Solana Supercycle Begins... Time To Buy?🚀Yat Siu INTERVIEW🔥Animoca Brands

Great to see you and always a pleasure to be on the show.

Yeah. So, first of all, generally, I think my general view on L1 and L2s, and you know, our thesis around altcoins, broadly speaking, that we do think that altcoins are going to ultimately outperform Bitcoin as a collective. And I think we're seeing some inklings of that. You know, obviously that's not to say every token will do well, but you'll see that. And of course, infrastructure plays such as the Solanas or the Ethereums out there will be basically also tokens that should do well because they are the base infrastructure, but the size and scaling that's needed to capture the sort of value that translates down is part of the issue, right? Meaning that, you know, our mental model on L1 and L2s is a little bit like Telcos and ISPs, right? So AT&T is a very valuable company, don't get me wrong, but it's not as valuable as Google or Facebook or Microsoft or Apple, right? So but because we're so early in this phase, you know, I would definitely sort of, you know, put Solana as one of the sort of, you know, must-haves in the bucket together with many other L1 L2s that I think are going to be structurally important for essentially the development of blockchain. If you believe as we do that blockchain is going to be, you know, one of the most important sort of basically sort of technologies out there, especially in light of what's happening with AI and the...

So remember Solana's mission in terms of basically thinking of it in terms of, you know, internet capital markets, right? And basically being the center of that which they're doing a great job by the way in that construct. You know, she I would say she probably felt that gaming was sort of too far away from finance and it wasn't really part of the mission and part of what blockchain does, which is where I think we have a sort of a point of disagreement there. Gaming is not coming back in the way that it was in 21, 22 blockchain. That's how I interpret it. It's a little bit like saying gaming is not coming back because we're not buying cartridges like consoles, right? Because that was a business model at that time. But then we innovated into free-to-play, we had mobile gaming, we had subscription models, right? All these things kind of innovate. And the other thing is, you know, this idea that sort of finance doesn't touch gaming is actually I think that's probably the weakest point of the argument because gaming is already a 300 plus billion dollar industry. It is bigger than movies and music combined. But then the other part of gaming of course which is the area of gambling, prediction markets, I mean they are called gaming for a reason, right? And so they are basically games with money that are categorized in a certain area. I would argue that Solana's ecosystem was really sort of growing in a large part because of memecoins in the beginning and memecoins are very much a game, right? It is gaming in that context, right? So to me, gamification and broadly speaking games is actually what our industry has been built upon. And so I think it's a bit unfair to dismiss it outright.

If you look at the historical way that they've dealt with, you know, secondary trading of cards and then they're cognizant of it, but they're definitely not sort of embracing it openly, making a statement around it, which by the way, I think is a very Japanese way and very Japanese style of sort of approaching things. I mean, just think about how long it took for Nintendo to finally open up and say, exactly, you know, maybe we should be looking at mobile games, right? They were like the last bastion to actually do that. But also, you know, why fix something that isn't broken, right? That's the other thing. Pokemon just really sort of became sort of a cultural meme, if you will. The financification of it in terms of people trading it and doing other things with it and now tokenizing it is all part of that let's call it laissez-faire attitude that they've had around the IP to let people sort of innovate on top, right? Which I think has helped it and served it and that's also why I think there is such an amazing sort of let's call it secondary trading market which of course blockchain has really sort of amplified.

Like that our children learn about money because of Pokemon cards. They don't learn it in school as an example. And from that then they understand things like, oh wait, okay, I can borrow this or I can lend trade. I can do these things. So to me, it's actually a really really sort of critical financial literacy gateway. You know, like we saw what Pokemon Go also did in terms of a movement as well when that came out. And by the way, that sort of gaming environment was unique to Pokemon Go. Many other companies tried to, you know, with big brands like Harry Potter tried to emulate that and were unable to basically capture anything close to that sort of same phenomenon. So, it has a very particular thing and let's call it our cultural and our sort of social side that other places and other brands don't have the ability to capture. This changes a lot because you're connecting. You could connect your Solana wallet, you know, whether it's Phantom or whatever. You can buy via USDC. Even if you roll a card, you can immediately sell it back in. I mean, there's a lot of instant liquidity in that marketplace.

Well, I mean, I think the reality is that if you're basically doing lending and collateral, basically you're not realizing gains, so to speak, right? Exactly. And so depending on which country and place you're in, but you know, first of all, I think it's incredible and it kind of just demonstrates the kind of cool things that blockchain enables, right? Because first of all, there's a whole wave of people out there who probably have no idea that their Pokemon cards could even be used for collateral. So, if you didn't even actually want to sell, you could actually just sort of borrow against it. It unlocks basically other things. The other thing, of course, is that if I borrow something against my Pokemon, the chances are that I probably will use it to buy more Pokemon cards because it reinforces this idea. Sure. There's value attached to that, right? So that's been really really powerful. But I think the ultimate thing, you know, Solana has just been really really good from a community standpoint around having these sort of shared networks where on the financial side where people go, oh wait hold on if I do this and I innovate this and I build this and remember the people who are building this don't all come from TradFi, in fact many of them don't, right? They come from gaming or from entertainment or from coding or something else and they go like wait a second I can build something cool without having these constraints around what is and isn't possible because if you probably go to a TradFi guy, it's like it's a waste of time. Don't even bother doing this. You know, why even do it? And here they go. They're just having fun, right? And then the next thing you know, it opens it up and of course begs the next question, which is that hold a second. Could I do this with my art? Could I do it with my cars? Could I do it with something else? Right? An asset that had no liquidity and now might have thousands of dollars of liquidity or tens of thousands of dollars liquidity becomes more valuable because it has some liquidity versus none at all. Right? And I think this is something where I think many many more things become accessible if you look at just the collectible space broadly speaking that's really accelerated and I actually think it's going to be even more accelerated in part because of AI, right? So the desire of having something that's authentic, something that's original, something that has uniqueness is going to drive essentially a demand for these sort of assets that are truly scarce and rare.

Pokemon could set the blueprint for a lot of this. I mean I think Pokemon sets the blueprint and opens up the imagination for people to say oh wait hold on if you could do Pokemon cards can it do for somebody else? Because for instance, if you look at traditional gaming, if you look at for instance, basically Counter-Strike skins, right? I mean, we're talking about a 7 to 8 billion, well, it depends on the day of the market, but somewhere between 4 to 8 billion of a market that's been trading really for the last couple of decades, right? And that's entirely digital in nature, right? It's sort of there's smaller communities that you can now basically sort of amplify and create a market for that wasn't there. And I think the error if you want to call it that with some of the NFT hype wasn't that NFTs didn't demonstrate, which by the way is still $3 million of sales a month give or take, right? wasn't the fact that sort of NFTs themselves were overhyped or sort of it became way more a speculative financial tool for the people who entered the space it's kind of like oh there's money to be made, right? brought in a bunch of people who weren't there for the game itself and for the fun in the community but were there just to extract, right? You know if you look at sort of things like CryptoPunks, you know having a little bit of a return like actually in the last two or three days NFTs has had you know like a really big buying a CryptoPunk has been a better levered bet on ETH than ETH itself.

I mean, it's exciting. So, first of all, we actually innovated on dynamic assets back in the day with Cool Cats during sort of basically some of the football promotions we did as an experiment as well. So, dynamic assets in and of itself isn't anything particularly new. But what happens here of course making sort of having the ability to sort of morph it and frankly that is the let's call it superpower of blockchain, right? Which is the composability, right? You can basically sort of change things around innovate on top create basically sort of cool new things and the intersection right now because of institutions coming in between something like that is the competition and I don't think the competition is going to be specifically around sort of going directly after the eBay market itself, but I think it's going to be more sort of a flurry of, you know, thousands of individuals basically building and utilizing these composable assets and these dynamic assets to basically create ways in which you can create new fun experiences. But the part where we're going to break out and that's where dynamic assets become interesting because of its dynamic nature is you can make it fun. Right? Yeah. Now remember the biggest onboarding event that we had, you know, despite the critics that we might have today and say, oh, but gaming that wasn't actually NFTs and gaming in 21 and 22, what was the one thing they often said, it was fun.

I think the way that we look at this is these are just very powerful community building tools where you can sort of string them all together and then sort of create networks combine them, right? I mean if you think about sort of the airdrop mechanism was another way of extending that in a let's call it less dynamic way this type of stuff you can't do in a centralized exchange exactly exactly right you got to do that on chain you got to do that on the blockchain and utilize that you're going to have different versions of the way that dynamic assets are being built because of its composable nature and so how do you interpret that and I think the sort of the part where we're here now with AI, agentic AI and AI agents that is becoming exciting because they can do the translation, right? They understand how to navigate this and sort of they also, by the way, can be able to sort of verify it in a way that a human can't because at the end of the day, I mean, Phantom, you know, is pretty easy to use. But for most people, it's still very unfamiliar and it feels a little bit worrisome for a lot of people who just like, okay, my assets are indistinguishable. They're still thinking of the wallet as something physical and that it's on my local computer, which it isn't exactly, but that's kind of how people think about it because they don't understand it, right? And again an AI agent can basically just abstract that for you. And I think that's going to be part of that. So technology is there to solve these interesting problems. But the use case of the regular user is difficult when they are still not going to be comfortable dealing with stuff on chain with multiple variations of this because composability can be endless, right? And that's I think where AI agents are going to really make a difference.