Is the Four-Year Cycle Dead? ft. Yat Siu

24:05But she knew nothing about money. I mean, she grew up, she was a musician in Europe. You don't even talk about money. Okay, you're not supposed to talk about money. That's right. However, now she, for a little amount of money, she could have a part ownership in what she understood to be valuable. And in the process, she begins to learn about money, right? And so the power of tokenization is that it essentially makes everything a financial asset. That's a criticism. Oh, you financify everything. But actually, what it also does is it creates a financial instrument forcing the people around them to learn about money.

24:37Because now it is a financial instrument of meaning. Whether it's a gaming asset, whether it's a cultural asset, whether it's a musical thing, doesn't matter, right? I mean, nobody would have thought that baseball cards or Pokemon cards would have any value whatsoever when they first came out. And here we go, you know, multi-billion dollar industry. I think that the financialization aspect is the superpower of tokens is they're a behavioral incentive system. And so it creates all sorts of things that are interesting. And that's why it aligns so well with, for example, gaming, because behavioral incentives, the gaming industry led all of that.

25:15Exactly. That's what Robin Hood and all of these platforms are. Are they using gamification processes? And the ultimate gamification is earning money from activity. Right. And the activity of earning money or basically creating sort of that kind of monetary reward is part of the game. And it's fun in and of itself. Right. And I think what we're seeing with tokenization are sort of, I guess, projection into the future. Our forecast would be that what tokenization and blockchain is really doing is essentially doing to financial literacy what the Internet did to digital literacy. in our generation as you may recall i mean we had this thing called digital literacy uh in my my my i had a sort of roughly one year job at at &t and uh this was in like in like in the 90s and i had to print my emails for my boss right because it's like he didn't just wouldn't read read out of the beer he wasn't digital literate right and just like today right if you're not digital literate which doesn't really exist right then you're basically invisible if you don't know how to be on Google, you can't be found or on LinkedIn.

26:18If you're not on Instagram or TikTok, you're not social. You just don't exist anymore, right? And I think that's the same is true now for essentially tokenization, where we're basically moving from a world where everyone's digital literate to a world where everyone will eventually become financially literate. And that will change the entire landscape, because everything is in the form of financial instrument. It will be as normal as me getting news from Africa, even though I'm in Hong Kong, which wasn't normal at all, by the way, Right. That was scarce and hard to get. Information was scarce. I mean, imagine that.

26:48Right. And also the other thing that it's doing is creating value out of things that humans knew to be inherently valuable, but couldn't value culture. That's right. Absolutely. What you're able to do here is tokenize and create value around culture. Now, what is culture? Culture is a form of attention. so whether it's music culture gaming culture all of these things um then they become you can tokenize that culture which creates the value and the internet memetics the stories we tell ourselves they're valuable to us yes it amplifies it because when you basically take culture and you create a network out of it which is what tokenization blockchain does you add network effects on top of it and you globalize it in a way how the internet has globalized it you know with Reddit or with like, you know, social media, but now in a value construct.

27:39And what I tell people who are like, oh, but tokens, what's the value of a network? And all that stuff, I say, well, did you know that digital advertising was$800 billion a year and pretty much all the revenue of the biggest companies in the world? And like, oh, okay, okay. Because they know advertising is big, but they don't necessarily know that it's close to a trillion dollars, which is essentially fueling all the market caps of, you know, the Apples and Googles and Facebooks of the world, right? And actually, it's a tension that they're trading. But the difference is, is that, you know, it's not your network.

28:08You don't own it. You're literally renting it the whole time. And now with tokens, actually, you can have an ownership in that particular attention network. And what I tell people is like, look, if you have a token, it could be a small community or an NFT, right? Like a CryptoPunk, for instance, right? If you own that, you're a member of that community. There is value in that, not just something sort of symbolic, but actually something that basically is provable. And that in itself means that you're a target audience, right? Whether it's like saying, hey, I could actually reach out someone who had a Lamborghini or had a Rolex watch and I can certify that.

28:40That's actually much more valuable and I will pay you much more because I know you're the real customer for that. So there's benefits that sort of imply from that, right? But the other one is, you know, you can actually trade against the attention of the value of that attention that that network has. as literally as if advertising was a commodity that was tradable, which it is when it comes to DSPs and SSPs as a sort of closed network. But just like how crypto has basically busted open the doors of essentially the financial network, which was a closed door network to an open network, that's basically what tokens can do to any industry.

29:13And it does this to advertising in the form of many of these tokens, which are, I would argue, primarily attention focused today. This expands with RWAs and other areas as well. But many of the tokens today, I would argue, are very much in the vein of the attention type of the asset, the network attention asset, rather than the, let's call it sort of real world asset type. The other thing that I think people still don't understand is what an NFT is and what it can unlock, because people still think about just the PFP craze that happened last time around. Now, again, there are Lindy effects within that.

29:50You're invested in a whole bunch of these and they're still huge projects that are doing huge things. But NFT technology itself creates digital scarcity around single things, whether that's a contract or whether it's a ticket that unlocks network effects from things that didn't have them. And they're still being underutilized, I think, by corporations when they realize the power of NFTs. NFTs are going to scale enormously. When you invest in crypto, you want the right tools in one place to help you achieve your goals. That's why I recommend Gemini. It's an exchange that's secure, trusted, and has all the tools you need to buy crypto and grow your portfolio.

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30:57I think NFTs are going to scale enormously. I think NFTs, and we may not call them NFTs anymore anyway, but the baseline is kind of like how we don't call digital music MP3s anymore, right? However, when you think about what NFTs will unlock, this ability to essentially turn a sort of mass scaling, essentially property rights of scarce unique assets. I mean, think what it would do for creators who are musicians. And you could create a decentralized Spotify, literally, where everyone basically suddenly shares rights of music and basically pays accordingly, but directly to you as opposed to needing an intermediary like Spotify who basically skims off the top and suddenly skims everything because they control the network.

31:36right as opposed to you know um something like that you know for instance with one of our companies that we funded um you know basically was doing um teacher nfts um and what was interesting is like basically they used the nc technology to essentially create property rights around people making certain kind of teaching content and that content might pay a yield of i don't know 10 20 a year it's tiny but for a teacher in venezuela he could now sell that for $100 or$150, that's life-changing, right? And the foundation of a lot of our early forms of wealth is property that we were able to buy fairly cheaply or created a certain rent or yield from it.

32:13And then basically, you were able to sort of create an asset class out of that, right? Ranging from all sorts of things. I mean, some of the more quirky companies in the portfolio are companies who basically created property rights from their dance moves, right? It's a funny story but you know this company called dance fight uh the one of the sort of i guess guys behind it uh the dancer had uh his move he had a dance move on tiktok that was really popular and fortnight just ripped it off and he was playing fortnight and he's like hey this is this is my dance move and he basically went out and asked asked him can i you know epic is like so you know can i get something for this it's like crickets because he can't prove it right and with blockchain, you don't actually need to, you don't need a legal lawyer to sort of do the trademark.

32:58You can prove origination, an original source, you know, and essentially created a legal property of some form in the same way that Bitcoin is a legal property of yours as well, right? You go to court and say, this guy stole my Bitcoin, or that should belong to me. Here's the proof, right? It's that proof that basically NFT technology can do on scarce, unique assets of all sorts. And, you know, some people argue about, oh, but this is invisible and it's not really, It's not tangible, right? And they forget that intellectual property is not tangible. And now it's an$80 trillion market, right? Probably the fastest growing sort of market really over the last several decades.

33:35So again, right? And it's entirely virtual and it comes from our minds, but it comes from this form of property rights protection that you can now do at scale. So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. You've got a kind of vast, broad portfolio within Animoca. Break us through kind of what the portfolio looks like. Where have been the focus of attention in the last few years?

34:10What have you guys been looking at? And we'll talk about where you guys are going as well in a bit. No, of course. Yes, really. I'm saying there's a lot of signal within what you've got because you're so broad and so deep in the ecosystem. So we have today over 628 portfolio companies. Obviously, we have a healthy mix of everything, I would say, from infrastructure, Deepin, AI. Gaming remains a really big part of the portfolio. Over 200 of them are in gaming, again, primarily because we see that as a very natural onboarder. Gaming tokens in and of itself haven't done so well, but many of the gaming projects are profitable in and of itself.

34:41right and we get we can get into those models later because it's sort of a misunderstanding i would say in early days around what sort of makes a good token versus what makes a good game and how you integrate the two and you know one of the reasons why i think financial players have done better on tokens is because they understand investor relations whereas game companies don't have to understand investor relations they never have to think about that right so they're just making the game and thinking it's about the player and that took a few years for people to understand basically that you needed to do both right but yeah there's obviously the gaming point the ai point, we're doing a lot in RWA's, right?

35:13We have this sort of joint venture with essentially, you know, the ProvLabs guide, the team behind Figure, you know, on Nuva, which is an RWA marketplace. We're doing a stablecoin JV with Steiner Chartered, which is a notifying bank here in Hong Kong and Hong Kong Telecom. You know, a lot of institutional sort of things that we're also doing in the Middle East, like with Saudi and like with Neom, for instance, right? So there's projects we incubate, but there's also projects that we're investing in. One of the things that we are very excited about, for instance, in open campus is basically on-chain student loans, right, which is fascinating because basically students are now able to basically get financed through crypto rails effectively, which are better, faster, cheaper.

35:54And of course, the student then on the other end basically starts to repay their loans eventually through crypto, right? So there's all these new things that sort of have evolved from there. And it all comes from the same lens, which is essentially financial inclusion, financial literacy, financial adoption, and of course, bringing in people into the ecosystem around sort of mass adoption. We've been big supporters of Ton as well, primarily for distribution rails, right? Because if you think about what happened with Apple and Facebook and Google, I mean, Apple still has restrictions around NFTs in the App Store.

36:25Wild. We're here under a Trump administration, and yet Apple says, NFTs, you can't use them inside the App Store in the way that you'd like to, right? So there's still restrictions there, right? So that's why you need things like the Telegram ecosystem. So we've been very, very actively focused around that. And I would say, in a way, we believe everything will be tokenized, not just because of the Clarity Act. But the thesis point isn't just around sort of make it a token. But why is because it's more broadly accessible. I'll get to that quickly. But also, it makes it AI readable. And I think that's the part that a lot of companies haven't yet fully, let's put it, sort of visualized.

37:05because they're using AI in a way of, this is how I use AI. I ask him questions and he services me and he answers my questions and whatever, right? Like as a tool, right? Not really as a lifestyle agent or someone who will do things for you on your behalf, right? The truly agenting AI. And the truly agenting AI, which I believe we will be using not just one or two, but many of them, right? Are basically going to be transacting with tokens because it's a native currency. They don't have a bank account, right? And it's going to be in the same way that you have to become basically internet readable to be discovered by your customer audience.

37:39You have to become AI readable to become accessible, whether it's an asset you're selling or a product you're trying to reach, right? And so we have to figure out ways in which you become tokenized because it's the standard. And the key differentiator is, I believe we're moving away from trusting an API to having trust, essentially, the blockchain as that sovereign source of information. Like I can trust that if you give me Bitcoin, it is your Bitcoin and I now have it, right? You're not gonna, way you can take it away. Whereas we're still living in the Web 2 era in an API economy, which is all permissioned.

38:10And what happens is that if I'm building a business where suddenly hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue come from that, there's another company that has massive power over you. We're like, oh, the answer has been today to build a new infrastructure, my own APIs to split out. Hugely inefficient, right? But of course, that's what they had to do. But on blockchain, I can still exist on the same system, share the network effects without ever having to worry that I essentially get deplatformed because of its permissionless nature and because of the inherent property rights that basically the blockchain can deliver.

38:44And so if I have an AI agent who's going to trade millions of dollars for me, I'm not going to do that on an API basis. I'm going to do that on a system that I know is sovereign, right? Just for the safety and security of my assets. That's the only thing. And that in itself is good enough why I will choose something that's on-chain as opposed to something that's centralized, for instance, right? So that's a big thing. The other thing is reaching new audiences, for instance, stablecoins, right? Of course, we know why stablecoins are a big deal for America because it can buy treasuries. But of course, it basically also ensures dollar hegemony, not because more Americans use stablecoins.

39:18They don't necessarily have to do that. But because now Africa, South America, Pakistan, India, all these places are basically becoming dollar colonized. And of course, the flip side of that is that you as an American business can now reach them as customers and take their dollars too. So suddenly your economy hasn't just expanded to where the Internet can reach, but expands essentially to nations who now have the currency to pay you. because they may read your content, but they can't pay you because they don't know how to because the bank won't let them or they don't have a credit card. But now they have a stable coin and can do that.

39:53And, you know, I tell, especially some of my European friends, it's like, you guys really need to get your act together and really promote that because, you know, MICA has a structure, but you're not really pushing it forward because if you don't, Europe will become dollar colonized in the same way that it's become internet technology colonized today, right? And then at that point, And, you know, the EU is just an extension of essentially American tech and the American economy if they're not careful. And I think the guys in the top honchos in the U.S. do understand that very well. And I'm not sure everyone gets that.

40:26Right. But again, you as a business, you need to participate in this because this is where the world is going. Right. And so those are the lenses that we take. And we as a business essentially feel like, well, you know, how can we be valuable in this space other than sort of incubating, going and investing? right the the view we take is that we as a business could essentially become an index for investors to participate basically in this next growth era and it comes a little bit from my own thinking of you know being an early internet entrepreneur but of course much younger less wisdom no money back then right to saying well if i had the early advantages of knowing what the internet would would become how would i have played it right and so anemoka is a little bit of a version of that where it has a vast portfolio of what we believe will be the next Amazons and Ebays and Googles of the world.

41:13But if you're a fund, you basically have to basically sell after 10 years, right? But imagine if you invested in Google in 2000 and then Apple and in Facebook, and you were forced to unwind the fund in 10 years, that's 2010, right? I mean, that's literally, that's 15 years before prime time. The worst timing. The worst timing. I mean, you would have made money, don't get me wrong, but it's just, how do you do that? And many of the people, even though it was 10 or in some cases 15 years of development already, for most investors, they still couldn't picture where those companies were going, right?

41:45And that to me is essentially how Anomoka wants to build itself as an operator. Anomoka is really a permanent capital vehicle, which makes a difference with funds, right? That's exactly, exactly. We're a permanent capital vehicle, but because of the nature of tokens, we can create yield and income. So we're very profitable, you know, not just through trading activities, but, you know, basically when we receive these altcoins, we have the ability to hedge against a portion of them. And that's how we basically create money, for instance, outside of the operating business. But we can be long on most of the position.

42:16And so as a result, you basically have an index of the other sector of the market. And altcoins is today about 25, 30 percent. Well, it depends what day you look at, right? You know, the market. Recently, maybe not so much, right? But still, it's over a trillion dollars. And our main thesis and belief, which maybe you want to get into is that we think altcoins collectively will exceed Bitcoin by 10 times in the mid to long term. Yeah, I completely believe that because smart contracts by definition have more use cases. Your favorite neighborhood spot grows with Square. Indeed, my favorite neighborhood spot has quickly become Todd Snyder in Williamsburg.

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43:43And you build the applications layer on top, which is a lot of what you're investing in. Yes, you've got infrastructure rail, but you're also doing the applications layer. And if we think of the internet, the applications layer was actually the larger part of the internet, which is Google and Facebook and everything else. the gaming companies, all of those things. And so, yeah, I mean, I totally believe that. It feels that that's the directionally the right way is to think of the smart contracts will be much larger than Bitcoin over time. And I think it's not to say that Bitcoin in and of itself won't be the largest asset class, just like gold, right?

44:18You know, gold is 27 trillion, but the stock market is 128 trillion. And when you start adding essentially, you know, private markets on top of it, you have over 200 trillion, right? So that was roughly what informs our thinking as to where Bitcoin, as the form of digital gold, will be relative to where everything is in terms of the altcoin space, which is what we use, right? And altcoins isn't specifically just a meme coin or a utility token in itself. It could be RWAs. It could be sort of other uses that you build. You actually create sort of assets that are commodities that now have use cases within sort of digital applications directly.

44:52There's a lot of innovation that can basically built from on top of that. And that's what we use, right? I mean, back in the NFT craze, you know, people entered crypto not because of buying Bitcoin. They entered it because of playing a blockchain game or basically buying an NFT or buying virtual land, right? And by the way, NFTs are still about three to$500 million of sales every month, right? It's just gone away from the traditional hype from before where people who didn't know what they were doing basically were there. And I liken it a little bit like if you're not in crypto, you wouldn't know about nfts but if you're in crypto especially in the culture area you would understand the value of them and you know even i mean some ways you know owning a crypto punk has probably been a better levered bet on eath than owning eath itself right that's right and you know i spend a lot of time in the digital art world as you know um and it's bringing in all sorts of interesting people like mickey um you know people don't really understand the scale of what's happening in the digital art world.

45:48And this is nice because you see these cultural niches becoming bigger, more entrenched, having bigger Lindy effects over time that most people aren't even aware of. You know, it's kind of like the, I tell people that it's the asset class of that generation, right? And so, you know, like, for instance, I'll give an example that probably most of your audience might not appreciate because they probably don't live in China, right? Chinese modern art is massive. Massive, massive, massive. But for someone who's not in China, it means nothing to them, right? But why is Chinese modern art so big? Because there's a lot of rich Chinese people now, right, who have made their wealth.

46:26And what matters is essentially the social network effect that they have within China. Oh, you have this art. That means something to that community. It might not mean to someone in America, right? So it's hard to translate, right? But in China, you know, it's worth a ton from a reputation standpoint. And so you basically grew this into a multibillion dollar asset class, not just, you know, Western goods and culture, but, you know, basically now let's call it modern Chinese version of that. And it's the same with crypto. And if you're a tourist or not even inside crypto, you look at these NFTs and you go, I don't know what that means, right?

46:57Because it's not your culture. And so it's strange to you that someone will buy something, basically, you know, a picture that you could save, so to speak, right? But for people in China, it's everything. And I would argue that translates into all sorts of culture all over the world. There's American culture, whether it's a Warhol or maybe Picasso's, you know, in Europe or, you know, where it's very valuable there, but not valuable elsewhere. It all has to do with what it means to your particular social groups and networks and Lindy effect, as you say. Right. So, yes, it's all the same. Right.

47:28And if you understand that, then that's why you buy it. So how do you manage a portfolio that's so broad? I mean, that's not easy. No, it's not easy. But first of all, I think one of the ways that we create operating leverage around the altcoin space is that we advise and support them. So we're actually much more engaged with many of the projects than just the silent investor. So we have an entire infrastructure that's built around supporting them. But the second thing, and I think this is a real game changer versus the traditional form of VC, which is you don't really need a dedicated portfolio manager because you can create network effects between your portfolio because it's all on chain.

48:03Much, much easier, right? Like you don't have to have an API or contract. Remember, if you're a VC and you want to create, you know, synergies, I hate that word, but synergies basically between, you know, two companies. They come together, they sign an agreement, there's an MOU, they bring team people in, all that kind of stuff. And blockchain is like, oh, I've got an app chain. Here's my API. I'll feature you. I'll give you support, but you can just build everything yourself, right? or I'm a marketplace like OpenSea or Magic Eden or one of those guys in our portfolio. We'll just make the introductions.

48:37Okay, I can support you this way, but that's it. They don't have to sign a contract. They don't have to have funky API integrations. It just builds on chain. Here's the asset. Here's my audit report or whatever it is. There's so many open ways that you can do so. It's basically open source, right? And so it's kind of like, how do you manage open source? Well, it kind of manages itself as long as you bring them together. And I don't want to sort of make it too trite or oversimplified. There is, of course, a human part that's there. But the power of blockchain is the self-organizational capabilities that it has because of its rule-based structure.

49:10There's a structure that you all know the rules on. You may not agree on all the rules, but they are the rules, right? And so you build on top of them. And so you can really leverage this kind of infrastructure on top if you know what you're doing. And I think a lot of classical VCs aren't really leveraging the on-chain dynamics. They're more like, I make an investment and basically you do what you do and then you do the portfolio report. But much of the stuff you can even measure on-chain. I don't need your statistics if you're on-chain. I can see that. TVL, I can see that. These are things that you can already measure without really needing someone to send you a monthly report or quarterly report, which by the time you get a quarter report is really, really bad or really, really good news, right?

49:53It's like, so there's a lot of things you can automate. And then of course, you know, we do have an AI agent that's on the investing side, but we're also building AI tools to help us with this because it's on-chain. It's sort of automated. You've got tools like Dune. You've got all sorts of things that you can basically build on top of. So it's much easier today. And our projection, by the way, is we think that we should have thousands of these portfolio companies, right? And again, you know, if you think it from the lens of human limited thought of, but how do you manage that? But you say, well, do you not think we're going to have AI agents that can help us with that, right?

50:26You know, do you not think technology can scale towards that? I mean, yes. So I think it's okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Being able to use AI, figure out the signal, whatever's in the portfolio gives you better asset allocation decision-making because you've got all the information in-house. Because it's on-chain, you can see more. And the more it happens on-chain, the more you're able to basically to analyze. which by the way, you couldn't do in a traditional VC setting. In a Web2 company, you don't have access to the books. You can't see what's going on. You don't have the stats, right? You have to ask them for the stats and then they send it to you.

51:00And in nine out of 10 times, you take it on good faith. You know, like, oh, our growth is 500%. Okay, that sounds good. 500%.

51:12So there's so much more efficiencies if you actually know how to sort of scale and grow that. So we're building an ecosystem, but it's an open ecosystem. And I actually think that that's how in the future I do believe, for instance, that classical VC is going to die. And I actually think that not just we all become investors anyway, but also that I think corporate VC, if you call it that, I don't like the word, then probably will be a better word for it. But essentially balance sheet VC, as it were, is more the way forward. Because if you think about the amount of money that's trapped in the balance sheets of these gigantic companies and midsize companies, it's enormous, right?

51:47and is very, very sort of inefficiently spent. It's like, oh, you're going to put in a savings program, 3%, right? As opposed to generating yield or doing something. The second part, though, is similarly to how I mentioned that, you know, money has become much more social with the younger generation, while investing is social as well. It's about relations. It's almost like diplomacy, right? It's also essentially creating a better network within it. Imagine if Apple took 1 % of their net profit a year and made an Apple ecosystem fund that would only invest in people building on the App Store, what do you think would happen to the Apple Store ecosystem?

52:22It would be richer, better, stronger, and everyone would be happy to pay 30%, right? Whereas now, after the ruling, everyone's like, yeah, you had your day. Everyone's like, nobody's cheering for Apple after Epic One because everyone's like, it's extractive. But if they realize that this money, a part of it will go back into the ecosystem that brings in more users and more revenue and more growth and help developers grow in the ecosystem, then it's okay. Or, you know, why does Spotify not have like a music endowment fund of some sort out of their profits? I mean, it's kind of wild, right, if you think about it, right?

52:57And I think that's the thing. So if you want to create a more balanced society, you're also going to do that when the corporates realize that it's not just you don't have to be good citizens because you want to be charitable. It's just good business, right? Because you put money back into your ecosystem that will come back to you because you're not building something for, you know, one or two or three years and then you're out. You're trying to build something for eternity, which means you have to think of it as a loop. And I think, again, tokenomics is kind of an early version of that. And of course, there's a lot of bad tokenomics and a lot of experimentation.

53:27But that thinking starts to evolve to say, well, actually, how do you make a more sustainable ecosystem? And what can you learn from this experimentation of tokenomics? Nine, nine percent of them that may have failed in terms of their intention. But then you see how you can evolve and do that. Like, for instance, I think DAOs are not dead at all, but they've gone through some very, very bad teething problems. Right. And we had to go through them. You know, democracy was not born in a day either. Right. So, yeah, you have to learn. You have to experiment. That's right. Correct. You know, like we've tried with social tokens several times.

53:56Still, nobody can get it right yet. Some people figure it out. Yes. And then it's going to be massive. Exactly. Exactly. That's right. And so how do you manage the treasury of all of this? Because there's so many tokens you get both equity tokens, all of that. That's got to be complicated in itself. I mean, the tools are much simpler today, right? And the nice thing about tokens is because, you know, when they get listed, this is the other thing, right? When you're an investor in the traditional, it's called the traditional sort of Web2 world, you look at a liquidity path in five to 10 years. Now, that's not to say that the liquidity path is necessarily the reason why you do the token.

54:29But because you have essentially a market that could be seed stage market, but there's now trading in some form, right? You can now hedge and build stuff around it. You can still be long in the position. But what happens is that we can basically immediately start basically creating sort of, you know, ways in which you can sort of, you know, secure or protect our downside or, you know, secure upside, whatever you want to look at that. Right. So that's part of the basically treasury team function that we have. That's part of our revenue. The equity side sits as classical equity because, you know, and I would argue that, you know, back in, you know, four or five years ago, people really didn't know what they were doing.

55:03So they were just doing equity and tokens together because that was a construct of the time. I think it was more limited because that was what people understood, right? Or you're an equity investor, but you would like tokens, but your mandate didn't allow tokens. Oh, okay, let me do an equity plus token safety so that we can bring you in so the token is free. And, you know, like it was just creative ways of actually saying, but actually the token is the only thing that matters because your foundation or your protocol, right? So I think it's all part of that evolution. It's kind of like how I think meme coins have become less relevant, even though they're always going to be there, because now we can actually talk about utility, right?

55:35A lot of the meme coins really just emerged because they couldn't talk about utility. You had to pretend it was worth nothing or doing nothing so that the SEC wouldn't come after you. And now we can say, oh, the token has a use case. And I think that's basically where you can now go more directly into things that are more valuable and you can have much more conviction on. I thought meme coins, it's really interesting because crypto speed tests ideas in weird ways. They use speculation to speed test anything. And for me, mean coins were really a tokenizing culture. OK, we get that. But it was also instant capital formation at scale in a decentralized manner.

56:13Imagine, imagine. And I think the pump fund guys really wanted to do this. But I think sort of that social experiment went a little off. But imagine if your likes and your follows were essentially sort of valuable assets that you could trade on at that moment. it's basically an open poly market right where you can see immediately and judge not based on just some momentary attention because you know right now when you have likes and follows they sit there as a badge but you don't actually know whether it's still relevant so you say oh wow you've had 100 million views but actually his next video has 10 views or 100 views because that was him three years ago but not today for instance right and you can't see that right but when you actually have real money at stake, right?

56:57Then you can see, is the attention real right now? Or is it only momentary at that moment in time, right? And because, you know, just like Polymarket, people are actually putting money behind it. You actually have a much better measure because there's something at stake, right? So, but people are experimenting and trying to figure it out. And of course, what Pump did, also people did all sorts of weird things to try to get money. And so that part, again, is this, I would argue, sort of a great sort of, I guess, psychological human experiment that's happening that we still haven't figured out in the same way that, you know, when social media came about, many of the things that have emerged, both good and bad, we didn't really realize until social media came about, right?

57:32So we're going to have to keep experimenting. So what's the next step for Anamoka? Because you're moving towards the end game, which is being a publicly listed company, right? Well, I think the way I would look at it, the publicly listed company is actually really the beginning of the bigger game, I would say, Right. And, you know, why do we want to do this path? Well, one, I think we believe very strongly that we're entering this institutional era of crypto. If you think about it, whether it's an altcoin or, of course, the majors, we only think we think that if you want to be one of the big tokens in the space, you need to have institutional adoption.

58:09It's kind of like, you know, even though DATs have a bad name, I do understand the function of the DAT, right? Which is that the DAT in itself, if you can't be an ETF or you don't want to be an ETF, is a gateway to institutional investors to understand, okay, this is your asset. I don't need to learn about you. It's almost the same as saying, hey, I'm going to list on an exchange. But now you have to list on the next level exchange, which is basically one that's regulated, the one that basically has accountability as opposed to you have some foundation that lists the token and you're kind of like, oh, I'm not really responsible.

58:43And that's exactly the reason why institutions can't invest. Because imagine you're a family office somewhere around the world and they're like, oh, okay, I can buy Ethereum. Great. I can custody that with Coinbase. Okay. But when there's a problem, who do I talk to? Who's accountable, right? It's impossible, right? You don't know, right? And that's basically the institutional world. Someone has to be responsible. But then, oh, you've got Tom Lee, who's like, oh, you know, he didn't found Ethereum, but he's responsible for his company, who's basically managing the asset in a responsible way, depending how you look at it.

59:16But the point is, I can point to a guy. And if something happened, he's at fault. Right. And he's accountable for it. Right. And I think that next level of accountability and disclosures is going to be required to bring that in. And so, you know, for us, for our ecosystem, we need to do that. We were once a public-listed company in Australia. Right. So for us, it's not a totally unfamiliar path. But the second point is that we think nobody else is like us. And so there is an element, of course, of basically trying to get toward this sort of first mover advantage. You know, you've got exchanges that are listing.

59:46I mean, several dozen of our portfolio companies are all going public. So we're like, OK, this is exciting. But they're not doing what we're doing. And so if we could be essentially the altcoin index for investors. The broader representation of the space. space. And what we believe will be the fastest growing and the biggest space, and I think we have a very, not just compelling story, is actually we can be the ambassadors for utility for crypto. Because right now, I think most investors, and this was very informative for me when I started pitching and telling people about the story, most of them have just gotten past Solana.

1:00:18They're like, okay, I see. I kind of get it, right? But then everything else on the tokens, they don't understand that because it's a little bit too far away from them. It was very reminiscent into sort of back in the early days of the internet. It's like, why would I want to read a magazine online? It's so nicer on this piece of paper, right? I mean, it's like literally that kind of conversation that's taking place. Someone has to be out there to tell them, but there's not a reason to do so. But when you have a path to go in public, you know, with our reverse merger with currency, which, you know, and we should talk about currency itself because they're actually a really fascinating business, which is very complimentary to ours, is that actually we then educate them about the space And then actually it grows, not just what's in our portfolio, because they go, oh, that's interesting as an ambassador almost.

1:01:03But also it makes them think about tokenization. It makes them think about stuff. And that's why RWAs and stable coins are an important narrative, because that's the very first thing they also understand. And we think that's a faster path of adoption, right? How about tokenizing some of the equity like others are starting to experiment with? It kind of makes sense, right? So Solana and Republic actually really through their own actions have started to, they announced actually that they're going to tokenize Animoca equity, right? And this is even before we're trading, right? But of course, it's more than that, right?

1:01:34But it's a good experiment as well to demonstrate that you can basically do that. And eventually, I mean, obviously what Solana wants to do with the internet capital markets play pretty much is to say, everything will happen on Solana. And we're basically just going to sort of, you know, trade stocks and equities and all sorts of financial products on Solana. I think every blockchain is going to want to do that. So it's going to be pretty competitive. But the point is that it's going this way, regardless of whether it's Solana, Ethereum or whatever. We've got to be true to ourselves. And if we want people to have access to the opportunity set globally, not just US investors who've got access to an exchange and can open a brokerage account, all of that stuff is prohibitive for anybody else in the world.

1:02:13And tokenization solves that. It's a really key part of why we're all here. Exactly. And it doesn't just only solve that. The accessibility is instant. and actually because someone who doesn't have a back account could still be a potential participant or stakeholder in whatever you're building. And this to me is actually the opportunity for why you as a business should tokenize, not just because of the whole AI story, but because you're reaching out essentially to a much larger audience where you could basically do more business, right? Which is really ultimately what most businesses want. They want to expand somehow.

1:02:44And normally it'd be like, let me move to China. Let me go to India. Let me go to Europe and sell stuff there. And oh, let's go to crypto. How do we sell to that community? what happens to be the whole world, right? And so many people who haven't traveled to many of these places don't realize just how unbanked they are and how much value there is, but how they can't sort of transact in a traditional way because they didn't have the tools to do so. And stable coins and crypto rails really do solve that very beautifully. And so tell me about the reverse merger. So currency, who are they? What do they do?

1:03:18And how does it all fit together? Currency has an interesting history. so they're a NASA global markets company and merger terms basically is 95.5 which means that essentially the shareholder of currency will have 5 % we're 95 % so it could almost be considered like a takeover however we're sort of merging into them because they have an existing business that we could utilize and I kind of have joke about this as well because a lot of people often when they look at a deal like this they dismiss the target company outright because it's like oh you took it over okay fine some faster way of going public Like, it's like, hold on, hold on.

1:03:50This is not a biotech pharmaceutical company or something. This is actually a fintech business that services 13 million people, basically, in places like Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, and does basically remittances to them at$2 a day. Perfect use case for crypto. And the founder actually built a business originally. For those who don't know Hong Kong, Hong Kong has a very big domestic helper market. These are basically people who help basically in the households. right? It's probably one of the largest ones, right? And they keep sending money back to the Philippines. And again, for those who don't know, a lot of the money gets sent to, you know, like, I think there's a joke, and this is not meant to be disrespectful to any Filipinos.

1:04:34But it's a bit of a trope where there's some truth to this, where they say, like, if every woman in the Philippines would stop working, the entire Filipino economy would ground to a halt in three days. Whether that's true or not, the point is, it's because they're the ones working, and they're sending money back to the Philippines. It's like such a huge deal, right? Like, you know, billions and billions of dollars of remittances that go back to the Philippines. And then the husbands, I'm not saying again, all of them are like this, but the trope is that many of them basically just take the money and do all sorts of other stuff because they're not really working, right?

1:05:01And so he's created not only a system where he remittent this money sending back, he's also created a system, which is ingenious around, where the helpers could decide, well, if the husband's not, you know, spending the money the right way, they can instantly redirect it to maybe the daughter or some other family member, right? And we don't think about this stuff, right? But we also don't think about having to be paid daily because we don't care. But if you're in a place like the Philippines, you should be paid a salary daily. And if you think logically, why should we not be paid on a daily basis?

1:05:33Actually, right? Because it was too clunky to use the banking system. It was too clunky, right? Because there was no system where you could get paid daily because the payroll system wouldn't work. And how do I account for that? HR would go crazy. So let's find a way, okay, every month, right? And then entire credit systems and sort of facilities are built around the fact that we had human limitations around how we can pay you, right? But then blockchain comes around or technology comes around and says, actually, I should pay you every day. So, okay, that works better. And I can plan my life more predictably knowing that payment will come every day, right?

1:06:05So anyway, so they built a platform and product around that and servicing essentially doing around almost 40 million plus million dollars of revenue a year. So it's very complementary to what we do. And, you know, and those markets are also one of the most sort of ready ones for crypto adoption. So there's a lot of things that we could do. That's why I think it's very strategic. And, you know, the ticker is CURR. And it's live now and trading? You can trade it right now. You can trade it right now. So, I mean, the actual completion of the merger won't be until 9 to 12 months or so, give or take, right?

1:06:38Right. However, what happens is now it's a reference price, right? So you can basically infer a price because you know the merger ratio. And then you can basically look at that. It's been very interesting to see because the first day, as I shared earlier, the circuit breaker went off like 26 times. Trading was wild, which was actually to us a positive sign, right? Because it meant that there was attention and interest in the business. Somebody can. somebody cared it would be terrible if it went out it's like it did okay and that's it flat right that's bad right um so and then it ended up so you can't really take the first few days of trading as an as a real indicator but now it's stabled off a little bit and then you get the idea again last 24 to 48 hours accepted perhaps but broadly speaking right is the market so broadly speaking i think we're getting into a little bit of a sort of um sort of a an indicator indicative sort of market value which then allows me also to go and finally talk to investors and have a reason to meet them and say, this is who we are.

1:07:35Because I think that's the other thing about us. Like we're much more than metaverse and gaming, of course, right? However, so many, so many sort of people remember us from the NFT days, which is still a part of what we do, but not all of what we do. And so if we go and say we'd like a meeting to introduce a business, it's like, yeah, but I don't do gaming and I don't do NFTs. It's like, no, this is not what we do. You know, and then the second part is we stayed away from the U.S. market because, you know, the U.S. was so hostile. And the other thing is that we would be probably a pretty juicy target if the SEC wanted to set an example of a company that was doing tokenization or being involved or being an investor, whatever, right?

1:08:13So we just decided not to go there and just get away from that market. So as a result, we've been invisible to the U.S. market, right? So people don't really know who we are. And if they do know, they only know us from several years ago. So this is all part of a remarketing, re-engagement campaign. Tell them who we are. we're basically essentially sort of, you know, away, sort of, I don't want to say levered bet on altcoins because, you know, people might get the wrong impression. No, broad exposure to the growth of the crypto ecosystem, I guess. Exactly. Crypto ecosystem. Exactly. Right. I mean, some people might have referred to it this way, but, you know, we're not taking debt to buy altcoins, for instance.

1:08:47Right. That's to be clear. Right. But it's operation, operating leverage. And essentially, if you want access to the broader sort of crypto ecosystem, as you as you put so well, without basically a sort of, on top of your Bitcoin that you're holding and your Ethereum and your Solana and your majors, then we should be that play. And if you allocate out of your crypto portfolio that might be 10 or 20%, and you put a few single digit percentages into someone like us, so you have exposure to the rest of the market, which we think would be prudent, that would be plenty for us, right? And a good starting point.

1:09:19But we have to tell that story now, and now we can, right? That's why we chose that path. So it sounds like you've got a busy year ahead. I'll be traveling even more, which is crazy because I thought I was traveling quite a bit already. Well, hopefully I'll see you somewhere in your travel, somewhere in the world soon. Yeah, in Dubai or New York or anywhere. I haven't come to Cayman yet. No, I'm back in Dubai and Abu Dhabi early December, I think. Oh, if you're in Abu Dhabi FinTech Week, then we'll be there as well. Yeah, I'm there for Breakpoint. We will have some special announcements at Breakpoint, so I'll see you there.

1:09:55I'll see you there, my friend. Yes. All right, yeah, great to catch up as ever. And let's see how it all plays out. Thank you so much for having me. So, yeah, as ever, is a fantastic conversationalist. It gives us a much better understanding of really what's going beneath the surface. And the breadth and depth of what Animoca are doing is very interesting because he gets the signal within the portfolio of where things are really moving. whether it's DeFi, whether it's gaming, whether it's other applications. And I think it's always important to check in with Yat to find out what's really moving in his world and how he sees this playing out.

1:10:33Anyway, I hope you found it useful. I'll see you next time. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com forward slash join.