My name is Yat. I'm chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands. We're one of the largest investors in digital developments in the space with over 628 portfolio companies and we believe we're basically one of the best ways in which you can get access as an investor into the very, very interesting, fast-growing crypto markets.
I mean we're very focused on RVAs. You know we have a joint venture with Standard Chartered and HKT called Anchor Point around stablecoins basically where we're applying for a license. We have an RWA on Avalanche with ANIMA. We're of course still focused on things at the intersection of culture and entertainment, you know, so we're still really active in gaming. But generally speaking, we're very focused on the growth of altcoins. You know, I think altcoins have had a very difficult period, but our general view is that at the end of the day, how is the crypto industry growing? It's not growing because of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the value, but we're growing in terms of users because of altcoins. They're bringing in users. They're bringing utility. We use gas. We use games. We use DeFi, we use DePIN through these altcoins and that's what Animoca represents. And just like the stock market, we believe that Animoca's perspective on altcoins will be that altcoins are ultimately going to be larger than Bitcoin collectively, as in not a single altcoin but collectively as a space, just like the stock market which today is roughly six times the value of gold.
Well, I mean this year is definitely defined by Trump. I mean, Trump was basically, I mean, I don't know if it's all three points, but you could say if it was top 10, one to nine is probably Trump, right? And I don't mean this, you know, on the positive side, crypto regulation, you know, the sort of, you know, the changes at the SEC, you know, Bitcoin reserve, you know, the fact that Trump family is also very pro-crypto, all of this very positive. And of course, the Genius Act, Clarity Act, those have been great, right? But of course, you've had other things that were not so great, right? Like again Trump token, Melania, tariffs, you know, I guess certain kind of conflicts shall we say within, you know, the conversations in the regions, you know, trade war with China on and off, right? All of these things have basically created a lot of volatility in the market which have affected broader markets and also especially crypto, right? So I would say the sort of the Trump X factor is very much the representation to me on 2025 as a year. And to me the other big area is of course institutional and deferral. And when I say deferral I basically say that many of the things that the crypto industry was hoping for happening in 2025 with Trump we think will happen in 2026 because I think a lot of people, you know, especially in crypto more so, were seeing that crypto was a priority for Trump. And I think while it is important for Trump, I don't think it was a priority for Trump. And by that I mean that, you know, things like tariffs and sort of, you know, trade wars or dealing with the wars that was a priority, right? And crypto was a bystander on all of this, right? And I think when we get into more stabilization and more certainty like what's happening in Russia and Ukraine or what's happening with the sort of, you know, trade relations in China or for instance the government shutdown that we just had, right? All these things I think as we get more clarity and certainty around that they can start focusing on things like crypto more specifically. So I do think that, you know, things like the Clarity Act are going to really be a big push for support for the industry. So I think 2026 is going to be a better year for crypto than it was for 2025.
I don't know if it's don't discuss right but I give you an example. If you look at for instance memecoins right which in the beginning of the year of 2025 was really really big and I mean Trump and Melania were also memecoins in themselves. I think that narrative of memecoins has gone away. But we also have to remember why did memecoins exist? Memecoins existed because of the previous regulation, right? You weren't able to launch a memecoin. You wanted to say it's a joke. It's not serious. Don't worry about it, right? And so that was really what happened. And now we can actually talk about utility in the token. We can talk about actual usage and how it's valuable. These are things we couldn't do before. So I think memecoins will sort of always be here but will probably become less and less important especially when clarity comes out because then people are going to look at that as a framing which again hints towards more institutional support. The second point I would make which might be a little bit more controversial but I think the importance of Trump in crypto I think will become less relevant than it is this year. I think we overindex Trump's relevance not to say that he isn't important. He's incredibly important. However, I think at this point we now already have ideas of where his position is, right? You know, we know about clarity. We, you know, we see Genius Act passed. We know sort of the roles that they're doing in this space. We basically I don't think there's, you know, knock on wood, but I don't think there's a lot more surprises that we can see from Trump around crypto per se, right? And we see some things that there are positions that are different like on one hand, you know, they are for instance not as pro-privacy or pro-privacy as perhaps many people hope they would be, right? So I think you see a lot more of what that policy direction is and with that we have more clarity and we know what to expect. So I think 2026 will be less emphasis on Trump, still important but less emphasis. 2025 was very heavily indexed. I mean companies were sort of falling over to do business with Trump or certainly in order to get sort of, you know, benefit in the crypto market. I think that also will slowly subside and normalize shall we say.
I think the two biggest misconceptions in crypto, one is that it's only for the rich, right? And that's because of Bitcoin's value and frankly, you know, there's a lot of crypto people who have become very wealthy and they're not doing any favors by, you know, 'when Lambo' and showing off their wealth. And it's okay, of course they deserve to show some of it, but the point is it makes the people not understand and appreciate and also often they tend to be condescending as well. So we need to be inclusive and we need to be more generous in order to bring those people in to let them know that, you know, basically if you're in crypto you're not an a**hole, right? In the short, right? And I'm not saying many of us are really nice guys but we do have a few people who are just a little bit arrogant and we kind of I think we have to lose that. So I think that's one element, right? The second aspect is that, you know, crypto is all about speculation and gambling and I think that is a misconception but it comes from a different element which is that when a token is live and there's people trading there is of course a speculative politics and what we've seen with platforms like Polymarket is that speculation is also an avenue for information. I speculate on something, I gain information from that insight. So there's value in it. But most people don't understand that speculation is essentially a feature of capitalism that actually is valuable and it's not just gambling, right? And I think people conflate that. And maybe the third point and I think this is a big one is that we also conflate in crypto and for our audiences who are not in crypto, privacy and anonymity, right? We talk a lot about privacy but many people in our industry sometimes conflate intentionally it with anonymity. But if you're not in crypto, anonymity is not a good thing. Anonymity could be avenues of crime and secrecy versus privacy is different, right? I'm still sort of being, you know, responsible of what I'm doing, but I'm private in terms of other people in the network, so they don't know what I'm doing. They're two different things, right? And I think people outside of crypto don't understand that there's a difference between privacy and anonymity. And I think we as an industry don't do enough at clarifying that either because many people in our industry like anonymity, which is not actually a good thing. I think broadly speaking, it's privacy that we should focus on.
I think the big difference between a web three and a web two company is that inherently a true web three company is a fintech company as in they understand money and finance whereas a web two company doesn't necessarily have to understand money and finance, right? And so they know how to leverage the system and so tokenization and blockchain and crypto becomes a leveraging tool around that which is also why we believe that a company that can leverage web three in a competing business, someone else who's doing this but only web two, the web three company will win because they will have different tools to leverage. Remember back in the days when, you know, the early days of the internet like if you were not on Google you were irrelevant. The company that was in Google would beat the company that wasn't in Google or if you were on eBay or Amazon or TikTok or Instagram, if you were on social media you would win against the company that was not. And the same is now for crypto. The company that is in crypto and is tokenizing is going to win against the company that is not, right? And I think the big difference is that one of them understands financial systems much better than the other.
