? And then of course after that went to Hong Kong and I saw capitalism into overdrive meaning that there was really no social security net. That was fairly new when I first came to Hong Kong in the 90s. Even up until I would say the late 90s and early 2000s, social security and social safety nets were basically sort of a new construct, right? And so there you would have the opposite end where you'd have like billionaires and tycoons and you know people sort of you know having Rolexes and Rolls-Royces everywhere and then at the same time you would have a 70-year-old sort of man or woman sort of pushing up trash right on the side. Right? So the wealth inequality and there's a Gini coefficient, Hong Kong famously is one of the worst in the world. Right? So you see that and you kind of go wait hold on that doesn't seem quite right as well. And so that's definitely had an impact on the thinking. But of course, you never think about it quite that way until much later in life, but it certainly had a sort of impact. And I think the second thing that had a major impact in my life, perhaps the biggest impact is my interaction with the computer. And the interaction with the computer wasn't so much that I learned to code and did stuff, but it was actually that I got connected through an early pre-internet service called CompuServe where I was basically writing MIDI software because I was studying music. And frankly, I wasn't that great of a musician in comparison to many of my peers. But I basically used a computer to help me compose music. I always found it was kind of weird that I would sort of make music on a pen and paper, right? Basically that was the tools that they had back then and you have to remember that in the 80s it was not even allowed to use a calculator in class so never mind using a computer to do that kind of stuff which was very early stage and you know my teacher wasn't impressed but I uploaded the software on computer and what then happened was that people sent me messages they even sent me money even though I didn't have a bank account and back then sending money was a check like literally a physical check that would be sent to your home and you would share your home address because you would put it essentially in the communication for the credit of the software because back then, you know, nobody really cared about privacy because the chances that someone from somewhere around the world would show up on your doorstep was zero because travel was expensive. You know, people didn't do that, right? The world was very different back then. But what it did do was it opened me up to the world from a global perspective. I was interacting with people from all over the world who appreciated my software. And you know the side sort of aspect of this is that you know even though I speak fluent German you know and I was raised and born there and I know the system you know I was very much a minority from an immigrant perspective because obviously I'm Chinese right and there was very few Chinese or just generally Asian people in Europe anyway and never mind Vienna literally you know you could count how many of us were there so you were always kind of an outsider right and in a way you know normally in a very traditional society. It's not just your ethnic background that you get judged on back in the day, but it's also the fact that you were young, right? So, you know, again, today it's very common to have sort of a young kid that has an interesting company or an idea. Like, you would consider hiring even a teenager if the person had talent. This was not true in the 80s or 90s. Like, you don't hire kids, right? You just don't do that because they didn't have experience. They still had to go to school, you know, all that type of stuff. Unless they were becoming artisans, generally speaking, they didn't really have sort of the, let's call it the respect, the professional respect that they have today. But when you're online back in the day, I didn't even have a name. CompuServe basically was just a number. And you know, even as you introduce yourself, they don't know your age, right? Online, you don't say, 'Hello, my name is Yat and I'm, you know, 13 years old.' Nobody cares, right? They just care about the software I wrote, whether I can help them, whether you know there's something interesting. And so with that, I basically saw a much more meritocratic system that was online, not tied towards essentially sort of physical, call it constructs and physical limitations. And through that, I got a job at Atari that eventually led me to the US and then Hong Kong, right? So, you know, there's many other aspects, but I would say in my early childhood, that was probably the most transformative experience because I basically got an opportunity to, you know, work and travel the world when I was a teenager without actually having so-called professional experience because I knew something or was able to do something that most other people couldn't. And as it turns out, whether this is mobile development, early internet, making websites, blockchain, smart contracts, you know, basically that path is true all the time, right? It doesn't matter how old you are or where you're from. If you know something or are able to do something that is valuable that others can't, you will always have a path, right? And so that's kind of the world that I saw. And therefore, I think it made me optimistic. It made me hopeful because I was always able to find something or do something because, you know, I was able to learn something or be different, right? Whereas if you were sort of raised in maybe a more traditional setup, then you were given those rules and those constructs. And I would argue that the fact that I was essentially a minority and in some ways a foreigner in my own country, you could say, actually it allowed me to basically do certain things or open certain opportunities that perhaps someone who was more local, shall we say, would never dare to do because society wouldn't let them or it was hard to imagine that that was possible. Right? So I think it's you know it's as I say you know of course a lot of it is the work that you do but you had to have good luck and you had good fortune to have you know met and seen these opportunities. So I consider myself also very lucky.

Correct.

Handover. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, I appreciate the compliment. I'm not sure I would describe myself as a polymath. I would say the way that I describe myself and I think most people are probably going to exist in the world are going to be more generalists. And the reason why I say generalists is not to say that you are just general in knowledge. It's to say that you need to have knowledge of everything because the tools around you that allow you to become experts in everything is already ever present. You saw that in the early days of the internet when you know we sort of in particularly myself I started using the internet much earlier than my peers and I ended up getting valuable information and was able to do stuff from the internet and eventually how to search on Google or how to do that kind of stuff ahead of others that essentially gave me an advantage. From the outside it might appear that I have a lot of knowledge but really I just knew how to search better than others or I knew how to basically sort of get value from those systems that are out there. And so this knowledge that I have that is over time obviously developed with all these other areas of fields of interest comes from the fact that of course I have a hunger for learning but at the same time I have access to this information that you know my mother's generation for instance simply didn't have. Right? So even if you had the sort of proclivity and the interest you were limited to the resources around you. And I think you know in my childhood one thing that sort of my mother also did in particular we were all surrounded by books. So you know we had so many books that our entire living room was just full of books right and so obviously that sort of created another sense of curiosity which of course is important. But you know one of the big things that we had was an encyclopedia Britannica and so that was basically a way in which you would get information right it's kind of I guess the Wikipedia of then if you will right but it was kind of an expensive thing to get and so you had to sort of really sort of navigate around that and you know we couldn't really afford every sort of what they call the book of the year because the book of the year created these updates and you would subscribe to it but you know frankly we didn't have the money to do that. So we had an old version of that and this is an example of you know if you didn't have access to this or money then essentially you were left behind because you couldn't get the updated information. It costs money, right? Or, you know, can you afford to do international phone calls, which is what basically was the case back then and today, of course, and back then when the internet came, it completely blew that open, right? So, you know, and now if you look at AI, that's going to happen even more, right? So, the democratization and the access to information is becoming ever more prevalent, right? It's becoming much more abundant. But now, what's the skill that you need? The skill is basically how to be able to interpret that information, how to distill it and then using your creativity or your ingenuity and your general experiences to basically distill it into something special into something valuable into a new product area. You know, with things like voding, you know, you don't need to hire engineers anymore. I mean you probably need some support but the cost of building a startup or the cost of setting up a business or making the initial prototype is infinitely less expensive than it was before right so I would say that it's very important to be sort of you know worldly shall we say and then what I would also say is that what also becomes important like I have a big interest in liberal arts I study history and social sciences I mean for me economics is you know one of the most important social sciences right you know some economists would argue that they want to be a little bit more like you know a physical science right although it doesn't quite work this way it want to be more like math right you know there are certain truths right however again right that is really around the study of human understanding and when we are building businesses when we're creating interactions when we're building relationships ultimately we're dealing with humans who are different who have feelings who don't act in predictable fashions as we hope they might in some cases, right? Which is the reason why, you know, socialism and communism doesn't work because it makes an assumption about human behavior that just simply isn't true, right? And I think that's the thing that, you know, I would say is more important. Everything else can come as long as you're willing to learn, right? So I would say that's kind of the circumstance that happened there, right? So I would say, you know, like being able to basically sort of adapt and use that you had to be interested of course in it. You had to have computational thinking. You know, this is all true and relevant. But I would say being a generalist is more important than ever in that sense.

Or in Africa or in any place in Asia or whatever.

No no it isn't and so look I mean I am a little bit of the camp but this is where it's a little controversial maybe for some but I'm of the camp that you know greatness can only really come from suffering in a way right and what I mean by suffering isn't that you basically torture yourself right but is that you basically go through challenges in life like you're not going to be able to learn and grow and advance unless you push yourself so if it's comfortable if it's easy if it's very predictable maybe you need to move on right that's kind of the thinking right and by the way that's also why we as a company also and personally as well like to invest in new ideas and new constructs because they challenge us. They're not something that's always the same. Like you try to sort of, you know, have a similar formula. And I think for some people, they want to try to find the formula that is predictable because they want certainty. And I think that was maybe true for my parents' generation and maybe a little bit for our generation, but certainly for you know my children and for the generations to come because of the way that essentially sort of time has compressed because of innovation and the generations are compressing. There is no way that there's any certainty about the fact that what I'm doing today is what other people will do in the future. In fact, you know, 10 years down the road, we will do entirely different things, right? The jobs that our children will be doing, most of them will probably not have been invented at this moment in time, right? They don't exist. And you just have to look at the companies today, I mean, the biggest companies today, whether it's Microsoft or Google or Facebook or Nvidia, did not exist when we were children, right? And so this sounds like oh it's been forever it's been 30 or 40 years right you know in some cases right and in other cases like Meta or Facebook it's not even been 20 years right and so that to me is sort of what we need to be comfortable with and being able to sort of you know adapt to this change and also really adapt to this volatility and that's why when I talk about the so-called suffering what I mean is that we are challenged we're stressed and we can navigate through that. And when you think of sort of, you know, the great human stories, not just of survival, but of victory or of winning or of succeeding, it typically comes from overcoming incredible challenges, not just at that moment, but in general over time such that you had the grit and endurance and the perseverance to be able to succeed to do that, right? And I think that is one of the awesome human qualities where you can basically overcome great odds because it's not a logical thing. In fact, it's very highly illogical that we basically put ourselves through, you know, this kind of pain because we have passion, we have love and we have emotion for it, right? It's important to us and we were willing to risk our lives for these type of things is, you know, illogical. Like it's not biological. If you're sort of thinking it from a evolutionary survivalist streak, why would you challenge something where you might lose everything or might lose your life or might whatever whatever that is in history, right? And yet somehow there is this trigger because of the human nature and our ambition and our goals and our desire for impact and purpose that basically pushes us to something that is greater than just the one thing that you do. It's something meaningful and important, right? So I think that's actually true for all people in a sense like we all strive to sort of have something purposeful like that whether we find it or not which is also why I think you know systems that know this well hack into it exceedingly well you know whether this is social media whether this is religion whether this is organizations right they understand our desire for impact and purpose and they can basically also hijack that thinking as well right and then create organizations around that, right? So I think what shaped me is obviously the history of everything in terms of my background. I wouldn't change anything. But the thing is not just being a foreigner but also growing up in a time where frankly you know even though my mom was a musician we didn't actually have a lot of money. In fact, it was quite difficult as a sort of foreigner, shall we say, to be in the classical arts in the 80s or 70s and 80s in Europe. Incredibly difficult, right? And so that's kind of an issue. So, you know, the opportunities weren't given because frankly that was a time when people said, 'Oh, well, if you're not European, you probably can't do this role or you can't sing this or whatever.' Like, it's totally different, right? And so back then if you were an Asian opera singer, you typically get typecast into Madam Butterfly, you know, maybe Turandot or something, but generally you were cast in certain roles because you were Asian, so to speak, right? And of course, again, today we don't do this, but that was kind of the world back then. You know, if you look at the James Bond movies of the 70s or 80s, all the Asian bad guys were basically you know, Caucasians with makeup, right? You know, like and again, you know, like it's not I don't have any hard feelings about this. It was just the world as it was, right? So, you always knew in a way that you had to fight more for it and it was a different kind of suffering, but it was still a kind of suffering that you had to go through, an uncomfortableness that you had to basically navigate, right? But I would say the other thing is that you know always being hopeful and always striving for something greater I think is really important. I do feel that there is a sense of hopelessness that sometimes engulfs people and when you have hopelessness then nothing works right and I think there's you know many of the problems we have comes from the sense that they don't believe that there's a better opportunity so they try to look for something that is maybe not that great right so that's obviously another aspect right so yeah I would say you know these are you know I mean there's many things that shape us but I would say these are some of the critical things here where you feel like you can, you know, like not just believe but know that you have the capacity for impact in whatever shape and form.

Well, I mean, you know, if I go back, you know, when I started with Atari, back in the early 90s, Atari basically went under as, you know, we would know it back then, right? And obviously there's an Atari that exists today, but has nothing to do with the original Atari from the US. And so, we started a business basically supporting ex-Atari sort of, you know, owners. And if you recall back in those days when you bought a computer, you thought you would have it for 10 years, okay? Right? You know, people didn't buy a computer to replace it next six months or one year, right? It was really around a sort of a long-term investment. And so, we made a side business basically just supporting companies that basically had these computer systems. But, of course, that was, you know, going to disappear because Atari wasn't making new computers because they weren't around anymore. And so, we moved into basically developing what we knew for multimedia and essentially 3D modeling software into SGI, another company that's not around anymore, but Silicon Graphics. And Silicon Graphics was really, if you think about it, in many ways, I would argue kind of like the Nvidia of its time in some form or fashion because they basically created the most advanced computer graphics stations in the world. And their vision especially when the internet was growing and they were trying to compete with Sun Micros was to basically build a 3D internet of sorts. And the foundation of that was essentially you know basically using OpenGL which they were basically you could call them almost forefathers of it was this thing called VRML. And VRML is essentially the 3D VR version of HTML which is of course the construct of the web in terms of hypertext and it stood for virtual reality modeling language and we basically wrote basically software and tools that allowed people to navigate the world in 3D kind of like the metaverse. But this was in '92 and '93. Okay, so this is a long long time ago. Everything was wireframe graphics and so on, right? And what was interesting to observe and these experiences were relevant is that what we can see so clearly or we thought we could see so clearly in the 90s is actually something that most people just didn't understand at all. And I think this was an interesting experience to say, well, you know, why don't you understand? Because and this is by the way this is what you see when you talk to an engineer or you talk to someone who's very strong in a field and he tells you something and you're like I don't understand anything sort of that skill to be able to explain what it is is you know I wouldn't say I call it just a sales skill just a communication skill is something that you learn over time right and that's kind of part of that evolution when you basically selling in many ways something that is the future and you know in the 90s and actually in 2000 when the dotcom bubble burst actually a lot of people were saying the internet was just a fad, right? And it will go away because nobody actually will use it. You know, of course, it wasn't true. But that's an example where people have difficulty seeing the future if they're not using that, right? And because I was the young person at the time, I basically saw that future because I was a user of the product, right? It was something that I understood, right? And so that led me eventually, you know, going to Asia. SGI sent me there. I couldn't get my email. So I basically started an ISP. An ISP is essentially you know I guess like a quasi telco. Used telco infrastructure to essentially build you know internet service providers service for you know basically customers who could go

Online because my thesis back then was, well, the internet was good for me, so it should be good for you, right? It's very simple. From a product standpoint, very hard to sell to people because I was competing with DHL. I mean, it sounds crazy, but that was a thing. Oh, I can use a fax machine, sounds fine, and I can send something with DHL. Why do I need email? I mean, that's again, sounds crazy, right? And that's basically what I had to deal with at the time. And then I basically built a free hosting service. And what I found interesting there was that we had lots of young people sign up for the service, but none of them had money because they're young people. However, I had amassed something like 300,000 users who were willing to wait for hours to upload their content because back then the entire internet was slower. Access was expensive. My entire service was run out of 64K. But people were willing to wait to do that so they could upload their content and their stuff. So, all of those experimentations and this vision around what we thought would be a better future, a better world, led to essentially one development after another. And I would say the more pivotal moment was when we built a company called Allay, which was effectively a cloud computing business, but it was called ASP, an application service provider, back in 1998. That was eventually sold to IBM in 2009. We were one of the largest email service providers, and that experience was really a decade-plus long experience in terms of basically building a business through very difficult times, from soup to nuts. An organization that was roughly 130 to 150 people. So, obviously, not massive, but back then for me was a really pretty big deal. And then eventually going through a major sale to a global conglomerate called IBM, which of course back then was one of the biggest companies in the world. They're still big, but not as big as Google or Apple, but back then they were much bigger than them. And so those are all valuable experiences that sort of help shape and think about what we know and do.

And this is another example of how we think about ideas and product. I was a young father and I had a child, of course, as a father. And I was carrying these flash cards because back then flash cards were a big deal. You show the card, it says Apple, and then you show the apple and that kind of stuff. Because apparently the theory, which has been debunked, is that that's how children learn faster. And of course, parents always want their kids to learn faster. But you would buy these packs. It's called Baby Einstein back then for 20 cards for $14 or $19. $14 for cardboard that has a photo of something that I can get anywhere and the word apple or stone or dog in the back. That's it. So if you think about it, it's actually kind of ludicrous, but it was a thing. And I was like, I had this early other device, which was one of the first Apple devices, and I said, why don't I just put this content on the phone so that I don't have to carry stacks of 100 cards and I could maybe just even give it to my toddler so that they could just look at that. Everyone thought, or a lot of people thought, that was crazy because why would you give a $1,000 device to a kid who might just break it? That was the instant thinking. And I was like, fine, just build it for me, just do that. It was really a product for myself. And then I forget if it was like three or four weeks later or a couple months later, the team came over and said, hey, do you know what happened to it? It was called Baby Flashcards, probably one of the very first baby flashcards on the app store. I said, I don't know, I have no idea. It was downloaded like 15 million times. Okay, it's like what? 15 million times. And that basically led to us moving essentially into the app economy and ultimately into games that became Animoca Brands. And the reason I'm sharing the story is because it didn't happen because we're like, oh, we need to make games and we need to do this. It happened really because of a sort of more whimsical story of I need this. And through that experience, I wasn't thinking that we're going to be making games because I'm making baby flashcards. I just understood that this could be a better device for me as a parent. But from that experience, it basically led into the mobile app development space, which then led into gaming, which then led into Animoca Brands, which then ultimately led into something else differently as well. And when you chart the path of entrepreneurs or even your own story and actually you analyze that, you realize that what you thought you would do is probably very different than what you ended up doing. But it's still valuable experience because you would have never be doing what you're doing if it wasn't for the fact that you were doing these other things and going through these stories and experiences and navigating them. And some of the greatest businesses that are out there have emerged from ideas that ended up not being what you're doing today. Amazon was a really good book seller, and nobody thinks of Amazon as a book seller. You can still buy books on Amazon, but that's not why you use Amazon, for instance. Slack, which actually originally was trying to build a game, and then they basically, for building a game, they created an organization tool so they could work better within the company. It turned out that was actually the golden idea than actually the game in and of itself. So as long as you're open-minded and you have, again, this is where I say the interdisciplinary and the generality of it is that you can connect the dots between different things, then whatever you do won't be wasted because you actually understand, oh, I built this, but this could be interesting here, versus I'm only building this and everything else is essentially just a sideshow, when in fact the sideshow could be the bigger.

Yes. So in fact, Animoca was actually originally, really its founding history is 2011. It wasn't called Animoca Brands, but it was Animoca, but essentially the same group. It became Animoca Brands when it went public in the Australian stock market, and that was 2014, 2015. But the origin story was 2011, and it really started as I told you about essentially the baby flashcards. And then we recognized that, oh, actually, making applications for children on the app store could be interesting and lucrative. So we went to do that. We got a lot of downloads and we made some revenue, but okay, but not that great. And then an application came out that really took the world by storm called Angry Birds on the mobile phone. And we said, oh, hold on a second, that's fun and interesting. And we decided that all the expertise that we had built on making basically educational games, we could actually make an actual game. And we launched a game called Pretty Pet Salon basically like six or seven months right after the launch of Angry Birds, and it became a sensation. It became an absolute hit. And from a business that was essentially making just hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even every six months or something, we were a very small business after we sold the business to IBM, we had to rebuild everything. We were suddenly making overnight millions of dollars a month. And so that was essentially the rapid growth and then trying to figure out and understanding that in terms of the distribution game, was also something we understood that the app store wasn't in and of itself a technology innovation. It was really a distribution innovation. It basically circumvented the classical gateways of how do you basically discover technology and applications, and the app store was basically the big buster of these sort of walled gardens in the physical sense. And so that really grew our business. And we became big in the gaming space. But then a year later, we had figured out that actually the more games and applications we launch, the more they cross-promote each other, the more we ensure that our applications are at the top. And the relevant part of this is that in 2012, Apple removed all of our apps. They basically deplatformed us entirely. And if you search Animoca banned on the app store or something, you'll find some old articles at the time because we were one of the biggest game developers on the app store and all our apps were gone overnight. And to this date, we actually don't really know what exactly happened because of course Apple doesn't have to tell you and they never did. They just removed us and said in violation of the app store rules. And what we of course know is that if you can basically disallow Epic with Fortnite to go in the app store, then certainly what chances would we have at the time, in comparison. Of course, the Epic sort of Fortnite battle, Apple battle was much later, but it illustrates the point.

And it was kind of because of that experience as well that eventually when we landed on blockchain technology much later through a studio that we had acquired to help us make multiplayer games. They were involved in this thing called CryptoKitties. They were building an application that was essentially, I would argue, really brought NFTs into the consumer zeitgeist and basically brought blockchain technology and culture together in a way that hasn't been done before. And we didn't think of it as breeding digital cats because most people thought of CryptoKitties as just a cat breeding game. We understood that this technology allowed people to have actual digital property rights of their assets, and we as a gaming company understood that the gamers wanted to own these assets or at least have ways in which the ownership of those assets could be really theirs because games shut down, people lose their assets and all that kind of stuff and invested time and money into it. This was a perfect way to perhaps preserve that. So it came from that lens. Like if you were not in gaming before, we might not understand it. We would look at CryptoKitties and we'd be like, cute, right, we're moving on. And that's kind of what happened to us with Bitcoin. I mean, I encountered Bitcoin much earlier, but my interest in Bitcoin was very small, so I didn't buy Bitcoin or do anything really. So if you think of it from a crypto standpoint, anyone who bought Bitcoin back in 2012, 13, 14, 15, 16, whatever, is technically more OG than us. We got in because of NFTs.

And so this is the experience lens, which is that maybe if I was from the financial world, or if I was a trader or I was a finance guy, maybe I would understand Bitcoin better. But back then I didn't care that much because it just seemed about money in a way, and a lot of people really didn't understand or care about that. Certainly I was like that. But when it came to NFTs, which is using the same technology but for different purpose, I understood what it meant because as a gamer, I had an appeal for it. And as the people I interact mostly with at the time, which were other gamers and game studios and so on, I also understood that this is something that our customers might like and also it had an engine in which you could maybe also help capitalize businesses from a fundraising standpoint. So combining all of these things then made us go into that and study that and understand that better. And that's basically the beginnings of why and how Animoca Brands actually became a blockchain company because of CryptoKitties, starting with NFTs and then essentially going beyond that to all areas of basically digital ownership.

I mean, massively.

Yeah.