Last year, the crypto market traded on political hopes waiting for Trump to wave a regulatory wand.
But as we settle into 2026, the Trump trade has faded.
Institutional capital and AI are also taking the wheel.
The market is undergoing a structural shift where Bitcoin may become the new gold.
Well joining me to weigh in live from the New York Stock Exchange is Yat Siu, Chairman of Animoca Brands.
Yeah, great to have you here in person.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
Well, we know there's a lot going on when it comes to all asset classes across the globe and markets, and in New York morning trade, we are looking at a vampire for the crypto majors, including Bitcoin and E.
But given everything that's happened, tell us what you think the role of the US is when it comes to regulatory clarity moving forward.
First of all, regulatory clarity in the US is actually pivotal for the growth of the industry.
If you look at for instance what the SEC was like before and what it is right now, it certainly has sort of changed the tone and sort of advanced the industry in one way.
But I think also last year, to your earlier opening statement, there was a lot of hopes on Trump himself as well and his family, what they could possibly help in the industry, and I think at this point I think a lot of people are realizing that that's probably not. sort of thing that they should be banking on and rather focusing on institutional adoption, what's happening in the AI space, you know who's the actual user for this asset class.
Bitcoin is digital gold.
I think it's a very simple argument.
Do we think the world is going to be more digital?
The answer is very likely yes.
And therefore, what's the asset class?
It's going to be something like Bitcoin or Ethereum or the majors certainly.
But I think the regulatory clarity that's happening in the US is also really a beacon for the rest of the world.
So as the US advances, other countries are like, Well, I don't want to stay behind.
I want to make sure that I'm bringing in the talent.
I want to make sure that we take advantage of this as well.
So I think in that sense it's very positive, but I think we should expect more of a competition.
I think the US has sort of declared itself that it wants to be the crypto capital of the world.
I think it's moved towards that ambition, but in many ways, you know, last year I think in some ways some of the opposite happened, not from an innovation standpoint, but from a sort of asset class perspective.
People, you know, I like to describe it.
Crypto is important to Trump, but it's probably like his 10th child, right?
It doesn't mean he doesn't love it, but of all the priorities he has to deal with, the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum is not exactly high on his agenda, I would imagine, and I think a lot of people in the industry were thinking that was very high.
I think we were maybe people in the industry were thinking, well, you know, crypto is top 3 on his agenda, when, as I said, I think it's more like bottom 10.
It's not. that it is not important, but it's not the most important thing, right?
And therefore I think we need to sort of fend for ourselves, basically make sure that the industry does what it used to always do, which is basically grow it organically, advocate for it, tell people why it's important, and not necessarily pin our hopes entirely on politics.
Yes, and speaking of which, you and I, we were talking about what's happening before we went on air about GOP.
Politics and I think that analogy about crypto being the 10th child of Trump is an interesting one.
That's a first.
I've never heard that before.
But given the fact that there are expectations for the Clarity Act, a lot of anticipation for it to pass, I understand that tokenization for businesses you think is integral.
Tell us why and tell us what's actually happening around the globe, especially.
Since you've been traveling to different regions, so I think the thing that's super exciting right now and where all the institutions are talking about is tokenizing, right, tokenizing gold, tokenizing mutual funds, tokenizing all sorts of things.
And so if you're in the financial industry, you understand the benefit, right?
I mean, look at stablecoins as an example.
Stablecoins obviously is not an asset in and of itself, and it doesn't appreciate in value, except that.
It now has the reach of hundreds of millions of customers around the world who don't have a bank account in places like Africa, South America, they all now could become your customers.
So if you're basically thinking about tokenizing something of value, it could be stocks, it could be commodities, it could be anything you like, you can now sell that to that audience, for instance, in a way that you couldn't do before, right?
So you've created a much larger dollar economy as an example, right.
So that's exciting, right.
Um, the thing that has weakness in the past.
I retail.
So retail has not really come in any big way.
Last year, a lot of retail got flushed out.
In fact, it was very difficult.
A lot of people have forgotten that, you know, maybe it was only about a year ago where Bitcoin was trading at around the same levels and slightly below.
Actually, think about that, right?
And this is not that long ago before Trump was inaugurated as president, went for a big dip, and then started to recover.
And then basically again what happened with October 10th.
So they've gone through these cycles, and so retail has had a really tough time, and so it's really more all institutional buying and institutional support that's been holding the market and that sort of kind of tells you where the tailwinds are, right?
Retail is no longer as retail driven as it was before and it will take some time for retail to recover.
And the tokenization trend is happening all over.
RWBAs is one of the biggest buzzwords out there.
Everyone's like, I want to be able to sort of tokenize something of value.
It's happening not just in the US, it's all over Asia, of course the Middle East as well, even in Europe, which is usually a bit of a laggard.
They're all interested in how do I tokenize what I have and sort of offer that to the market.
And finally, when you tokenize something, the transaction fees are much lower as well, right?
It's the speed, the efficiency, it's all there.
And so of course you can reach more people.
You can basically sell products that might have cost you hundreds of dollars minimum to basically sell because of the transaction fees.
Now you can basically sell it at 10 times less.
And another area that we're paying attention to when it comes to crypto and digital assets is artificial intelligence.
So we all know.
Artificial intelligence is an investment theme.
We're keeping a close eye on the technology, but when it comes to the role of AI, in particular agentic, autonomous AI in crypto, what innovations are you paying attention to and what does that actually mean for institutions?
It's massive.
So one of the things that we like to say is that we used to talk about the metaverse.
We used to talk about basically sort of blockchain and crypto and the rails that are set up.
Our internal thinking is that essentially we as humans were effectively the POC for agents.
Right, if you think about the future, right, we asked a question.
Most people, I, I had a survey and I said like how many agents do you think you'll have?
Most people say between 3 to 5.
Those who actually use it, some of them said millions, which is kind of a lot, right?
But somewhere between, you know, sort of, you know, a single digit to like let's say hundreds, you're going to have a world where there's going to be tens of billions of agents.
So where are they going to live?
How are they going to transact, and it's all going to happen essentially on blockchain and crypto because things like basically sort of handling wallets and handling.
Actions on crypto with all the hashes and cryptography does seem something that's really difficult for humans to do still after all these years, but an AI agent can do this just fluidly, and that's one of the reasons why engentic AI in particular, what you saw with Open Claw, what we're doing with Minds, the reason why that's basically taken the world by storm is because people are saying wait a second, you can actually do this type of stuff where an agent really is doing what sort of an employee was doing before in many ways, right?
And so that's kind of the driver.
And of course agents are going to be trading in crypto.
They're going to be sort of handling essentially crypto assets for you.
They're going to basically do this in a permissionless manner.
If I wanted to sort of sort of do business with you, I just tell the agent to do business with you.
Do they have a bank account?
Can you, can you do KYCE?
No, of course it has to be done basically through an agent.
So we think it's very integral towards that, and I think the explosion in the crypto world will happen as sort of agentic AI will take off.
It's beginning right now.
And we have less than 60 seconds here.
So yes, I do want to ask you, where are we when it comes to the crypto mass adoption timeline?
Well, I mean, I think at this point the mass adoption timeline is coming through the form of crypto, so I actually think we're going to get to the point where we're going to get a billion people onto it, but not over the next 12 to 18 months, but not how we thought that we would go on chain, but rather their agents will go on chain.
On behalf of the user and all these things we talk about digital identity important for humans but way more important for agents, right?
And the same goes for tokens.
Anything that you tokenize, if you don't tokenize, agents can't find you, which is the other reason why you have to think about tokenization as a strategy.
Well, yeah, we will have to leave it there for today, but I look forward to continuing this discussion.
So thank you so much for joining me today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
