Crypto Secrets Institutions Don’t Want You to Know ft. Yat Siu

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Hi, I'm Ral Pal and welcome to my show, The Journeyman, where we travel to that nexus of understanding between macro, crypto, and the exponential age of technology. And again, um I I say this a lot, but it's a real privilege to speak to the people um that I get to speak to on this show and people who have become friends of mine over the years. And one of those is is Yatsui. Yat has been really instrumental in some of my thinking about where the future of crypto lies and the broader web 3 ecosystem. Um he came up with you know many ideas where where him and I were riffing about universal basic equity which is the idea that tokenization of communities will drive value to people in an AI-driven world. And I think that kind of stuff makes sense. So it's always good to catch up with Yat to find out really what's going on at the broader level of crypto. So we're not necessarily just talking about Bitcoin. We're talking about the applications for web 3 technology at its broadest base. So going to be super interesting because he's got his fingers in every pie with Anamoka. So let's sit down with Yat see what he has to say.

Join me Ral Pal as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto, and exponential age landscapes. In the journey man, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

Yat, welcome back to Real Vision.

Thanks for having me. It's been a while.

It has been a while actually. You and I have caught up outside of Real Vision, but um Yes.

Yeah. This is the first time you've been on for a while, and there's been a lot going on for you and a lot going on in markets right now.

In the world, for that matter.

Yeah, in the world. So, let's get your overview of kind of what's happening, how you're feeling, and and um you know, what you think's going on.

Well, I mean, first of all, you know, depends what lens you take, but I mean, we've been we've been on this journey for a little while. Uh you probably longer than myself, and I remember back in the day in, you know, when we actually got into the whole crypto scene, you know, first with NFTs, but generally in the space, this was 2018 and 2019. I mean, Bitcoin was $3,000, right? And everyone was calling it the end of the world. Ethereum was actually trading below 100. It was $80. And I keep telling people, guys, just just macro and zoom out a little bit and just take a look.

People find it so hard to do that because they're obsessed by cycles and they don't see the big picture.

And and there are cycles, sure. However, um you know, just zoom out and unless you're trading, you know, unless you sort of want to sort of do the day trading thing or something, but if you're just taking a macro view, then it's okay, right? Then there'll be corrections and stuff and there'll be cycles, but broadly it's going in the right direction because hey, guess where the world is going and what's important and all that kind of thing. Just just consider the fundamentals, right? And that's that's exactly what happened. Uh and and I was just just posting something uh I think just a like like a couple days ago where I said the sort of greed and fear index according to coin market cap is actually lower today than it was post FTX and Terra Luna. Right now just just just picture that. And I'm like, uh, guys, Bitcoin was, you know, all the way down to 16,000, averaging around, let's call it, you know, mid-20s, right? And Ethereum was hovering around a thousand. And the the sort of fear index was like in the 30s. And right now it's in the mid to low teens. And like what is going on guys? Like this just just just generally just like sort of it doesn't make sense per se. But it just also shows how people are just in some ways so I think a little bit fragile because I think there's uh I think to me what's actually happened is it's quite psychological because it's one thing you know I I would argue that had Trump not been elected and it wouldn't have been you know we would still been in the quasi Gendler era of crypto and there would be ETFs and so on everyone would be much more measured in their assumptions of where the market would go right but when Trump was elected there was really exuberance being especially in crypto it's like oh my goodness crypto is going to is going to be everywhere. You know, the Trump and family, they love crypto, so it's all good, right? And so, everyone basically just expected it just to moon all the way and not realizing that I mean, in many ways, sure, Trump and the Trump family are obviously pro crypto, but they have other things on their agenda that's not just crypto, right? And uh and so I think the scoreboard for crypto for under Trump has been 50/50. And I think not because it's 50/50 in a bad way, it's just that, you know, it's been great for institutions in a way, right? For Bitcoin and Ethereum and and the majors. And it's been terrible for sort of certainly memecoins and altcoins and other areas in many cases because, you know, it's really been the sort of retail guys who, you know, the existing retail guys because new retail didn't really join, right? Existing retail guys who've been wrecked not once, not twice, but probably four or five times this cycle. And it I think I think the damage is this feeling of sort of but it's okay because we have Trump and it's positive because it's older. So so instead of being a little bit measured around actually this is just a different way of how the market's evolving. We still have to manage our risk. We still have to be cautious. Just because someone's pro it doesn't mean there's not possibly sort of you know danger ahead in some form or fashion. Whereas before I think we were hypervigilant for good reason because literally there was an enemy at the gate the whole time. Right. Right? So you have to sort of watch out and so you're much more careful and ironically if you think about the liquidations that have taken place this year the damage and carnage that's taken place particularly with you know basically things like like per futures and so on and and just the leverage that's been happening um you know in comparison to 23 24 25 compared to 25 23 and 24 pretty tame right so so so I think I think it's this mixture of people just like so excited and just throwing their let's call it risk strategies out the window because they really thought under this regime things would be great and they were great for some but not great for others again. So, so I think that's kind of what's happened and so the the the notion of what's happening in market is amplified. I also think there's a little bit of this sort of I call it sort of this sort of religious tradition of the four-year cycle right um and as time evolves I mean you know forgot I was talking to about this but you know at the end of the day even though crypto you know bitcoin it's mathematical and it's obviously but the actual cycle itself isn't mathematical per se because who cares about the having because we're at like 20 million bitcoin like it's not it makes no difference okay right like seriously right it's just not going to make a difference however ever the people who own crypto and are the same people who own crypto before and they've become the whales and they're an impact and it's their religion and it's their tradition and so it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy where they go okay we're in the cycle I got to start selling and then buy back later type of thing um you know and and and until more institutions are coming in and I I would say that the reason why it's not as knock on wood pronounced in comparison to where it might have been is because we do have institutions that are buying the assets that don't follow the same religious cycle because they're not of that world, right? It's not their tradition, right? So, I think as we become more institutional and more broader accepted around the entire space, cuz remember small still a small number of the world owns this asset class in relative terms, then this whole four-year cycle, this whole sort of nature is going to basically disappear and soften around the edges because it's no longer held by the very people who actually sort of believe in that stuff and make it self-fulfilling. Right? Because at the end of the day, we're still human. you know, we have beliefs and we have, you know, faiths and and we have um you know, um superstitions, shall we say, right? Um and and all these things bear into our factions as to why we want to sell and and and buy and trade and and that's exactly what's happening right now. So, you have have this and then but actually the market is not bad at all. I mean, Nvidia posted great results. Okay, AI bubble. I hear that a lot. But honestly, are we saying that AI is not here to stay? Okay. Right. Do we think we don't need more energy? Right? you know, are GPUs not going to be in demand? Uh, I mean, you look at right and then, you know, you look at China, you look at Japan, uh, you look at Hong Kong is going to have and is is rever is is revising, for instance, it GDP upwards to 3.5% for the end of the year. That's a prognosis, right? Uh, Japan just released like a $135 billion stimulus program, right? To sort of, you know, basically help the economy. China has been essentially doing a sort of I guess more responsible version of I guess uh liquidity and fiscal stimulus, right? So the world is reacting um but everyone's just really focusing what's happening in America when America is perhaps a big part of the story but not all of the story, right? And also the other thing is the wealth that's the other thing the top end of the wealth in America is still very very wealthy, right? And they're spending a lot of money and and again, it's like uh, you know, and there's there's an issue around the divide but but but there's not less money around so, you know, I think it's a bit oversold so so we're certainly buyers in this market so

And also um what we see is as this kind of wealth dichotomy has emerged over time particularly driven by the debasement of currency it means that younger people can't don't have access to buying a house and don't have access to the same investment opportunities and that kind of thing and it creates a a sense of desperation that crypto is going to be the answer and it probably is but everybody wants it to happen immediately. So it becomes a highly emotional state where it kind of they they demand it's kind of it owes them 100x or the 20x.

Yeah. I I think the I think a lot of it has to do with you know I guess we can start we can blame we can possibly blame MTV uh back in the sort of 80s you know so where our attention span went from like 5 to 7 minutes I don't know if you remember I mean you would remember right but for the audience who bit younger they might remember you know that the the the buildup to the start of the song was probably 1 minute long right it'd be like you know like if you if you listen to like songs from Dire Straits or whatever is like build up build up build up build up, build up, build up, right? Or if you look at the movies in the 80s or '7s, right? Like the the James Bond movies, like the entire opening was like 5 minutes, right? Just sit there, right? Right. Right. And now, you know, because of TikTok and Instagram and all this stuff, we're just like, I need the action in the first 5 seconds or I'm done, right? And I think that behavior is affecting everything, right? So, it's like, hey, you know, I don't have patience for any runup of sorts, so I need my money now or I need my reward now. I need my gratification immediately, right? Um and we see this not just in trading but also in the gamification of toolings as well like you know Robin Hood uh you know yes it's a stock trading platform but it's a game really right for the audiences it's got leaderboards it's social right um and and I think the powerful thing that crypto has done is it's sort of translated the language and the culture of Gen Z and you know roughly that generation and younger but into finance right and our generation actually doesn't look at finance this way right we look at finance in a much more traditional way. Right. It's like we have to have some savings or we need to be sort of more organized in some ways and there's risk and whatever. Right.

Diversified portfolios.

Right. Right. Exactly. But for a lot of the Gen Z's even if they were taught that sort of uh sort of uh finance or let's call it finance like trading it's a game, right? And there's fun in the game, right? Whereas I wouldn't say necessarily for traders it's necessarily always fun in the game. It can be quite stressful. It's it's different, right? Um and and crypto has really just sort of amplified that and I think it's going to make the world more financially accessible for that reason because it's speaking that culture to them. But at the same time it also does mean that we're going to see more volatility because we have very sort of uh artificial um sort of breaks in in the trady world. You know um when when we announced our merger with currency the circuit breaker went off 26 times. There are no circuit breakers in crypto, right? This this there this there's no artificial stop in go and halt and go for instance, right? Um and you know it starts at you know it starts like at you know in the morning and it ends in the early afternoon right and you weekends off and holidays off right crypto doesn't do that right so so so it's actually a much more truer reflection I think of the markets but the problem is of course that it as a result really uh brings out the true volatility that actually is there right and whereas I think in in the trafire world we've done many things to let's call it tame that volatility right and so I think again It's it's uh it's different systems and and kind of somewhat embodied by different cultures. It's kind of fascinating to see.

It is fascinating. The other thing is is clearly some damage was done in October for sure.

And you know my read on it is market makers probably have impaired balance sheets from what happened because they got trapped in a lot of that because they couldn't actually buy the sell off. They couldn't provide liquidity because they were frozen out of the APIs and all of that stuff. So they probably got impaired balance sheets which means they're inclined to take less create less liquidity less risk and then maybe there's an unwind going on of somebody who got severely impaired over that period and it feels like there's something going on in the background because there's no real news driving what's happening.

Well, I think outside of the sentiment um and sort of small little sensitivities like oh my goodness, Fed might not increase uh might not decrease the rates and boom, suddenly it's like a like a big reaction or job numbers are up or oh my goodness, right? Um I I actually I mean I think there's definitely less liquidity that's for sure. Because there's less sort of cushion, shall we say, broadly speaking, although from what we could tell, at least uh, you know, from from our sort of market makers who who we work with. I don't think market makers were quite as impaired because really what they did was they just pulled liquidity as quickly as they could, right? Um, and I think that's the reason why the bottom fell out because they were like, "Okay, I'm I'm out. I'm not here. Like, I'm not I'm not I'm not doing anything. I'm not catching anything." Right? Um, and and so I think there's there's been a little bit of that. And in fact for ourselves actually when that flash crash happened we actually used it as a buying opportunity to buy actually to sort of accumulate certain assets that we felt made sense as well because they were ridiculously cheap. Right.

Yeah.

Uh so I think I think and again this is where I think we're entering this institutional era. Uh and by institutional era I don't necessarily mean just sort of because an institution buys something but the thinking in an institutional long-term style which is to say hey Leot fundamentally we like the asset. If it's basically at fire or sell prices, we'll just buy. We don't care if it's a, you know, next month, three months, six months. If it's a, you know, multi multi-year play, we're good with that because we're never, you know, we think it's a greater buying opportunity, for instance, right? And I think more and more players that will enter the space will then help balance the market out a bit more because they have long-term conviction as opposed to trading. And I think the emergence and really the maturation of per markets have also sort of contributed towards this because you've got the leverage and you've got really sort of bringing out essentially sort of the very den nature of of traders who were like oh my goodness I can do this and and again it's the psychology of oh I I put in a thousand but it feels like I put in 20,000 okay right you know it does it does it does have an impact as well right because it's somewhat of a game and I think I think there are some things around that as well and I do think this will change over time when people become come more financially literate and are able to deal with that because they're used to it. Like like how we used to sort of you know react to sort of new interfaces or how we were more prone to purchasing with inapp purchases or how we were sort of you know like like these these let's call them interface tricks we get accustomed to and then we won't fall for them anymore in the same way. It's an evolution.

But, you know, as we zoom out, which is I think what both of us prefer to do,

you look forward and it's like, okay, we've got the clarity act that looks like it's it's going to come through maybe this year.

It has to or next year by because you know because it might be in danger if they don't make it before the midterms. So, I I think everyone recognizes that. But what I've heard was that uh they were in Q1 next year, but if it could make it out, I mean, you know, the government shutdown is not helpful, right? No.

Um, so so obviously it's delayed, but honestly, if it comes out anytime in the next 3 to 6 months, it's it's a win regardless, right? If if it get and it's it's likely to pass Congress, right?

Yeah. And then when you hear the financial institutions, they're really waiting for that as the signal is the final clarity of what they can do. And I think that's a big deal because what it does at broadest sense is not necessarily about the capital coming into the space. It's about the use of blockchain for let's say the entire financial system.

Yeah. Well, and the way we think of it is the expansion of basically tokenization beyond the traditional financial system. So, for instance, if you're a gaming studio, um, and you're thinking about tokenizing and you're a mid to large size company, uh, you're not going to take a chance on tokenizing, you know, whatever assets you want to do in your whether it's your game currency or your game assets or whatever until you have some clarity, literally, no pun intended, right? And it's kind of like what happened when the Genius Act came out. Suddenly, everyone's like, I'm doing a stable coin, whether it's Walmart or Facebook or Google or Apple, right? They suddenly all could come out and say that they're doing this and have a plan around this and I think the clarity act is going to change that for all companies big and small where they're going to start thinking okay now I can tokenize and it's going to force the rest of the world to also basically respond in kind right this is the power of America when they start saying we're going in this direction it forces other places to react in the same way that the genius act essentially forced many other nations to start thinking okay we got to do something about stable coins don't know exactly what got to figure that out cuz most of them haven't even got a plan in mind and now they have react to it because they recognize that stable coins are coming to them uh whether they like it or not. Right? So, so I think the Clarity Act is going to sort of be one of those triggers where it forces tokenization across the board because you can totally see how let's call it, you know, non-tokenized companies are ultimately going to be using their tokenized assets in some form of business trade to communicate and to do transactions with some overseas business partner. Any overseas business partner that has blockchain and can trade with you or deal with you in that manner is going to win your business, right? Uh this reminds me back in the sort of early days when we started um you know I started an ISP in the '90s called Hong Kong online, one of the very first ones and our primary business was really to deal with Hong Kong companies who basically had to sort of have a way to communicate over email with their US customers because US customers like I'm not faxing you stuff and I'm not sending you stuff over DHL cuz that's like old. I I need I need you to send you an email. So, please set that up. Right. And literally, you would lose the business over someone who had email capabilities versus not because the entire American um sort of business space there was set up with back then it was CC mail, right? And then Lotus Notes later. Um and if you weren't set up, you you're out, right? And that's what tokenization will do to the rest of the world as well because America is going to tokenize everything and the rest of the world has to respond. And you know, it's it's been interesting to me to see the phases of what gets tokenized. So, you know, we spent a lot of time building the infrastructure layer, the layer ones, the layer twos, all of that stuff. It's now clear the financial systems coming across. Okay, that's great. Starting the stable coins, and then we'll tokenizing equities and all of that stuff. What has surprised me is how slow it's been for web two businesses to move across. They've started and you know this has been your thesis for a long time whether it's gaming the social side all of that it's been it's been slower than expected what why is that you think

Well so first I think uh it depends on which territory you're looking at right so when you look at for instance uh the US and the west it's definitely been slower but it's also been slower because you've had a government in the US that's been hostile

They want to put you into prison yeah

Yeah I mean anyone who would like so literally sort of you know like a spit token you basically like whack hack, right? So, you couldn't you couldn't do anything, right? So, that was kind of the the first first problem cuz I think Americans were quite keen to do stuff. All right. And and you know, I mean, you get people like uh like like for like NFT projects basically get getting hunted for having sold apparently unregistered securities. Of course, now under the new chair that's been clarified, but before right it was so so that's that's one element. And then I think you know in in in Europe I think there is this other issue which is related to sort of you know basically capitalism as I put it which is the sort of attitude towards capitalism and money is generally more negative than it is in say Asia. So the reason why sort of tokenization broadly or crypto has been so well adopted in Asia is because everyone in Asia is very capitalist broadly speaking and again it's because of our history because we didn't have capitalism. We didn't have property rights in our lifetime of our generation. My parents had nothing. Right. And so we know what it's like, right? So whether it's Korea, I mean, you know, South Korea's economy, its GDP was lower than North Korea 40 years ago. It's hard to imagine, right? Right. And and so so so they broadly see that as a positive, right? Whereas in Europe, it's kind of like, you know, they they don't really see that. So you have this problem. You have also overregulation. And then in America, we have this dangerous shift right now where even though it is, let's call it the granddaddy of capitalism in a sense, right? Uh the problem is is that so many people especially young people capitalism doesn't work for them right and that's why you have essentially a sort of you know um a much more socialist agenda that's emerging because it just sounds better right you know and that's why you have uh you know it's not just Bernie Sanders but AOC or Mamdani and they all they all trying to solve a real problem here and they think the answer is essentially a form of wealth redistribution through a socialist agenda of sorts right uh which you don't have to go into but the point is it's attractive know, but of course it goes against some of the earliest principles of capitalism and then tokenization is essentially digital capitalism. It's creating a financial asset out of something that is virtually yours, right? Uh but but to me, I think it's the answer to basically solving inequality and making capitalism or broader because it increases financial literacy because you have property in something. And so for instance, how do our children learn about money? They learned it through Pokemon cards or baseball cards before and they were trading them because it was their property and someone wanted that property and then someone would buy it from you and you're like, "Oh, that's valuable. Oh, you know that could do something." And that's how we taught them about some forms of trade and money and and what that meant. But we don't do so much physically anymore because we live in a digital world. Our entire attention is digital. Our entire economy as it were, our social economy is entirely digital in the forms of likes and follows and whatever credits and leaderboards that we have that are all actually valuable. We just don't have a way or a measure in which that become becomes assetizable which now basically tokens can do. And every time someone experiences that, they don't go back. That's the other thing. They're like, "Oh, wait, hold on. That's valuable. So I will want to keep that value somehow." And so that's kind of the evolution where it's going. The other thing I would also add, you know, a year and a half ago or two, we we tokenized the stratavarious with Galaxy and that was more just for good fun, right? But was really interesting around around that experience was that of course your Wall Street banker wouldn't be interested in that cuz they're like, you know, whatever. But my mom, who's a musician, uh she was interested in that because she's like, "Oh, wait. Uh I know that that's valuable, but she knew nothing about money." I mean, she's she grew up she's she was a musician in Europe. You don't even talk about money, okay? Hey, you're not supposed to talk about money, right? However, um 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 because now it is a financial instrument of of meaning. Whether it's a gaming asset, whether it's a cultural asset, whether it's a m musical thing, doesn't matter, right? I mean, nobody would have thought that baseball cards or or you know, Pokemon cards would have any value whatsoever when they first came out. And here we go, you know, multi-billion dollar industry, right?

I think the 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 you know what that's why it aligns so well with for example gaming because behavioral incentives the gaming industry led all of that and that's what Robin Hood and all of these platforms are they're using gamification processes and the ultimate gamification is earning money from activity right and 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 uh projection into the future. Our forecast would be that what tokenization and blockchain is really doing is essentially doing to um 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 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? It's like he didn't just wouldn't read read read on a computer. He wasn't digitally literate, right? And just like today, right? If you're not digitally 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 LinkedIn. If you're not on Instagram or TikTok, you're not social. You just you just don't exist anymore, right? And I think that's the same same is true now for essentially tokenization where, you know, we've basically moving from a world where everyone's digital literate to a world where everyone will eventually become financially literate. 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 right

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. You know 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 matics, 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 in a value construct and what I tell people who are like but tokens they like what's the value of a network and all that stuff. Said, "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, right." 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 attention that they're trading. But the difference is is that you, you know, it's not your your network. You 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 uh if you own that you're a member of that community there is value in that not just 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 that'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 cept 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. It's literally as if advertising was a commodity that was tradable, which it is when it comes to DSPs and SSPs in as a as a as a sort of closed network, right? 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 and 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 as you know the network attention asset rather than the let's call it sort of real world asset type. Right?

The other thing that I think people still don't understand is what an NFT is and what it can unlock. You know, because people still think about just the PFP craze that happened last time around. Now again the Rindia effects within that you're invested in a whole bunch of these and they're you know 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 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. Time in the market can be stressful, but staying consistent doesn't have to be. With Gemini Recurring Buys, you can automate your crypto investing, helping your portfolio smooth out markets ups and downs and stay on track towards your goals. In addition, Gemini's Active Trader gives you professional-grade tools like custom views, charts, and alerts so you can trade and manage your portfolio all in one place. They've been around for 10 years, and their commitment to keeping users safe give confidence when investing. Terms apply. Signing up is free. Start investing today at gemini.com/realvision.

I think NFTs are going to scale enormously. I think SC NFTs, and we may not call them NFTs anymore anyway, but that baseline, it's kind of like how we don't call digital music MP3s anymore, right? Um however when you think about um what Nifties 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, right? 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 NFT 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 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 and then basically you were able to sort of uh create create an asset class out of that, right? Ranging from all sorts of things. I mean, you know, some of the some some of the more quirky companies in the portfolio are are companies who basically created property rights from their dance moves, right? It's a it's a it's a funny story, but you know this company called DanceFight 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 Fortnite just ripped it off and he was playing Fortnite 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? is like crickets cuz 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. You can prove origination and 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 and it's an $80 trillion market, right? Know probably the fastest growing uh sort of market really over the last several decades so again, right? And it's entirely virtual and it comes from a minds but it comes from this form of property rights protection that you can now do at scale.

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You've got a kind of vast broad portfolio within Animoka. Break us through kind of what what the portfolio looks like. Where where have been the focus of attention in the last few years? You know, what are what have you guys been looking at? And we'll talk about where you guys are going as well in a bit, but

No, of course. Really understand 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 deepen 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 right 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 RWAS's right we have this uh sort of joint venture with essentially um you know the provabs guy the team behind Figure on Nuva which is an RWA marketplace. We're doing a stable coin um JV with standard chartered which is a notation 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 with incubate but there's also projects that we're investing in uh one of the things that we are very excited about for instance in open campus is u basically onchain 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. Uh and of course the student then on the other end basically starts to repay their loans eventually through crypto, right? So so there's 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. Um and of course bringing in people into the ecosystem around sort of you know mass adoption. We've been big supporters of Ton as well. Um, 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 um, in in the app store. Wild to think, you know, we're here under 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 like Telegram ecosystem. So, we've been very very actively focused around that. Um, and I would say in a way we believe everything will be tokenized. You know, not just because of the Clarity Act, but you know, 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, you know, visualize because 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 like as a tool, right? Not really as a lifestyle agent or as someone who will do things for you on your behalf, right? The truly agentic AI and the truly agentic 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 the with with with tokens because it's a native currency. They don't have a bank account, right? Uh 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. You 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 to become tokenized because it's the standard and the the key.

The differentiator is, I believe we're moving away from trusting an API to having trust essentially in 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 going to, there's no way you can take it away. Whereas we're still living in the Web 2 era in an API economy, which is all permissioned, right? And 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. And so that's, so if I have an AI agent who's going to trade, you know, 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? Uh, just for the safety and security of my assets. That's the only thing. And that's 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, um, so that's, that's a big thing.

The other thing is reaching new audiences and, for instance, stablecoins, right? Of course, we know why stablecoins are a big deal for America because you can buy treasuries. But of course, it basically also ensures dollar hegemony, not because more Americans use stablecoins, they don't necessarily have to do that. Um, but because now Africa, South America, Pakistan, India, you know, all these places are basically becoming dollar colonized, right? 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 it 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 stablecoin and can do that. And, you know, I, I, I, I, 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, Micah has a has a structure, but you're not really pushing it forward. Because if you don't, Europe will become, uh, dollar colonized in the same way that it's become internet technology colonized today, right? Um, and and and then at that point, you know, the EU is just an extension of, of essentially American tech and American economy if they're not careful. And I think, I think the, the guys in, in the top honchos in the US do understand that very well. And I'm not sure everyone gets that, right? But, but again, you, as a business, you need to participate in this because this is where the world is going, right? And and so that, those are the lenses that we take. And we, as a business, essentially feel like, well, you know, how do you, how can we be valuable in the space other than sort of incubating, growing, and investing, right? The, the, the view we take is that we, as a business, could essentially become an index for investors to participate, basically, in, 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, Animoca 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. But 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 in 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 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, it's just how do you, 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? And and I, and and that to me is essentially how Animoca wants to build itself as an operator.

>> So Animoca is really a is a, um, permanent capital vehicle, which makes a difference to a fund. 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. Uh, 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, create money, for instance, you know, outside of the operating business, right? But we can be long on most of the position. And so, as a result, you basically have an index of the other sector of the market. And, you know, altcoins is today about 25, 30%, well, depends what day you look at, right? You know, you know, of the market recently, maybe not so much, right? Um, but still, it's over a trillion. And our main thesis and belief, which maybe you want to get into, um, 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 and you build the applications layer on top, which is a lot of what you're investing in. Yes, you 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. Uh, the gaming companies, all of those things. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I, I totally believe that. Um, it, it feels that that's the directionally the right way is to think that 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? Right?

>> You 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, so that is 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 memecoin or, you know, a utility token in itself. It could be RWAs, you know, it could be sort of other uses that you build. You actually create sort of, you know, assets that are commodities that now have use cases within sort of digital applications directly. There's a lot of innovation that can basically be built from and 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 a blockchain game, uh, or basically buying an NFT or buying virtual land, right? And and by the way, NFTs is still about 3 to 500 million of 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, 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, in some ways, you know, owning a CryptoPunk has probably been a better levered bet on ETH than owning ETH itself, right?

[laughter]

>> 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, PE people don't really understand the the scale of what's happening in the digital art world. And 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.

>> I, you know, it's, it's kind of like the, it's, it's, I tell people that it's the, um, asset class of that generation, right? And and 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.

>> Yeah.

>> 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 who have made their wealth. And what matters is essentially the social network effect that they have within China. Oh, you have this art that means something to that community. Might not mean to someone in America, right? So it's hard to translate, right? But in China, you know, it's, it's worth, it's, it's worth a ton from a reputation standpoint. So you basically grew this into a multi-billion dollar asset class, not just, you know, western goods and culture, but, you know, basically now, so let's call it modern Chinese version of that. And it's the same with crypto. 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? Because it's not your culture. And so it's, it's strange to you that someone would buy something basically, you know, a picture that you could save, so to speak, right? Um, but, uh, but for, for, for people in China, it's everything. And it's, and, 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 Picassos, you know, in Europe or, you know, where it's very valuable there, but not valuable elsewhere. It's, 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, it's a, it's all the same, right? And 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, it's not easy.

>> No, it's not easy. But first of all, I think, um, one of the way 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, right? 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, you know, 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 a long chain, much, much easier, right? Like you don't have to have an API or contract that you remember if you're VC and you want to create, you know, synergies, I hate that word, but synergies basically between, you know, two companies, you can 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, I've got a, I've got an app chain. Uh, here's my API. Uh, I'll feature you. I'll give you support, but you can just build everything yourself, right?" Um, or, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a marketplace like OpenSea or Magic Eden or, you know, one of those guys in our portfolio. We'll just make the introductions. Okay, 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's just build on-chain. Here's the asset, you know, here's my audit report or whatever it is. There's, 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, I don't want to sort of, you know, um, 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. There'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, right? They're more like, I make an investment and, you know, basically you do what you do, and then sort of you do the portfolio report. But much of the stuff you can even measure on-chain, like I don't need your, like statistics. If you're on-chain, I can see that TVL, I can see that, right? Like 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 quarterly report is really, really bad or really, really good news, right? It's like, so, so there's a lot of things you can automate. And then, of course, you know, we do have an AI agent, um, 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, 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 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? You know, do you not think technology can scale towards that? I mean, yes. So, I think it's okay.

>> Yeah. And that that makes sense. Uh, be 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 happens on-chain, the more able you basically to analyze, which by the way, you couldn't do in a traditional VC setting in a Web 2 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. And in nine out of 10 times, you take on good faith, you know, like, like, oh, our growth is 500%. Okay, that sounds good. 500%. Uh, [laughter] it's like it's a, so, so there's so much more efficiencies if you actually know how to sort of scale, uh, and and grow that. Uh, 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, right? 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, there 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 mid-size companies, it's enormous, right? And is very, very, uh, sort of, uh, inefficiently spent. It's like, oh, let me 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, uh, 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? It would be richer, better, you know, stronger, and everyone would be happy to pay 30%. Right? Whereas now, after the, after the ruling, everyone's like, "Yeah, you had your day." Everyone's like, "Nobody's cheering for Apple after Epic 1." 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 is 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? And 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? Uh, 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, but 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, 99% 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 it with social tokens several times. Still, nobody can get it right yet.

>> That's right.

>> 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 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 Web 2 world, you look at a liquidity path in five to 10 years. Now, not to say that the liquidity path is necessarily the reason why you do the token, but because you have essentially a market that could be seed-stage market, but there's now trading, right, 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 we can sort of, you know, secure or protect our downside or, you know, secure our upside, whatever you want to look at that, right? So, so that's part of the basically treasury team function that we have. That's that's that's a that's part of revenue. The equity side sits as classical equity because, you know, um, 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. So they were just doing tech 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 you're a foundation or your protocol, right? So I think it's all part of that evolution. It's kind of like how I think memecoins have become less relevant, even though they're always going to be there, because now we can actually talk about utility, right? A 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, right?" And I think that's basically where you can now go more directly into things that things that are more valuable and you can have much more conviction on.

>> I thought memecoins, it's really interesting because crypto speed tests ideas,

>> in weird ways. They use speculation to speed test anything. And for me, memecoins were really a tokenizing culture. Okay, we get that. But it was also instant capital formation at scale in a decentralized manner. Imagine, imagine, and I think the pump fund guys really wanted to do this. Um, but I think it sort of that social experiment went a little off. Um, but, but imagine if your likes and your follows were essentially, uh, 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? Then you can see is the attention real right now or is it only momentary at that moment in time, right? Um, 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 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 just, I would argue, the sort of a 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? So, so we're going to have to keep experimenting.

>> So what's the next step for Animoca? Because you're moving towards the end game, which is which is being a publicly listed company, right?

>> Well, I think the way the way I would look at it, the publicly listed company is actually really the beginning of the bigger game, I would say. Right. Um, and 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. It's kind of like, you know, even though ETFs have a bad name, I do understand the function of the ETF, right? Which is that the ETF, 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 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 know, some foundation that lists a token, and you're kind of like, well, I'm not really responsible." And that's exactly the reason why institutions can invest because imagine your family office somewhere around the world, and they're like, "Oh, okay. Um, I, I can, 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? Like, like it's, it's impossible, right? Um, you don't know, right? And and that's basically the institutional world. Someone has to be responsible. But then, oh, you've got Tom Lee who's like, "Oh, um, you know, he didn't found Ethereum, but he's responsible for his company who's basically managing the asset in a responsible way." Um, depending how you look at it, but 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, 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. I mean, several dozen of our portfolio companies are all going public. So we're like, okay, 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.

>> the 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, it's actually we can be the ambassadors for utility for crypto. Because right now, you know, I think most investors, and this was very informative for me when I started pitching and telling people about the story. Everyone's, most of them have just gotten past Solana. They're like, "Okay, I see. I kind of get it, right?" But, but, but then everything else on the tokens, they don't understand that because it's, it's a little bit too far away from them. And it was very reminiscent to sort of back in the early days of the internet. It's like, "Why would I want to read a magazine online? It's just so nicer on this piece of paper, right?" Um, 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 going public, you know, with our reverse merger with Currency, which, you know, and we should talk about Currency itself because they actually really fascinating business, which is very complimentary to ours, um, is 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, but also it makes them think about tokenization. It makes them think about stuff. That's why RWAs and stablecoins 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?

>> Um, how about tokenizing some of the equity, like others are starting to experiment with? It kind of makes sense, right? Uh, so Solana and Republic actually really through their own actions have started to, they announced actually, um, that they're going to tokenize Animoca equity, right? And this is even before we're trading, right? And but of course, it's more than that, right? But 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, 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, you know, can open a brokerage account, all of that stuff is prohibitive for anybody else in the world. And tokenization solves that. It's a really key part of why we're all here.

>> Exactly. And it does, doesn't just only solve that. It, the accessibility is instant. And actually, uh, because someone who doesn't have a bank 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. And normally it'd be like, "Let me move to China," or "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 and so many people who haven't traveled to many of these places don't realize just how unbanked they are and how, but how much value there is, but how they can't sort of transact, uh, in a traditional way because they didn't have the tools to do so. And stablecoins and and and crypto rails really, really do solve that very beautifully.

>> And so tell me about the reverse merger. So Currency, who, who are they? What do they do? And how does it all fit together?

>> Currency has an interesting history. Um, so they're a NASDAQ Global Markets company. Um, and the merger terms basically is a 95/5, which means that essentially the shareholders of Currency will have 5%, we're 95%. So it could almost be considered like a takeover, right? However, we're sort of merging into them because they have an existing business that we could utilize. Um, and, you know, I kind of half joke about this as well because like, 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, it's just, you took it over. Okay, fine. Like, you know, some faster way of going public." It's like, "Hold on, hold on. This is not a biotech pharmaceutical company or something, right? Like 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, right? Perfect use case for crypto, right?" Um, and, uh, 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, right? Right? These are basically people who help basically in the households, right? Uh, it's probably one of the largest ones, right? Uh, and they keep sending money back to to the Philippines. Uh, and again, for those who are in, don't know, a lot of the money gets sent to, you know, like, like, I think there's a joke, and this is this is not meant to be disrespectful to any Filipinos. Um, but 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 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 remittance 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? Um, and so he's created not only a system where he remits, there's money sending back, he's also created a system which is ingenious around where the the helpers could decide, well, if the husband's not, you know, spending the money the right way, he can, they can instantly redirect it to maybe the daughter or some other family member, right? You know, and, you know, 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, like, you know, 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 the daily basis, actually, 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 it's the payroll system wouldn't work and how to 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? Uh, you know, but then blockchain comes around, or, you know, technology comes around and says, "Actually, I can pay you every day." Okay, that works better. And I can plan my life more, more predictably knowing that will payment will come every day, right? So anyway, so they built platform or product around that. Um, and servicing essentially doing around almost 40 million plus million dollars of revenue a year. Um, so it's very complimentary to what we do. Um, and, you know, and and those markets are also one of the most sort of ready ones for for crypto adoption. So there's a lot of things that we could do. That's why it's, I, I think it's very strategic. And, you know, the ticker is CURR.

>> And it's live now and trading or?

>> You can trade it right now. You can trade it right now. Um, so I mean, the the actual completion of the merger, uh, won't be until nine to 12 months or so, give or take. Right.

>> Right.

>> Um, however, what's, what's happens is now it's a reference price. Right. So you can basically infer a price because of, you know, the merger ratio. And then you can basically look at that. And it's been very interesting to see because the first day, as I had shared earlier, you know, 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 in the business. In that.

>> Somebody cared.

>> Somebody cared. It would be terrible if it went out and 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 as a real indicator. But now it's stabilized off a little bit. And then you get the idea again, last 24 to 48 hours, accepted perhaps. But broadly speaking, right, here is the markets, right? But broadly speaking, I think we're we're getting into a little bit of a sort of, um, sort of a, an 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. Because 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, um, 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 with like a meeting to introduce the 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." But like, you know, uh, and then the second part is we stayed away from the US market because, you know, the US was so hostile. Um, and, and the other thing is that we would be probably a pretty juicy target if, you know, the SEC wanted to set an example, uh, of a company that was doing tokenization or being involved or being an investor, whatever, right? So we just decided not to go there and just leave, get away from that market. So as a result, we've been invisible to the US market, right? So people don't really know who we are. And, and, 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. You know, we're basically essentially sort of, you know, away a sort of 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 existing, exactly, right? Um, I mean, some people might have referred to it this way, but, you know, we're not taking debt to buy altcoins, for instance, right? That's to be clear, right? But it's operating, operating leverage. And essentially, if you want access to the broader sort of crypto ecosystem, as you, as you put so well, without basically sort of, um, you know, on top of your Bitcoin that you're holding and your Ethereum and your Solana and your majors, then we, we should be that play. And if you allocate, you know, out of your sort of, you know, 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. Uh, that would be plenty for us, right? And a good starting point. But we have to tell that story now. And now we can, right? That's why we decided to chose that path.

>> So, it sounds like you got a busy year ahead. I'll be traveling even more, which is crazy because I thought I was traveling quite a bit already. So, [laughter]

>> Well, hopefully, hopefully I'll see you somewhere in your travels, somewhere in the world soon.

>> Yeah, in Dubai or New York or anywhere. Um, I haven't come to Cayman yet.

>> No, I'm back in Dubai and Abu Dhabi early December, I think, for Breakpoint.

>> Oh, for if you're in Abu Dhabi, uh, uh, Fintech Week, then I will be there as well.

>> Yeah, I'm there for Breakpoint.

>> We will have some special announcement at Breakpoint. So, I'll see you there.

>> I'll see you there, my friend. Yes.

>> All right. Y great to catch up as ever and, uh, let's see how it all plays out.

>> Thank you so much for having me.

>> So Yak, 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, uh, 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. Anyway, I hope you found it useful. I'll see you next time. So, you obviously like this video enough that you've got to the end. That's quite a big task. But listen, do me a favor, hit the like and subscribe button, and also check out what videos next, 'cause I think you'll love it. But if you want even more, and when I'm talking more, I'm talking about member-generated ideas, incredible alpha research, everything there to help you in your journey, just head to realvision.com/join for the best financial intelligence out there and the pure alpha that's within the platform.