Can AI Fix Crypto's Institutional Drift? Yat Siu Weighs In

Quick Take

• Yat Siu says crypto conferences have started to feel like "a digital version of Wall Street," as the industry drifts away from its original mission of democratized access.
• Animoca's MINDS agent is "probably the third or fourth largest AI agent on OpenRouter" and the only one growing in Asia, according to Siu.
• Siu points to Meta's Muse terms of service that allow the company to remove a user's agent "anytime, at will," calling it a trust deficit.
• Open Campus (EDU) traded at $0.069 on 18 October, up approximately 39% over 30 days following the announcement of a token buyback plan.

Crypto has grown up, and Yat Siu is not 100% happy about it. The Animoca Brands co-founder spoke to Block Insider’s Varuni Trivedi at TOKEN2049 Singapore about how the industry's conversation has split in two. While one segment talks "non-stop” about tokenization and real-world assets, the consumer side that could bring in the next billion users is getting sidelined. According to Siu,

"If you remember five years ago, it was just fun…We had artists, we were in culture, all sorts of interesting, diverse people. And in the last couple of years, it started to feel more like a digital version of Wall Street."

His fix is not yet another wallet or chain. It is an AI agent. One that holds the user’s keys, interacts with the blockchain for you, and cannot be switched off by a platform. Animoca is building exactly that with MINDS, and Siu spent most of the conversation explaining why he thinks Meta cannot.

"That Wasn't the Mission": Yat Siu on Crypto’s Original Promise

Siu was careful not to dismiss the industry’s shifting focus on institutional finance. For context, Animoca runs its own tokenization business, and he called RWAs "important, don't get me wrong." However, he is concerned about the disproportionate focus on institutions. He said,

"What is the promise of crypto? We need to remember it was around democratized access to financial products and assets…That someone in Africa or in India could buy the same product as someone in America."

In Siu’s view, while technology is already bridging the gap, regular users will not touch it. He argued,

"If we don't bring the regular user into crypto, it doesn't matter that the technology can do it."

That is where agents come in. Siu's estimate is that only around 10% of people who own crypto are actually on-chain today, and he expects that number to change, "not because a human is directly on-chain, but because his agent, who is representing the human, will be on-chain."

Meta's Muse and the Trust Deficit

The agent market has moved fast since Block Insider last spoke to Siu about a month earlier. As per a Khaleej Times report, Meta launched Muse in September. Muse is a personal agent that can send emails, book travel, and make payments. Siu mentioned that reports put its user base in the low millions and that it’s growing faster than OpenAI's early numbers.

However, he is unimpressed by that comparison, because "Facebook has access to billions of users. Why do you only have millions?" He said,

"I would look at it as, 'Huh, why don't you have at least another zero attached to that?' given the size of your network."

Moreover, the sharper criticism is about control. Siu said Animoca read Muse's terms of service and found that Meta can "remove your agent anytime, at will, with no conditions." He compared it to losing an Instagram account with no appeals process, then scaled the stakes up and remarked,

"It's one thing if you lose a social media account with a thousand followers. That's hurtful. That's devastating. Imagine a personal agent that you depend on. Suddenly, your gateway to life is gone."

A personal agent, in his framing, knows your salary, your relationships, your bank account numbers, and your job search.

"Do you really want Meta to own that data? Do you want them to run your life?"

Siu's answer is a sovereign agent, built on the same self-custody rails as secure crypto assets. "The same technology that can give you effective self-custody of blockchain and digital assets can now also essentially give you control of your agents," he said, adding,

"To me, that is perhaps the most critical thing we need to fight for."

What MINDS Does Differently

MINDS, Animoca's agent product, launched with a blockchain wallet built in. Siu calls it a multi-agent orchestration involving several agents with separate scopes rather than one that knows everything. His case in point was simple. You might share a work agent with colleagues. However, you would not share one that holds your personal life.

Siu made four claims about where MINDS stands:

• It is "probably the third or fourth largest AI agent on OpenRouter," a platform that routes requests across AI models.
• It is "the only one growing in Asia," since Muse is not yet available in the region and rival agents are not focused on it.
• It supports iMessage, Telegram, email, and Kakao, alongside WhatsApp. Siu argued that building only on WhatsApp is a risk, because Meta "took your data, shut it down" when OpenAI tried.
• It offers choice. Users can pick from around 60 AI models, and prioritize price and performance rather than being locked to one provider.

Animoca committed up to $10 million to a MINDS developer programme in June, according to Dealroom. Siu said some users building skills on the platform are already "making thousands of dollars a month," and compared the moment to the early App Store, when developer income was small until usage caught up.

On security, the perennial crypto weak point, Siu argued agents will do better than humans. "They can't translate a hash, right? They don't know what's safe or not," he said of ordinary users, adding,

"An agent, with code as its native language, will be naturally better at dealing with it than a human."

Clarity Act: "The Market Shrugged It Off"

Block Insider's last conversation with Siu came when the industry still expected the Clarity Act to pass. It did not. Siu reads the market's reaction as positive.

"The fact that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the crypto market basically kind of shrugged it off is a bullish sign. It means that now the industry is kind of saying, 'We don't care about Clarity. We're going to do it anyway.'"

He pointed to SEC guidance on what counts as a security, on buyback mechanisms and on NFTs as having done "a little bit of what Clarity was supposed to do." His expectation is that the bill passes next year, and the guidance is already changing behaviour inside Animoca's portfolio.

Siu said Open Campus, the education project behind the EDU token, announced a plan to use business profits to buy back tokens because of the SEC's ruling. The token rose about 30% over the following week. EDU traded at $0.069 at 20:15 UTC on 18 October 2026, as per recent data from CoinGecko, down around 11% on the day but up roughly 39% over 30 days. Siu said,

"I believe many, many more projects that actually are profitable are going to go in that path because they can now say they can do that."

Where Animoca Is Betting Next

Asked to name portfolio companies he is watching, Siu picked three. Open Campus, which he said recently helped fund student loans for 6,000 students. Moca, whose token runs on the backend of Moca Chain with MINDS, so "as MINDS grows, hopefully Moca grows too."

And Colossal, the biosciences company behind the dire wolf project, which Animoca backed in 2021 and which Siu said was last valued at $10 billion. The Colossal pick was deliberate. He said,

"The message here isn't 'Oh, they're bio-engineers’. The message is that blockchain, crypto, and tokenization touch every industry. It can be in education, it can be identity, it can be games, and it can be in life sciences."

Siu's prediction for TOKEN2049 2027 is that agents will be everywhere, and that he is as likely to be speaking to someone through an agent as to the person directly. His closing message was for builders.

"Keep building and don't give up," he said. "A lot of things that happened in our industry that were negative have become essentially fuel for the next sort of cycle. So we remain very, very bullish."

Whether that cycle arrives through tokenized treasuries or through an agent buying groceries with a crypto wallet is the question Siu wants the industry to argue about. For now, he says, it is only half the conversation.