An Interview With Animoca Brands

Yat Siu, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Animoca Brands, on digital property rights, regulated stablecoins, on-chain student loans, and why the agentic web will change how ordinary people use crypto.

By Bitcoin World  |  14 September 2026  |  Exclusive Interview

Yat Siu, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Animoca Brands

Few companies have shaped the Web3 landscape as broadly as Animoca Brands. From The Sandbox and Open Campus to a licensed stablecoin joint venture in Hong Kong and, most recently, an AI agent platform called Minds, the group has placed a consistent bet: that people should own their digital assets, identities and data rather than rent them from platforms.

In this exclusive conversation with Bitcoin World, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder Yat Siu explains what Animoca Brands actually does, how his team evaluates new investments, what an on-chain student loan cycle achieved for more than 6,000 learners in Southeast Asia, and why he believes the internet is moving from a participatory model to an agentic one.

For people who are new to Animoca Brands, can you explain in simple words what the company actually does and how it helps the crypto and Web3 space?

Animoca Brands builds, invests in, and supports projects that advance digital assets and digital property rights. We believe people should be able to own their digital assets, identities, data, and contributions, rather than simply use platforms that are owned and controlled by large companies.

Digital property rights are foundational to crypto, Web3, and now the agentic web. If AI agents are going to create, transact, and interact on our behalf, then we need to know who owns the assets and data involved, who has the right to use them, and who should be rewarded for creating value.

We champion network effects and collaboration. Users derive more value from a network the more users join that network, which in turn helps the network to grow, creating a positive feedback loop. A stronger network (with a stronger network effect) therefore creates more opportunities for users, developers, and companies. Collaboration is a critical ingredient here because when companies work together to advance crypto, Web3, and the open metaverse, the entire ecosystem benefits.

 

A question many in the community always ask – is Animoca Brands planning to launch its own token in the future?

Animoca Brands has not made any announcement about launching a token representing the company. However, several of our subsidiaries and affiliates have launched utility tokens for their own ecosystems, including SAND from The Sandbox, MOCA from the Moca Foundation, EDU from the Open Campus DAO, and CHECK from the Checkmate ecosystem, among others.

These tokens serve different purposes within their respective ecosystems. They can support participation, access, governance, rewards, and other forms of utility.

 

Animoca Brands invests in and supports a large number of projects. What are the key things your team looks at before deciding to invest in any new project?

First, we look at whether the team genuinely believes in digital property rights and is building for an open ecosystem. If a project is designed only to operate within a closed silo, it is less likely to align with our investment approach.

We also consider the potential impact of the project. Can it create meaningful opportunities for users, expand participation, or make a positive difference in the world? We look for ideas that can grow beyond a niche use case and contribute to the broader development of Web3 and the open metaverse.

We also pay close attention to the founders and the team. Do they truly believe in what they are building? Do they have the resilience and passion to pursue the idea over the long term? In many cases, the quality and conviction of the team are just as important as the technology itself.

 

You recently became part of a licensed stablecoin issuer in Hong Kong with big partners. Why is this important for regular crypto users and the wider industry?

To clarify, Anchorpoint Financial is a licensed stablecoin issuer in Hong Kong, and it is a joint venture between Standard Chartered, HKT, and Animoca Brands.

Regulated stablecoins are extremely important because they can provide a trusted bridge between traditional finance and the burgeoning digital asset economy. We believe regulated stablecoins can support and improve everyday consumer payments, business transactions, and broader institutional adoption.

For major companies to participate in crypto at scale, they need payment infrastructure that is reliable, transparent, and subject to appropriate regulatory oversight. Regulated stablecoins provide that foundation of trust, and serve as safe entry points into the broader digital asset ecosystem.

 

Through Open Campus, education credentials are now being issued on the blockchain. How can this actually benefit students or everyday learners?

Our most impactful recent initiative led by Open Campus is the completion of the first-ever fully on-chain student loan lending cycle, in which our partner Pencil Finance deployed capital via education-financing firm ErudiFi. The capital pool offered a senior tranche with fixed 15% APY and a junior tranche with variable returns and first-loss risk.

Basically, through a collaboration led and backed by Open Campus and Animoca Brands, Pencil Finance packaged ErudiFi-issued loans as on-chain private-credit investments, letting funders supply capital and monitor repayments on EDU Chain, the education-focused blockchain.

Thanks to this pilot project, over 6,000 students across more than 100 institutions in Southeast Asia were able to secure loans to help fund education costs. Around 50% of the borrowers were women and 93% were from lower-income households. The loan capital was fully repaid with zero defaults.

Aside from that, there are a variety of ways in which the work of Open Campus and partners benefits learners. Blockchain-based credentials can give students a verifiable record of their education and achievements for their academic and professional lives, immutable and on-chain. Instead of relying entirely on a centralized institution to confirm a qualification, students can hold credentials that employers or other institutions can verify much more easily. This makes credentials verification faster, more portable, and more transparent.

But it’s not just students. AI agents are able to identify and assess candidates much faster than humans, so employers need a reliable and efficient way to verify a student’s qualifications, achievements, and academic record. As AI agents become more common and are increasingly used to scan and filter appropriate candidates for a position (whether for education or employment), verifiable credentials become even more important. Blockchain-based credentials can make qualifications and achievements significantly easier to authenticate, while giving students greater control over how their records are shared.

Privacy is also important. With blockchain it is possible to verify whether someone has particular qualifications without requiring them to reveal unnecessary personal information. In this way, students can have greater control over their educational records and how those records are shared.

You launched Minds, an AI agent platform. In simple terms, what can a normal person do with Minds that was not easily possible before?

Can you design and code a game from scratch? Most people can’t, but a Mind that you created in one minute can do that for you, working with you every step of the way to ensure your vision is realized. That’s just one specific example, the range of applications for this technology is vast.

The first major difference of Minds by Animoca Brands (or just “Minds”) is that we made it radically simple to use. You do not need specialized hardware, complex server setup, or coding skills. A Mind is a persistent, autonomous AI agent that you can create using our website in only a minute or two.

The Minds platform removes one of the biggest barriers to using agentic AI, which is getting set up and started. As soon as your Mind is active,it can help you with tasks that may previously have required significant time, technical knowledge, or coordination.

The second difference is persistence and autonomy. A Mind does not forget everything when a session ends. It has persistent memory, so it can remember your context, preferences, and objectives over time. A Mind exists and continues working independently of you, even if you are completely offline.

The third difference is that Minds are social and relational. These are entities that are extremely well suited to collaboration. You can share a Mind with your family, team, or colleagues so that they can use it as well. In addition, multiple Minds can connect and collaborate with one another very effectively. With a simple squad setup—remember, it takes only minutes to create a Mind— you can become the head of a successfully operating company composed entirely of AI agents.

Conventional AI assistants are mainly reactive. A chatbot waits for you to ask a question, then it provides an answer, and then it stops. A Mind can do all of that, but it can also be proactive. A Mind operates continuously, carries out multi-step tasks in the background, contacts you when something requires your attention, and collaborates with other Minds or humans to achieve your goals. With your permission, a Mind can manage your calendar, track flights, monitor portfolios, support sales outreach, process billing, and transact through a wallet over a long-term horizon. A Mind is an entirely different category of product from the chatbot-based solutions most of us are familiar with.

 

Animoca Brands often talks about the “agentic web,” where AI agents will act on our behalf. How will this change the way ordinary people use the internet and crypto in daily life?

The agentic web refers to how the internet is shifting from a participatory model, where humans actively use the Internet, to an agentic model, where users delegate significant portions of their internet activity to their agents (who are vastly more efficient at it). The next phase will not be limited to people reading, writing, and interacting online, but will involve mass delegation of tasks and decisions to AI agents, simply because they are so much better at these tasks than we are.

Minds is designed to be a gateway to the agentic web. The platform helps people manage personal productivity, interact with digital assets, use online services, and participate in new forms of digital commerce through natural-language instructions. The Minds platform pairs beautifully with Web3 in general because Minds are blockchain-native, possess technical expertise out of the box, and have no problem handling all the technical processes that the vast majority of humans still find difficult or daunting.

We believe one of the biggest barriers to Web3 adoption has been usability rather than a lack of interest. Crypto wallets, seed phrases, gas fees, bridging, and transaction approvals are annoying and intimidating to people who are unfamiliar with the technology or simply don’t want to spend the time and effort required to handle these tasks. AI agents can vastly simplify that experience, removing its friction and much of the risk. You can describe what you want in plain language, and the agent can handle the technical steps on your behalf while operating within the permissions and limits you define.

This “enabling of simplicity” is what Minds by Animoca Brands is designed to do. The Web3 use-case is an ideal example because (even though we are several years into the crypto age) people still need help with the tedious complexities involved in using blockchains.

With the Minds platform, you simply send an email or a message, then your Mind gets to work to achieve your goals without the need for you to get bogged down in blockchain complexities and interfaces. You do not need complicated hardware or server configuration, you do not need technical knowledge, and you do not need to worry about smart contracts, address strings, scams intended to fool human eyes, or the other friction and pain points currently involved in blockchain interactions.

Each Mind has persistent memory, its own identity, and its own wallet.  Unlike a conventional chatbot, a Mind does not reset after every conversation. Over time, it builds a better understanding of who you are, what you are trying to achieve, and how you prefer to work—whether it is for blockchain/Web3 related work, or something completely different.

 

Looking ahead, what is one important development or project from Animoca Brands that the community should keep an eye on in the coming months?

Minds is one of the key developments to watch. We will continue expanding its capabilities, partnerships, integrations, skills, and applications so that it continues to become more and more useful in people’s daily lives.

Personal productivity is one of the largest opportunities. Minds agents naturally help manage calendars, track goals, summarize documents, and coordinate across teams. This is very easy stuff for them. Commerce is another important area and things here are developing in interesting ways. Through our work with Visa, we want agents to identify relevant card rewards and (subject to the user’s permissions) complete purchases on the user’s behalf, thus removing the annoyance of figuring out how to actually use your reward points.

Gaming is also a major area of interest. Agentic user-generated content and agentic non-player characters are changing both how games are built and how they are played. The Sandbox, for example, is exploring how Minds can help users to create digital content, interactive experiences, and even new forms of gameplay.

There is also the emerging category of agent-to-agent economic interactions, which leads to the emergence of new creator economies. One major example: Minds can create Skills, which are structured playbooks containing instructions on how a Mind can complete specific tasks. Skills are extremely easy to create—you simply tell your Mind what you want and it will create an appropriate Skill, which can then be shared with the rest of the community using the Bazaar marketplace. When others then install and use that Skill, the creator of the Skill receives a portion of the cognition used by other Minds via that Skill. This creates an economic model in which people can build useful capabilities once and continue earning as those capabilities are adopted by other users.

The Skill system is extremely powerful because it allows us to leverage a user’s knowledge and expertise (as well as the knowledge and expertise of a user’s Minds) and be compensated for it directly, without intermediaries.

A rough example: imagine that you are looking to buy a new phone. You instruct your Mind to research what you want in a phone—value, form factor, power, battery life, whatever—and to locate the best deals available to you. Your Mind scouts the internet according to your parameters and it locates a deal that’s right for you. You buy your new phone, but it doesn’t stop there. The work you and your Mind already did can be turned into a Skill to be shared with every other user in your market who is also looking for a new phone. These other users equip and use your Skill to find a good deal on phones they want, and your Mind starts receiving a portion of the cognition used by the other Minds who have equipped your Skill.

The Bazaar already has more than 3,000 Skills created by users’ Minds, ranging from the straightforward (such as skills to interact with third-party apps) to the highly complex (such as trading algorithms or analytical engines). My Minds generate so much cognition from Skills that it is more than enough to power their operations.

We believe the Minds platform stands at the cusp of a much broader ecosystem of agents, skills, and applications, and we are incredibly excited at the opportunities that this will generate.

 

About Yat Siu

Yat Siu is the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Animoca Brands, a Web3 company that builds, invests in and supports projects advancing digital property rights. The group’s portfolio includes The Sandbox, Open Campus, the Moca Foundation and, most recently, the AI agent platform Minds.