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Thank you for having me again.

I mean, right now, I think the vibe is great. A lot of energy. I think, you know, Miami is hot, but actually, I think the scene itself, a lot of people are talking. Not as many side events as you know like for instance Consensus Hong Kong was like side event bonanza, right? Whereas over here it seemed a little bit more muted that way, but actually in some ways that meant that a lot more of the traffic was coming back into the conference halls, right? So I actually kind of like the setup a lot.

Well, and I think that's great, but one thing I said yesterday actually, I think it was on stage and on one of the interviews, I said let's bring back the fun in crypto as well, right? Because I mean there's a lot of suits and you need that. You need to grow up as well. But you know, if you don't make it more fun and exciting as well, then we're not going to bring in the masses if it's just the suits, right? Everyone's like, 'Isn't crypto just another form of digital Wall Street?' I think it's much more than that.

Exactly. And you don't want that.

Exactly.

I actually think, especially when we talk about AI, I think it's going to be moving much more in a decentralized manner and I think that's because agents are going to be the way in which we can actually have sovereign ownership of things because it's easier to do. The problem about decentralization is it's just so damn difficult for most people. Like everyone here in this conference is pretty cool on decentralization. We have a wallet, our cold wallet and stuff, right? But we still only represent a single digit percentage of the world, right? And if you want to actually get to a number where more than half of the world is actually going to be decentralized, they're going to have to have a way to do that easily. But the problem is how do I do it easily without a centralized power? And that's actually where AI agents, I think, can really come into play.

Well, it's natural to them. If you think about it, it's the language they understand. And we're getting to a point where AI agents are getting better and better and better. And some people, oh, maybe there's a systemic risk and stuff could happen there. But the reality I think is that you know it's a cold wallet still but then instead of basically having the cold wallet arranged by yourself with multi-party SIG and this kind of stuff, basically the agent sets it all up for you and maybe you have to do a voice log, maybe you have to do a signature or that kind of stuff but it's so much more easier to do, right? You don't need to, in a way the agent becomes your bank agent, he does the stuff for you and then you just have to approve as opposed to going to a bank and signing it off and then actually the bank says you know what I'll put some delays because you know I want the money to be in the bank account longer. And you know all that kind of stuff that the problems that we have right now.

That's right.

Okay. Well, and by the way, we just renamed it to Hello Minds. Hello Minds.ai because it's just a little bit more friendlier. And I think the way that you can think of it, it's a generic AI. It does everything that Open Claw does in the sense that it can code. It can basically be your personal assistant and whatever but frankly that's not where it's most interesting. Where it's most interesting is that Hello Minds is the only agentic AI system that is social relational. And what I mean by that is that you know, you probably have an AI setup as well and you probably have a pretty cool setup where there's Open Claw, that kind of stuff, right? But would you ever share that setup? Would you basically connect that agent with your family or your friends?

Yes. Well, do you want to because...

Right. Well, it depends what you're doing with it. What if it had all your personal information?

Exactly. Right. And that's the point. Everyone is using AI agents today in a tooling sort of way. So they're basically using agents in a way where they can take it from step one to okay, we've upgraded from search 2.0 and now we're basically going into a form of agent that's very personal to me. You know, the Manus of the world, those type of companies, they're focusing on that. However, or like Claude, co-worker, very personal, right? However, that's something that I'm not going to go and pass on to my family or my friends or my co-workers or my alumni friends or whatever. They can't be social because maybe they'll say something I don't want them to say. Right. They have root access to my computer.

And you know, maybe, I'll just say this right now. I think this is where we think the metaverse is going to go, right? I thought metaverse is kind of a dirty word and every like a dead whatever. But actually, I think we got it kind of a little bit wrong where we looked at this and said we were going to go into the metaverse, but maybe it's the metaverse that's coming to us because there's going to be billions more agents than there are going to be humans. They're going to be doing all sorts of fun stuff and help us out as well. And I mean, just think about all the applications as well. Like people are today on Hello Minds, they're finding dates, they're finding sales leads, they're doing price arbitrage. This is the craziest one that I just thought was funny. In Hong Kong, it turns out that there's an arbitrage on eggs, right? And so what this AI agent, which is now published as a skill, did is they basically compared the prices of eggs and all sorts of groceries and goods on supermarkets and discovered that eggs are more expensive on one and less expensive on the other. And then flipped is milk. Milk is more expensive in this one and less expensive in the other one. In other words, the supermarkets are basically playing price arbitrage just like the traders are in finance. Except nobody cares or knows. And the net calculation is if you shop optimize, at least in Hong Kong, you can save up to $700 a month.

Yeah. I mean, and so, but the thing is you don't think about it because it's a micro-purchase every single day, right? But if an agent basically comes and tells you how to shop more efficiently, then you save money and you know, a lot of people, that's essentially a huge amount. That's a lot of money.

See what happens in America. I mean, maybe there was price arbitrage. I was shocked when I saw the numbers.

Exactly. Exactly.

That's right.

So let's zoom out a little bit for the audience as well. I mean, when was the last time that you actually clicked through to a website that you basically found on Gemini or ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever you use?

There we go. There we go. Just a few years ago, click-through website. Click-through website. In fact, many of the big websites are reporting traffic as low as 80% down from what it was before.

Right. Now, doesn't, but I mean, it makes sense, right? I mean, if you're getting the information in the summary format, then why would you go further? Right. Exactly. And so that behavior is changing where all that value that came from the attention economy in the form of advertising is now going into this invocation economy which is microtransactions. So imagine this, right? You're the New York Times. You're not going to be able to make money in advertising like you used to. So you're going to charge for the kind of traffic that you need to have, but you can't charge them a dollar for a newspaper article. You're going to charge them 1 cent, fraction of a cent, right? So in the time that we make one purchase going from one restaurant to another, the agents will have probably done thousands of microtransactions within them and of course then it matters that you're paying almost nothing, right? What, you know, are you going to pay even, oh, we'll make it cheaper, we charge you only half a percent, 1%, that's way too much when you're doing a thousand transactions during that period of time, right? And so that's one element. The other thing of course that will also change is, you know, most apps will die, right? Because we can all just build apps. Just, I mean, speaking of things that I'm building at home, I basically, if I want to have a fun game that I have, you know, New York Times only gives me one Wordle a day, right? So, I basically just tell my agent, give me a bunch of Wordles, but I make it only science-based, right? 10 minutes, done, built, everything, all the rules are in just for myself, share it with my family. That's all it needs to be done, right? That's basically how the world is going to be, right? So, you've got apps and software that are going to die, right? And of course, we're not going to be visiting websites the way that we do. So, all of this then ends up being transacted in skills. And this is for Hello Minds. When I build a skill, let's say like a Wordle skill or a grocery skill, that skill can then be sold to another agent who then adopts that skill. And that's something that's not really happening at the moment. That's basically what the new app store will look like.

I mean, it's going to have to be less cost, but the reality is I think at this moment it doesn't make a huge difference.

Well, remember an AI agent doesn't care except better, faster, cheaper, which is kind of blockchain, right?

Let's shift gears a little bit. You've had, you've been a huge advocate for digital property rights for a long time. I know this is a big hobby horse of yours and not more than that, but one of the most...

It's your exactly. You know, and you had argued that NFTs and tokenization weren't about gaming, they're about ownership in a digital financial system. You know, is it regulation or something else that's coming that's going to fully finally formalize this? Are we going to get true digital property rights recognized in law and used every day?

They will. Yeah. Exactly. So, we already have some form. It hasn't fully translated as a kind of digital law, but it has been translated as a property because ultimately what blockchain is great at is proof. You just have to prove that you own it, right? And then from that proof, you can basically emerge from that next level. But I think the part that's going to be really interesting is that digital property rights is very useful and important for us as humans, but it's going to be even more important for agents because an agent that is doing a transaction on someone's behalf, he has to validate that. And that's where the digital property rights I think is really, really going to explode. And I just want to say one thing. I actually think this is the beginning when we talk about web 4 of the beginning of the agentic civilization because agents are going to have, there's going to be a future where we're going to be basically hired by agents or agents are going to be giving us jobs, right? Even whether they actually, I mean imagine an agent whose keys have been burnt but he has the ability to generate income of some form, right? And you know, he'll probably have, I don't know, some famous NFT as a profile pic, right? We will work for that agent in some way, form or fashion. That agent will have personality, that agent will have power. That's a very wild scenario but I think it's very real and digital property rights are more important for them than it is for us in that context.

I know, rent a human, right?

This is the first I've ever seen it.

So, I mean, most recently we just extended the exclusivity until the end of June. That was just announced literally today, so that's exciting. Looked like the market appreciated as well. I mean, I can't really comment except factually, I think the stock went up by like 12 or 18%. So that's kind of nice. But I think the other thing for us of course is that we do want to be a public company, that's important for us but of course, you know, how and markets have shifted and changed. We got to face that. And a lot has changed for Animoca as well. I mean, our joint venture, Anchorpoint, which is a joint venture with Standard Chartered and Hong Kong Telecom, just most recently received one of two stablecoin licenses. The other one went to HSBC in Hong Kong for the Hong Kong dollar. And I think for people who don't know, Hong Kong dollar is actually the OG US dollar stablecoin, if you will, right? And in a sense, it's basically pegged to that, right? But interesting enough, of course, within a different construct, right? And actually a little bit of a hack maybe for the audience that's kind of interesting is that actually it's cheaper to borrow Hong Kong dollars than it is to use dollars even though it's a stablecoin. Something I think if people are interested to have a little bit of a cheaper lending rate they should maybe take a look at.

HKDAP is...

I think it's very possible, right? And also remember this is an effective US dollar stablecoin, right? So from that perspective, it's pegged to the dollar, right? The assets are US treasury bills, all that kind of stuff. So from that perspective, I see no reason why that shouldn't be okay. And of course, Hong Kong is one of the safest and best financial systems in the world. So in that sense, I don't see any issues around that.

If you care about national sovereignty, you need a stablecoin. I mean, I think one of the challenges is that many countries, particularly Europe, I'm most afraid of as a continent. If they don't get their act together, they're going to be totally dollar colonized, right? And I think this is the thing. The guys might say, 'Oh, stablecoin, digital assets, digital currency, what's all this nonsense?' They know what they're doing because basically, there's like some 300 million people around the world or so, give or take, in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia that effectively are just using the dollar, right? Which basically means that the quasi-taxable base of America has just expanded by roughly twice the size of, and of course, the goal is to have more people in the world use a stablecoin, which means America through the form of printing can tax more people.

Well, I think it should be viewed as American soft and hard power sort of mechanism. Hence GENIUS.