Nfts
Interview with Yat Siu, Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands
The cryptonomist interviewed Yat SiuCo-Founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brandsto talk about the future of NFTs and the metaverse through play and education.
Below is our interview with him.
What trends do you think will drive the Web3 space in 2024?
Generally speaking, the trends that we think will fuel this cycle are essentially cultural, very heavily oriented towards games and of course distribution narratives. So that means that on the culture side, whether it’s GAMI or Mocoverse, or digital identity, gaming stories are going to be important elements because they’re going to attract users.
And in terms of distribution narratives, things like TON, for example. Telegram helps solve a very big problem in Web3 user adoption and onboarding. GAMI now has 3 million daily active users thanks to Telegram and Blockchain TON. So, for me, those are some of the things that I think become really important drivers in all of this.
I believe that over the next 12 to 18 months, we will see more than 100 million users joining Web3 because of the games this happens to distribution points like Telegram. This is therefore one of the major trends to watch. So it’s quite consumer driven and of course that means things like gaming, entertainment and also education will ultimately become very important narratives in Web3 over the next 12 to 18 months.
What are the biggest regulatory challenges facing Web3 companies today, and how can these challenges be transformed into opportunities for market expansion?
I think regulation depends on the markets we operate in, right? So we focus on Asia and a little bit on the Middle East. So the regulatory framework depends on where you are, right? So we would say that because we don’t do a lot of business in the United States at the moment, we don’t have as many regulatory concerns about what we’re doing compared to some of our peers.
Because in Hong Kong, Japan and Southeast Asia, where we operate a lot, the Asian market has been quite favorable to Web3. The rules were quite clear. And the focus has been on the regulatory aspect, mainly on more varied types of exchanges, for example regarding service providers and childcare providers, rather than on the people who do it. web-3 games or make investments like us.
So it didn’t really affect us that much. But obviously for our portfolio, particularly the investment portfolio that has exposure to the United States, they’ve obviously had to deal with some of that and we have to see how we can support them legally, on the advice plan. thing and then think about it and help them enter other markets as well.
As a pioneer of the open metaverse, how do you see its evolution over the coming years?
The evolution of the metaverse is largely centered around digital property rights. We think that’s our core focus. And that’s the mission of the company. We don’t think the metaverse is just about VR, AR, and glasses. It’s a way to access the metaverse. But that’s not the reason, that’s not the primary way to interact with the metaverse. The primary way to interact with the metaverse is to own digital properties. So in other words, if you’re in Web3, you own NFTyou have tokens.
From our perspective, you’re already essentially in what we call the open metaverse, where you own digital property and you can start building off of that. But it starts with your property and you build it from there.
And we are already in the early stages of development. We think there’s a lot of activity there. If you look at, for example, Play to Earn Gaming like Axie Infinity or Pixels, for example, if you look at what’s happening with the NFT space at Mocaverse, those are growing ecosystems and more and more users are using them. join. More and more people are being integrated because of this. And as far as we’re concerned, these are already in the metaverse. It’s just not Facebook’s version of the metaverse. They are in the Open Metaverse, which is basically the Web2 Metaverse.
What strategies do you recommend to drive consumer adoption and engagement in Web3?
I would say in terms of adoption, it’s games and content. And content, we think, is perhaps the most important thing because content is what you’re engaging with. If you think about content in terms of distribution products like Game of Thrones and HBO. HBO may be the distribution product, but people aren’t going to use HBO if they don’t have Game of Thrones. Content is king in that case. So we’re very focused on the content layer. We also have to make sure that distribution has users available. And that’s one of the reasons why we’ve invested so much in the TON ecosystem, because we think Telegram will help solve a lot of these distribution problems.
What strategies do you adopt or investments do you make to follow these kinds of trends?
For Animocathe philosophy of how we invest is a little bit different in the sense that we invest based on what kind of future we think we want to build. So we focus more on investment strategies, on an ecosystem approach, rather than on an investment thesis. We create the investment thesis and then we invest.
This investment thesis is therefore focused on gaming, education and distribution. So last year we made a big investment in Telegram and the TON ecosystem. We have almost invested in over 150 gaming companies because we believe gaming will be a big driver of this growth.
We already have more than 500 investments in this sector, including three, including more than 150, even 160, in the video games sector. It’s probably our richest portfolio, to top it off. And of course, education is also a new field. So we actively made investments. This year alone, so far, we’ve probably already closed over 70 deals. Not all of them have been made public. But to give you an idea, we basically do what we say.
What do you think of the NFT market right now? Will it increase further?
I don’t think we should hope for a bubble. I don’t think that’s the point. NFTs can be used in games, can be used for intellectual property rights, can be used for a whole bunch of things, right? But basically, today, most NFTs, whether it’s a virtual country or a crypto punk or a Beople, right? What are they? Their status is, right now, cultural capital, right?
In a way, it’s not very different from owning a Ferrari, or a Birkin bag, or a Rolex watch. You don’t buy a Rolex watch every time, you don’t buy a Birkin bag, it says a lot about social status. So basically what’s happening in this community building is that when you’ve generated a lot of value in the native ecosystem of Web3, you want to signal your social status like we do in the real world, based on the items that are representative of that generation and that ecosystem.
So in other words, if I make money or reach a certain status in Web3, I’ll want a board eight, or I’ll want a Cryptopunk.
So, NFTs are currently doing around half a billion dollars in volume sales per month. So it’s obviously not as important as it used to be. But that’s not good either. So I think it’s and I think it’s and it’s also summer. Typically after the summer when market activity picks up you will see more volume, trading and activity. It’s, I think, it’s also a seasonal thing. Generally, this is true for all markets.
Can you give us a comment on your idea of returning to the stock market in the future?
So first of all, when the journalist interviewed me, he asked me the question and said, “Do you want to go back to being a publicly traded company?” And I said yes, because we are already a publicly traded company, right? We are just a list, we are already a publicly traded company, we have 2,000 shareholders by email. In a way, Animoca is almost like a DAO because we have to go through voting and everything that is on our register. So we want to go back to being a publicly traded company, that is a fact. But I said it would probably be in 2025 or 2026. So it’s not just 2025, it’s somewhere in between.
And we have a lot of work to do. We have to do a domicile, we have to leave Australia, we have to decide which market we want to list, we have to hire an advisor. So there is still a lot of work to do. But it is true that we intend to take it public.
When you take a company public, it can’t be done in a month, it takes time.