600 companies backed with a view to bring consumer mass adoption to blockchain. My next guest is making a bet that AI is the next technology that is going to bring consumers on-chain — and it is not going to be humans doing it. It is going to be AI agents. Joining me today is Yat Siu, Chairman and Co-Founder of Animoca Brands.
Thank you for the invite. It's a pleasure to be here.
Animoca Brands has 600 companies backed. What makes it different from any other company in the space?
We are already one of the largest — if not the largest — investor in the blockchain space. That basically makes us an index of the space. If you are invested in Animoca Brands, you are partaking in all of the investments we have done. We are the leading crypto consumer company in the world. And because we are neutral — we are not an exchange — we are participating in multiple projects, be it in DeFi, AI systems, blockchain games, and even NFTs. NFTs today trade about $300 to $400 million a month, mostly now with things like Pokemon cards. The technology is as relevant as ever, just transformed. Because we are in the thick of it all, we can see where blockchain and AI converge and where things are going. That is one of our special sources.
Why do you believe AI agents are going to drive blockchain adoption more than humans have?
AI agents don't really have financial power because they don't have a bank account. They don't have a way to transact with money. And are they going to use Visa or Mastercard? No. They are actually going to do everything on-chain — whether it is X402 payments, stablecoins on the back. All this technology that has been built for blockchain is actually much more relevant for AI agents and for AI autonomous systems as a whole. Humans have yet to even graduate from MetaMask — a very wonderful technology but difficult. But an agent? No problem. They can be using all of that natively.
Tell us about Hello Minds and how it fits into this thesis.
Hello Minds is essentially our agent system. We are now the third largest personal agent on Open Router. We are number one in entertainment and number one in creative. We are a cloud-based agent but all of them have wallets on the back — which means they are banking-enabled from day one. That means you can do all DeFi. If you want to trade on Polymarket, if you want to trade on HyperLiquid, they can do that. It supports all of those on-chain transactions. If you are a developer, you can basically tell the agent to build a skill or application that can do financing or earn yield somewhere. That opens up a whole new world. And similar to how people experience Polymarket — they don't have to know it is running on blockchain. They just know that it works. That is what we are doing with Hello Minds.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
