Proof of Progress: Yat Siu on Why AI Agents Will Bank On-Chain

When Yat Siu was asked to give one word on the current state of crypto in 2026, he didn’t hesitate before saying, "Anxious." In fact, the OG investor and founding father of some of the top crypto, metaverse, and web3 brands and full-time Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman spent an hour explaining, with solid numbers, why the anxiety has the crypto story backwards.

Usage is at record highs, Wall Street is finally on-chain, and the next billion users of crypto may not be human at all. So far so good!

Siu sat down with Block Insider's Varuni Trivedi at a moment that’s almost strange for the web3 space: fundamentals are arguably the best they have ever been, while prices tell a completely different story.

His answer to that tension is the thesis Animoca, with its 600-plus portfolio companies, is now built around.

"AI agents are gonna be the natural users of blockchain," he says. "They're gonna be very, very comfortable using crypto assets." In a future of billions of agents, he argues, blockchain becomes "their primary banking system as it were."

Why Does Siu Say Utility has Already Won 2026?

Siu called 2026 the year of utility back in January, and he is not walking it back. "Whether it's Robinhood or Revolut or major banks, everyone's in it," he says, pointing to Stripe's Tempo and, on the day of the interview itself, Citadel's investment into Crypto.com as fresh proof that institutions are now doing what crypto natives were doing years ago.

The disappointment, he concedes, is price. His answer is a distinction:

"There's a difference between utility and pricing, in the sense that when utility reaches a large enough size and scale, then the value will naturally accrue into it."

Nvidia, he notes, was once tiny too.

"Utility does take time, but when it happens, it's going to explode."

He offers one telling image from a turbulent summer: during the US-Iran escalation, people traded tokenized oil and commodities around the clock "while the stock market is essentially shut off and sleeping because they don't work over the weekend."

Are AI Agents Really Crypto's Mass-Adoption Moment?

Here is the math Siu walks through. Ask people how many personal AI agents they expect to run in three to five years, and the common answer is three to five, while some techie users in San Francisco or other parts of the US say close to hundreds.

Take ten as the average across everyone online and "we're at 70 to 80 billion agents already." That is huge, almost a scary number. Siu has an interesting take though on how and why this number matters.

Those agents will roam the internet, transact, and settle on-chain, he argues, because "an AI agent only becomes truly powerful and autonomous when it actually has autonomous access to money."

A credit card can be revoked; a wallet with on-chain spending rules cannot be quietly taken away, and it can be programmed: a $50 cap for the cautious, six figures for the bold.

The flip side is existential for businesses. AI summaries have already cut some websites' traffic by up to 80%, he says, and in an agent-run web, advertising gives way to on-chain microtransactions. "If I'm not agent readable, I become irrelevant. If the agent can't find you, then you can't be making business or commerce possibilities." Animoca calls this agentified internet Web4.

How Big is Hello Minds, Honestly?

Animoca's own entry, Hello Minds, sits by Siu's account among the top four or five personal AI agents on OpenRouter's rankings, processing 30 to 40 billion tokens a day against roughly 200 billion for the market leader. The pitch is speed and sociability: an agent in 60 seconds, running over email and Telegram, no server setup required.

The crypto layer is where Animoca's DNA shows. MOCA tokens pay for agent cognition or earn credits through staking, and a Skills Bazaar pays builders a revenue share when other agents use their tools. Siu's own skills earn him $500 to $600 a month in fractions of a cent per call. "Add a couple more zeros, and that becomes a small business," he says, backing the ecosystem with a $10 million investment program.

To his credit, Siu sizes the market honestly: not billions of users, "more likely hundreds of thousands of users using it very actively." The gap between chatbots and true agents, he argues, is autonomy — an agent keeps building on your behalf without being asked. On trust, his timeline is short: within 12 months, he expects people to hand agents "most of the stuff," the same way credit cards conquered a skeptical early internet.

What Happened to the Metaverse?

Siu, long the metaverse's loudest defender, says the concept was misread from birth. It was framed during COVID as a replacement for physical life, "which is, I think, a great misunderstanding. The metaverse or the virtual world is an enhancement of a physical life."

His 2026 version runs through agents: they book his flights, review GitHub repositories, and ship his code. "They're virtual beings, they are Metaversal beings, but they're impacting our physical life in better ways than before." Asked to finish "In 2030, the metaverse is…" he answers without pause: "everywhere in your life."

Will the CLARITY Act Still Trigger the Tokenization Wave?

On regulation, Siu has revised down. The CLARITY Act's odds of passing this year are "much lower" than when he first made the tokenization-wave call, he says, snagged on politics around an ethics provision rather than substance. "Crypto is a bipartisan issue," he maintains, and "a form of clarity will pass," just perhaps not in 2026.

The working substitute, in his view, is the SEC itself: a chair who has said most tokens are not securities and an agency granting waivers that let tokenization proceed.

"As long as that regime stays sort of as it is, it's still gonna be very, very bullish for crypto, whether CLARITY passes or not."

Geography shapes the rest of his map. Asia fuses AI and crypto first, he argues, because the region is pro-crypto and saw what blockchain did for the underbanked, while the West debates agent payments that skip blockchain entirely.

Yet asked where the next web3 giant emerges, the Hong Kong Web3 Council member surprises himself: probably Silicon Valley, "because there's more capital and there's more AI talent."

That intersection is also why Animoca wants its Nasdaq listing understood a particular way. "We want to be known essentially as both an AI and crypto company," Siu says, "'cause we think they're the same thing."

The Proof of Progress test, as ever, is whether the builder ships what the thesis promises. Five years ago the question was whether blockchain worked at all; today BlackRock, Fidelity, and Standard Chartered run on it, and Siu's next claim is that 70 billion software agents will too.

His advice to founders waiting for certainty doubles as his closing argument: "If you're not using AI properly, especially agents in your workflow, I think you're kinda doomed." The agents, he is betting, will not wait either.