MIAMI TAPES: Yat Siu (Animoca Brands)

0:00Alex Thorn:Welcome back to another edition of Galaxy Brains Miami Tapes, interviews that we recorded at the Miami Beach Convention Center on-site during Consensus 2026 in May. We have a great interview here with Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, and we talked with Yat about AI, his philosophy, how he got to think the way that he does, what Animoca's doing in the space. It's another great interview. Yat Siu, repeat guest. I know you'll enjoy it. Let's hop right into it. Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca, welcome back to Galaxy Brains. Thank you for coming. Thank you for having me again. We're on the ground now.

0:31Alex Thorn:I've interviewed you in your offices in Hong Kong, in our offices in New York, and this is the first time in a third-party location, but we're on the ground at Consensus in Miami. What's your impression of this conference? I mean, right now, I think the vibe is great, a lot of energy. I think, you know, Miami's hot, but actually I think the scene itself, a lot of people are talking. Not as many side events as, you know, like what you see, like for instance, Consensus Hong Kong was like side event bonanza, right? Whereas over here, it seems 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?

1:05So I actually kind of like to set up a lot.

1:08Alex Thorn:Yeah, and I think people are pretty optimistic and confident. And this is the most institutional crowd I think I've seen in my years of going to these conferences. Well, and I think that's great. But one thing I said yesterday, actually, I think it was on stage in 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?

1:34I think it's much more than that.

1:35Alex Thorn:It is much more than that. But you're right. It does feel at risk of becoming relegated to that. Exactly. And you don't want that. No. And we want to bring some crypto to TradFi, not just the TradFi crypto. I do think, and maybe you start here at a high level, when it's all said and done, I guess nothing's ever all said and done in human history. But let's say when it's all settled and it's all shaken out, there's clearly a push and pull between centralization and decentralization. Crypto and Bitcoin and digital assets world is trying to pull TradFi closer to a decentralized model. They're trying to tokenize our assets and sell them through their centralized model.

2:11Alex Thorn:Where do you think that line ends up? The spectrum between centralization and decentralization. I actually think, especially when we talk about agenting 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, a coal wallet and stuff, right? But we still only represent a single digit percentage of the world, right?

2:40And 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 to do it easily without a centralized power. And that's actually where AI agents, I think, can really come into play.

2:53Alex Thorn:You think they can traverse the on-chain environment more easily and better than humans? Well, it's natural to them, if you think about it. It's a language to understand. And we're getting to a point where AI agents are getting better and better and better. And some people will be like, oh, maybe there's a systemic risk and stuff can 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.

3:18Maybe 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 all that kind of stuff, the problems that we have right now.

3:39Alex Thorn:Let's just stick on this AI topic. There's plenty I want to ask you about. We'll go back to some other stuff too. But you guys launched Animoca Mines on February 5th of this year. That's right. It's persistent AI agents with their own wallets, white label, built on Ethos Swarm and CryptoSlam. What is it? Okay. And by the way, we just renamed it to HelloMines. HelloMines. HelloMines.com because it's just a little bit more friendlier. And I think the way that you can think of sort of it's an agentic AI. It does everything that OpenClaw does in the sense that it can code. It can basically sort of be your personal assistant and whatever.

4:11But frankly, that's not where it's most interesting. Where it's most interesting is that HelloMinds is the only agentic AI system that is social relational. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I mean, you probably have an AI setup as well. And you probably have a pretty cool setup where there's OpenClaw, that kind of stuff, right? But would you ever share that setup? Would you basically connect that agent with your family or your friends? I haven't yet. I've wondered. Yes. Well, do you want to? I kind of do. Well, it depends what you're doing with it. What if it had all your personal information?

4:38Oh, then I'm not sure I do it all. 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're taking it from step one to, okay, we've upgraded from Search 2.0, and now we're basically going into sort of a form of agent that's very personal to me, you know, the manises of the world, you know, those type of companies, you know, they're focusing on that. or like Claude Coworker, very personal, right? However, that's something that I'm not going to go and pass on to, you know, my family or my friends or my coworkers or my alumni friends or whatever.

5:11They 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.

5:16Alex Thorn:Exactly, right? And so you need different agents that represent different things that are social relational. That's cool. And of course, they also have things where they have your personality. They have all the capabilities. And here's the big thing. You know, like we're more technical. So setting up an open clause is pretty easy. However, my mom's not going to go set up an open claw. She's not even going to go bother with the VPS. This one, you basically just go in, basically, you know, with your email, and then they start chatting to you over email, just like a normal coworker, and do stuff with you.

5:41And, you know, maybe, you know, I'll just say this right now. I think this is where we think the metaverse is going to go, right? I know metaverse is kind of a dirty word. And it was like, oh, it's 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 and they're going to be humans. They're going to be doing all sorts of fun stuff and help us out as well. And just think about all the applications as well.

6:07Like people today on sort of Hello Minds, they're finding dates, they're finding sales leads. They're sort of 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 on the other one.

6:42In 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 US dollars a month. Wow. Yeah. I mean 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 sort of shop more efficiently then you save money and you know a lot of people that's essentially huge amounts that's a lot of money that's right

7:10Alex Thorn:and gosh I love this this falls right into my favorite conversation topic these days which is what are you building with AI and this is I hadn't even thought of this I'm now going to try to do my own in my area you see that what happens in America I mean maybe there's price arbitrage I was shocked when I saw the numbers. I would love to be advised on how to save$700 a month. That's a decent amount of money. Exactly, exactly. It's fascinating. You've also been, I think, one of the strongest, you've made the strongest version of the agents need crypto case, I think. Many, your thesis had been agents need wallets, micropayments, finality, transparency, etc.

7:45Alex Thorn:Today, though, most agent, I think, commerce traffic is still through Stripe and OpenAI APIs, I think. That's right. Not quite X402 yet or L402 if you use Lightning and the Bitcoin network. But why does the agent economy need crypto and not just like better APIs? So let's zoom out a little bit, right? 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? I usually just read what it tells me about it. There we go. There we go. Yeah. Just a few years ago, click through a website, click through a website.

8:20In fact, many of the big websites are reporting traffic as low as 80 % down from what it was before. 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? 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.

8:52You're going to charge them one cent, fraction of a cent, right? So in the time that we make one purchase going from, you know, 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, even, oh, we'll make it cheaper. We'll 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?

9:21Because we can all just build apps. I mean, you know, speaking of things that I'm building at home, I mean, basically, if I want to have sort of 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 basically a bunch of Wordles, but I make it only science-based, right? 10 minutes, done, built, everything, all the rules are done, just for myself, share it with my family. That's all that 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?

9:47And of course, we're not going to be visiting websites the way that we do. So all of this ends up being transacted and 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.

10:07Alex Thorn:I think that's really interesting too. Yeah, that makes sense to me. The microtransaction and also the, do you think there's a particular type of blockchain that is more conducive for AIs? I mean, this is one thing my team's been wondering about. 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. We're not quite there yet. Well, remember, an AI agent doesn't care except better, faster, cheaper, which is kind of blockchain, right? Yeah. And by the way, this also means that when you're basically thinking about discovery, that all changes.

10:39As humans, we're stuck to the discovery areas because we're used to it. We're stuck with habit. It's easier for us. And also, that's where we think the traffic is. But if I want to build a community, the AI agent will just go find it for me. And I basically don't have to go and sort of, you know, log on to Instagram or go on to sort of, you know, basically Steam to download stuff. When in fact, it just delivered for me.

11:01Alex Thorn:Let's shift gears a little bit. 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 our entire identity, but yes. Exactly. 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? Well, I mean, in a way, you could say digital property rights in the form of Bitcoin has been somewhat recognized.

11:37I mean, if someone steals your Bitcoin, the police will try to help you, right? 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.

12:07And that's where the digital property rights, I think, is really, really going to explode. And I just want to sort of 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 basically be 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 sort of, you know, profile pic, right?

12:39We will work for that agent in some way, form or fashion, right? that person will, so that agent will have sort of personality, that agent will have sort of 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.

12:54Alex Thorn:They are natively digital and we are natively physical and they can't, one of the few things that AI agents can't do is act in the physical world without some help, maybe with robots. I'm a little, let's not go too far down that. I know, rent a human, right? Pretty scary, yeah, rent a human. In fact, there was somebody at the Bitcoin conference last week in Las Vegas, walking around saying that they were, I forget, they were holding up a sign. And I asked them, I said, what is this about? And he's like, oh, I'm literally like, hey, I run a human. Like I was paid to be here by someone's agent. And I was like, this is the first I've ever seen it.

13:25Alex Thorn:I want to ask you about Animoca. You guys are planning to go public, reverse merger with Currency Group. That's right. What can you say about this? Where are you guys in that process? 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. It looked like the market depreciated as well. I mean, I can't really comment except factually, I think it 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.

13:52But of course, markets have shifted and changed. We've got to face that. And a lot has changed for Animoca as well. I mean, our joint venture, Anchor Point, which is a joint venture with Standard Charter and Hong Kong Telecom, just most recently received sort of the one of two stablecoin licenses. The other one went to HSBC. In Hong Kong. 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 stable coin, if you will, right? In a sense, it's basically pegged to that, right? It is, yeah. But interesting enough, of course, within a different construct, right?

14:22And 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 essentially stable coins. So it's something I think, you know, if people are interested to have a little bit of a sort of a cheaper lending rate, they should maybe take a look at Hong Kong dollars. That is interesting. Yeah.

14:36Alex Thorn:And, you know, let's talk, We'll talk about stablecoins now then, I guess. And I think the Anchor Point partnership and JV and license is very interesting. Obviously, we have the Genius Act is federal law here in the U.S. And I think will be fully implemented over the next 12 months. Do you think that, one, do you think there'll be reciprocity? I mean, neither of us are probably lawyer experts on this. But there is the capability in Genius for the U.S. treasury to say you know what like the hong kong digital asset uh dap hkdap hkdap is um is you know a sufficient license and like let's let them flow together um do you think we're going to see an hkd renaissance in this fiat stable coin i think it's very possible right and also remember this is a u.s effectively u.s dollar stable coin right right so from that perspective it's pegged to the dollar right the assets up to your 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.

15:34So in that sense, I don't see any issues around that.

15:37Alex Thorn:I think every currency is going to be a stablecoin. Like, you know, the Turkish lira is going to have a stablecoin. And like, 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 a thing. The guys, you know, might say, oh, stablecoin, digital assets, digital currency, you know, what's all this nonsense? They know what they're doing, because basically, you know, 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?

16:11Which basically means that the quasi-taxable base of America has just expanded by roughly twice the size of, you know. And, you know, 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. I think that's right.

16:27Alex Thorn:I think the Genius Act and, frankly, all of these jurisdictional laws and licenses for stablecoins are about extending the reach of your fiat currency. The Genius Act should primarily be viewed as a U.S. dollar dominance bill. Well, I think it should be viewed as American soft and hard power sort of mechanism. Hence, genius. Yes, exactly. And also, you're pointing out Europe, too. They really are screwing this up. They're still tinkering around the ECB thinking they're going to do a CBDC. I think the problem is, yeah, and I think, you know, also the fact that they're sort of conflating the fact that you have to choose between CBDC and stablecoin.

17:06You know what? Just do it, right? And obviously stablecoins will win, but just let them do it, right? And I think that's part of the challenge. And, you know, even though you have euro stablecoins out there that are licensed, they're not given the same runway. They're not given the same support, right? And so as a result, they're sort of really sort of playing. I mean, it's not even they're not even in the race right at the moment, which is kind of sad. Right. And I think it's very dangerous for Europe. Right. I think I think Europe will face a situation where they don't get their act together.