Tokenization and Agents: Why It Matters — Yat Siu, Animoca Brands | SuperAI 2026

So I might be the only AI sort of talk here that actually touches on crypto and blockchain, so no pressure at all. But anyway, I'm going to talk to you about why Asia's blockchain and tokenization really matters in this space. And I want to take you back in time a little bit to, I don't know how many of you here remember CryptoKitties back in 2017? Yeah, a few of you guys, maybe two or three hands. Okay, so, shows about the audience. This was actually the birth of consumer NFTs. But what was interesting wasn't that it was CryptoKitties. What was actually interesting was that at the time the blockchain couldn't handle, let's say, millions of dollars of transactions. And today, what you have with stablecoins, you basically have the ability to transact trillions of dollars with stablecoins, basically in this case on Base but on other chains, without a problem whatsoever. So, you've got a really high-scaling protocol that is basically money. You've got Visa, MasterCard, BlackRock, Fidelity, all the major financial firms in the world now adopting that type of technology. And there's around 700 million people that own crypto, but there's really only about less than 70 million of them who are actually doing stuff on chain. So, you ask yourself the question, why is that? Why has it been so difficult to grow the on-chain economy? To actually use blockchain beyond speculation and sort of token stuff? Well, it turns out that after 7 years, the human experience of crypto remains terrifying. We still haven't evolved much beyond MetaMask. You know, most people don't want to save their secret phrases and their keys. If it's all about decentralization though, we need to have a way in which we can stave off all that. But perhaps all this technology that was built on chain, on blockchain, in crypto, maybe it was never meant to be for humans to begin with. This vast incredible technology that can do fast transactions, handle money, was probably something that was always meant for agents, for basically systems that understand code better than anyone. We believe that blockchain is the native settlement layer for the AI economy. You don't need to have traditional transfers or wire transfers. You don't need Visa or MasterCard. You do a direct transfer from one point to another, basically using a stablecoin or using some kind of token and make a direct payment. Almost zero cost, super fast settlement, machine to machine, that is much more obvious. The other thing is also that if you imagine a future in which agents are supposed to have real autonomy, then they need to have money. But how can they have real autonomy and money when they can't have a bank account? And I think it's going to be a long time before JP Morgan will actually open a bank account for your agent. So again, a wallet can do that. And basically the same kind of technology that enabled someone in the Philippines who couldn't have a bank account, he became banked because of a crypto wallet. Now basically that technology can now apply to an AI agent in the same way. And so when you think about what a token is in the blockchain space, you know, forget meme coins and forget all of that kind of nonsense, but specifically around what a token represents, it's a digital bearer asset. It's a bearer asset that represents our property online, right? And that property could be physical like an RWA, could be a piece of real estate, could be a US dollar stablecoin, could be a piece of artwork, or it could also represent the effect or value of a network, but it is a digital kind of property that is native for an AI agent or an AI to be able to communicate, to be able to transact with because it's something they can deal with on chain very easily. And so that token as a bearer asset now can emerge into something different in which it could turn the token economies inside an AI into essentially a virtual property. And commodity in the AI space is really an abstraction of compute and energy. Compute and energy is really, if you think about it, the world's most critical currency for AI. You spend it all the time. You burning tokens is basically burning compute and energy. It is the raw resource. But how do you trade against it? How do you hedge against it? How can you create financial instruments around that, which is basically how manufacturing and other companies were able to sort of evolve because their products were built on these commodities? Tokenization comes to mind as well. And so again, you could have a token that you're already kind of using in AI become essentially a commodity just as it does in the real world. So, what you see in blockchain is that it is actually, we think, the preferred perfect financial sort of system for machines. Now, what are the applications and why does it matter? Why do we need a financial system for machines? So, let me ask the question here to the audience with a raise of hands. I know this is an AI conference, so it might be skewed a little higher, but how many agents do you think you will have in the next 3 years? Hands up if it's going to be at least three. Oh, wow. Is this an AI conference? Okay. Right. So, three. How about 10? How about a hundred? Okay. So, I did the same question in San Francisco. They said 200 at least, right? So, it all depends where you are. But the point is that it's going to be at least more than one. Everyone generally agrees that you're going to have at least more than one AI agent that will serve you or work for you or do stuff for you somehow in the future. Typically, three to five is the number. If you go to San Francisco, it's 200. If you go to other places, it's 1,000. Either way, there's going to be 50 to 100 billion agents at least roaming in the world, doing stuff, acting autonomously based on these numbers. And they're all going to have to have some way in which they can transact with money. And we think they will all have to have a wallet so they can transact and do business with other agents, with other ecosystems around the world, and the experiments that we've seen in crypto and blockchain around DAOs, around governance, around research, around these things in which we're trying to figure out how to make these ecosystems work better, are actually the playground, the test ground for the agentic future to come. Now, what we expect is that agents are going to be transacting and doing business with each other. We see this already with our own MINDS product, where they're basically building skills, sharing value in a token kind of way. They're not transacting with each other with cash. They're not sending money to each other using Visa. They're sending them stablecoins, or they're sending them a token from one wallet to the other wallet. Super simple, super easy, low cost. And all of this transaction that you're seeing is already happening in the back end today. When you're making a flight booking, you know, you're not actually dealing with one system. You're dealing with multiple subsystems that were developed by a travel company or something, but actually that's what your agent is going to do for you, and they're going to not only transact with the agents that the company built, they're going to transact with agents that someone else built, someone from the outside. They're going to negotiate with each other. They're going to create a transaction at micro cents, right at 0.001 cent of a dollar, they're going to do business with each other. Again, that is something that you can do very easily on chain. But it also means that the digital web is going to dissolve. I mean, when was the last time that you actually clicked through to a website when you got a result from AI? For most of us, it's almost never. Two years ago, we would always click through. So, the entire web as we know it is going to completely change. Everything will be on the back of these transactional economies. If you're a content company, you won't get paid on advertising. You're going to get paid from basically a microtransaction that's probably a fraction of a cent, which is by the way how the advertising industry historically has done it. They received a fraction of a cent of your attention, then they create revenue from that, and they pay you a share of that revenue. But that is now all abstracted in this future economy where agents are everywhere. The advertising or attention-based economy, which Facebook for instance, like 97% of its revenue, is going to be $950 billion this year. Last year it was around 900 billion. Either way, it continues to rise. If you agree with what I just said, which is that most people aren't going to be visiting websites, that advertising-based revenue is going to go away. But it's not going to disappear into nothing. That value we think is going to translate into this invocation economy, where agents are going to negotiate these fees. And when you pay your subscription to whatever service you use, whether it's $20 or $100 a month, you're going to pay a subfraction of that subscription to the content provider in which you obtain that information. That's all being negotiated on the back. Because otherwise, these content companies can't make money because advertising isn't going to be growing anymore when agents are the majority of the web. So, the attention economy as you know it is going to go away. Everything is going to handle through frictionless microtransactions, which we think will be powered mostly through blockchain. Every application will be extremely customized because you're not going to be downloading apps anymore that everyone else is using. You're going to basically instantly build the apps that your agent has been able to build for that moment, for that half an hour, for that day, maybe for that year, because essentially they could just do that very quickly. And this kind of dynamic rebundling enables this kind of new frictionless microtransaction system that we see where value is exchanged between agents in a very fast and frictionless way. So, the inevitable future therefore means that if you are not tokenized as a business, if you don't access the token economy, you become irrelevant because the agent cannot find you. If you're not a business that is tokenized or has tokens available, then you won't be discovered. In the same way that in the early days, if you were not on Google, you were not discovered. If you're not on LinkedIn, you're not relevant. If you're not on social media or TikTok, you're not relevant. You need to be tokenized to be relevant to this new agentic economy. Now, in conclusion, some final thoughts as to why this all matters. Finance, and I think a lot of people don't necessarily think about that, but finance is the stuff, is the technology that builds civilizations. The ancient Sumerians invented writing so you could tell whose property belonged to who. That was the reason writing was invented. And from that, we had the birth of all these amazing cultural things, but it came from the proof point to say whose cow belongs to whose cow, because when you grew a civilization to a certain size, you couldn't manage that beyond 150 people as in Dunbar's number, you had to know that there's a thousand people or a hundred thousand people in my society, how do I know who knew what so you could avoid that conflict. And that was the birth of finance. And from that came things like seashells as currency, and then later on went to gold coins, and then paper currency. Money ultimately was the ultimate social system. It was because of money that you could do business with someone far across the other side of the world. You do not need to know his name, but you could still have a relationship. But this was all human to human. And if we believe that every agent in the future will have autonomous access to money because of blockchain, then we're going to enter in a new era where actually we're moving from a primarily human-based civilization with blockchain, perhaps into this new era of an agentic civilization, because the AI intelligence will continue to accelerate, but at the same time, they will have autonomy because they will have money, they will be able to transact, and the entire financial layer that built societies is now going to build this machine society in a sense. Could be scary, but we're pretty excited. So, we think of this as the great inversion. You know, Animoca Brands is known for being involved in the metaverse, and perhaps one of the things that perhaps we got a little wrong about the metaverse because it was COVID, we were all thinking that we're going to spend more time online, but these AI agents are already not just handling our calendars, they're doing trades for us, they're getting smarter, they're probably finding partners for us, probably managing all sorts of things in our life that actually impacting our physical world. They're already here. They're already doing stuff. So, it's not so much that we're going into the metaverse, is that the metaverse is coming to us because of these virtual beings that are already hyper-intelligent and getting more intelligent every week as you can tell. So, all of this matters greatly because we think the combination of AI agents and blockchain can solve one of the big problems we have in the world, which is about financial inequity. Now, we're here in Singapore, you're all very well to do, so you probably don't see a lot of that. But, when you're outside of Singapore at some places in other parts of the world, you have a big gap. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, but the gap isn't just lack of financial opportunity. The gap is really the financially literate versus the illiterate. Most Singaporeans are very financially literate, so you're doing fine. Many other places around you don't even understand what money is. In fact, this statistic in the US showed that the majority of students that graduate are feeling completely unprepared for the world of money, despite the fact that we say that money or understanding money is very important. They don't understand anything about it. They don't know what to do, and so they enter the world with lots of student debt, and that's their experience. And it's obviously awful. And this statistic, by the way, very much mimics, if you look at where the places are that have a lack of financial literacy and not have semi-formal or lack of formal financial services, which is really a really big part of the world. The gray part obviously has better, right? That's fine. Happens to also be the places where crypto and blockchain is the fastest growing. For good reason, because with crypto blockchain, you become more financially included. You can't bank a person for $5 a month on salary because it's not profitable for a bank. But, with the blockchain, you can do that easily. So, why does this matter? Well, first there are two kind of audiences that are financially illiterate. One of them are the unbanked. It's about 1 and a half to 2 billion people in the world. People that are neighboring in Singapore, right? They don't have access. The other part are people like my mom. She doesn't know anything about money. She doesn't care about it, really. But, she didn't grow up in that kind of environment. These are things that are difficult. She doesn't care about money. She's never going to buy Bitcoin. She doesn't care about SpaceX, right? But, she also needs to understand about money. The AI agent can solve that part. It can basically equalize and democratize not just access to assets that are interesting for her, but it also educate and inform people around financial instruments, knowledge. It equalizes the broad access to knowledge around that. Agents have an intelligence beyond just doing something. It can teach you about things that could be fun. That's actually where we think a big impact will happen with the intersection with blockchain and AI agents. And of course, we see this with the impact of our daily lives. How do we learn about money? For our children, we don't learn about it in school. We learn about it when we trade Pokemon cards. Certainly, my kids learn about money that way. And it's not because it's designed that way, it's because it's fun for the kids. They're learning about cash that way. They're doing the trade, and suddenly they realize about value. And that basically now has accelerated even further because of blockchain, because now there's a marketplace. For those of you who are trading Pokemon cards, you probably already seeing it's gone up because of the fact that there's a market on blockchain as an example. So, in closing, couple thoughts. We think it's really important that the whole world needs to have AI agents serving for themselves, right? Serving you, serving others. But, it's still hard, right? I mean, Alex spoke greatly about Open Claw. Wonderful system. Most people, too hard to set up. That's why we started HelloMinds. We literally, within 60 seconds you can set that up. And you know, it's now number three on Open Router in terms of personal agents. And I think the other thing is if you want to build in the agentic space, we have a $10 million program where if you're interested in building an agent using HelloMinds, please look us up. We're here to help and support and of course looking forward to the projects you're building and to essentially bringing blockchain and agents together. Thank you so much.