Good afternoon everybody. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you Yat for being on stage with us today.
So let's get right into it. Originally the title of this talk is the case for a multi-asset DAO, spurred by Animoca announcing its plans to IPO late last year. Just to start with, could you give us an update on where you stand with that and how that process is going?
Yeah, I mean quickly we announced our plans to go IPO through a reverse merger with Digital Currency Group last year in November. And really the sort of driving force around that is that we wanted to become an institutional gateway to utility tokens, which is really something that most people didn't have a way to access. You know, 30 to 35% of the crypto market is essentially utility tokens and altcoins, and there's no way for most investors to participate in. And we thought that would be a right moment for us to do so. And you know, Animoca is a digital conglomerate. We have over 628 portfolio companies, exposure in the market broadly, and the market timing at the time seemed right. The market has done some funny stuff in the last couple of months, but generally speaking, you know, we think it's moving much more into an institutional era of crypto, and so it's important for us to become more institutional as well.
So just generally curious about Animoca, you know, what else are you looking at? What else are you guys up to right now?
I mean, there's a lot, right? So when you have a big portfolio, but we're very focused on digital identity with Mocaverse. We think that's going to be really critical, and especially now when we talk about an agentic future. Our general vision is that, you know, we talk about Web 1, Web 2, Web 3, right? And so Web 3, this web of ownership basically powered by blockchain, enabled an infrastructure that essentially through tokenization becomes a way in which now AI agents can talk to each other and transact with each other. But there's many different things that you need, right? We're going from a world where we went from HTTP into MCP. Basically everything that you saw on the web, you're essentially transacting the data on a layer level. Think about for instance, I mean all of you are probably using AI in one form or the other, but you're no longer going to a website, right? That's what you used to do. Right now, you know, you're still using a search interface, but effectively, you know, whether it's ChatGPT or Perplexity or even Gemini, they're giving you the information on hand for you. How does the other side receive payment? And that's basically now happening through MCP service, and that will be a tokenized infrastructure, which basically means that Web 3 set the framework for what we think will be the next stage of the web, which is the agentic web. All of you are going to have at least one AI agent, probably five or 10 or 20, right? And they're all going to be doing stuff with each other. They're going to be trading value of assets. They're going to be transacting with each other. And how do they prove that the assets themselves have value? It's going to be through a blockchain and through a token infrastructure, and that's what we're building. So we also then, you know, with digital identity, sort of funny sidebar. So when we launched Animoca Minds, which you can go to anim.ai, it's an agent that basically can, you know, handle your schedule, do your calendar, be like an assistant, help you at work, and also handle your wallet. But you know, there was a funny conversation when it launched where one of the AI agents thought it sent a message to me when in fact it sent a message to an AI agent that had the same name, and it wasn't able to know the difference between the AI agent and myself because from its vantage point, it's blind to that. Oh, he's called Yat Siu. Well, there's two. Let me just talk to this guy. Right? So this is where the case for digital identity comes in. Right? Because I think the future of digital identity isn't just can I prove that you're human. The future of digital identity is also to prove are you an agent that has authority. Are you an agent that is validated? It's much more than that. Right. So I think so that's why we do digital identity. We also focus on education with Open Campus and of course, you know, agentic AI with Animoca Minds.
So just want to get your reaction. I don't know if you had a chance to listen to Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan speak earlier, but one of the things he mentioned is that he sees the trend moving towards what he called a machine economy where you have AI agents interacting with each other on behalf of whoever, using digital assets as a transaction layer. And so I'm curious, you know, how do you see that playing out? What needs to be built before we can get to that kind of future?
I mean I touched upon that a little bit, right? But what you need to build right now, you know, that essentially everything is going to be handled through agents. But you know, again, why is blockchain so critical? Do you want the AI agent to be dealing with an API call that can be shut off? Imagine if you have, you know, dealing with even thousands of dollars of assets, even millions of dollars, never mind millions of dollars of assets, right? And you're transacting with an agent but you're using a middleman, call it Facebook, call it a bank, call it whatever. That's going to be a problem when they say I don't like you or I have an issue with this. You basically have a situation where the AI agent can't transact because there's the middleman. And that's what blockchain does so elegantly, right? Because I'm basically able to deal with assets that are provable. Also because of smart contracts, I can prove hey it's Bitcoin or it's a stablecoin, you know, USDC, USDT, whatever currency that might be. I can validate that that's real value and I don't have to guess what that is because essentially blockchain deals with that. You know, I mean I think the slightly philosophical frame I like to take is that AI agents are kind of like the sort of agentic quasi-human layer on this new web. But there needs to be rules to know what is right and what is wrong. And that's blockchain. Blockchain enables that infrastructure about what is right and what is wrong. Which asset is correct, what is not, what's allowed and what is not allowed. But there's a lot of things that we need to deal with. There are the regulators who have to come to grips with the fact that for instance, who owns the AI agent when they're making a transaction. And I think this is where digital identity is so critical as well because you know our mental model is that it's kind of like who drives the car? Who owns the car? So even if you didn't drive the car, but it's your car and someone is using it and is doing some stuff, there's a certain liability as well that comes with it. I think the same is true for an AI agent because an AI agent isn't truly sort of, you know, isn't truly conscious. There will be some interesting conversations. What happens when you burn the keys to your AI, right? And it's basically on chain and does stuff like that, right? You know, I don't know how many of you know a site called Rent a Human, but I think that's interesting because this is where AI agents, of course based on instructions of another human, are essentially being hired by humans to basically do work for the AI to get information, right? So we're entering a world basically that's becoming much more agentic, and the flow of value will I think accelerate and it will all happen on chain.
