Yat Siu's Strategy to Make Altcoins the Next Trillion-Dollar Asset Class

In 2012, Yat Siu learned what it means to own nothing in the digital world.

Animoca Brands was one of the largest app developers on Apple's App Store at the time, with hundreds of live applications. Then, overnight, Apple removed every single one. No warning. No explanation. No appeal.

"They never gave us an official explanation. They just took it off. The point isn't why they deplatformed us because they never gave us a full reason. The point is that they were able to do so."

For most entrepreneurs, this would have been a lesson in platform risk. For Yat, it became the thesis for what Animoca is today: a Web3 conglomerate with over 400 portfolio companies, $500M+ in metaverse land sales, and a 2026 public listing that could make it one of the first major crypto companies to trade on traditional exchanges.

From Hunter-Gatherers to Digital Feudalism

Born in Vienna and raised across continents, Yat came to digital property rights through an unexpected lens: anthropology.

In hunter-gatherer societies of roughly 150 people, property rights were simple. Everyone knew whose cow was whose. But scale to 10,000 people, and you need centralized record-keeping. You need governments to enforce ownership.

Today's digital platforms have regressed us to feudalism.

"All of the value you make online actually is digital value to which you owe no property. All the attention that you're generating on your Instagram posts and your social media is creating a lot of value for Facebook and TikTok and Google. And how much do you get paid for it? Nothing, because it's not yours."

The math is stark: digital advertising generates $800 billion annually. Users who create that value receive $0.

"If every user stopped using Instagram, what's the value of Instagram? Zero. So therefore, it stands to reason that Instagram users should receive a share in the value."

Yat points to the 17th century Statute of Anne, one of the first copyright acts. Before it, publishers owned everything. After, authors could commercialize their work. The result? An explosion of scientific writing and philosophy.

"If you didn't have music rights, there would be no Michael Jackson. There would be no Taylor Swift. There would be no Beatles, because there was no commercial rights attached to it."

Today, intellectual property is an $80 trillion market, dwarfing gold's $27 trillion. But digital creation, the value generated by billions of social media users and content creators, remains unowned by its creators.

The Altcoin Index: 400+ Bets on a Thesis

Since pivoting to Web3 in 2017, Animoca has assembled what Yat calls "perhaps the best gateway to the altcoin economy." The portfolio spans gaming (The Sandbox, REVV Motorsport), infrastructure (Polygon, Immutable), and identity (Mocaverse with over 1 million Moca IDs).

The thesis is simple but contrarian: altcoins will eventually exceed Bitcoin's value.

"We think that ultimately, collectively, altcoin is going to exceed the value of Bitcoin. And the reason we say that is because altcoin is what everyone's using."

Bitcoin is digital gold, a store of value. But altcoins, from stablecoins and Ethereum to gaming tokens and utility tokens, are what people actually use. Yat compares it to traditional markets: global stocks represent $120 trillion versus gold's $27 trillion, a ratio of roughly 4:1. Add private markets and the ratio exceeds 10:1.

"We think Animoca is the company to do that," Yat says of providing altcoin exposure. "So for the time being, we think we're the only ones that can do that."

In late 2024, Animoca received initial approval from Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) to operate a regulated fund, allowing institutional investors compliant access to Web3 assets beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs. While the US and Europe debate frameworks, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia are positioning as Web3 regulatory hubs.

Why Go Public? The Berkshire Hathaway Model for Web3

The 2026 public listing via reverse merger with Currency.com (a fintech serving millions across Southeast Asia) represents a fundamental shift in how crypto companies think about liquidity.

Yat's reasoning reveals different math than traditional VC.

"Imagine if you were a fund and you had the blessing of being invested in Google and in Apple and in Facebook in the early days, let's call them 2000ish. If you're a fund, you have to unwind the fund in seven or 10 years. That would have been 2010, maybe 2012. Imagine how much value you had left on the table if you had to sell your stock of those companies in 2012."

Those companies were already worth billions in 2012. Today they're worth trillions. Traditional VC fund structures force exits at exactly the wrong time.

Public markets solve this: investors get liquidity without forced exits, Animoca maintains its portfolio long-term, and retail investors can access diversified Web3 exposure beyond individual tokens.

Mocaverse: The Identity Layer Nobody's Pricing In

While The Sandbox generates headlines, Yat believes Mocaverse, Animoca's digital identity platform, might be the most valuable infrastructure piece.

"What is the most important property that you care about? It's probably your reputation. At the end of the day, reputation is something that stacks, you build it over time. And it's hard to build and easy to lose."

Every platform forces you to start from scratch. Your Steam gaming reputation doesn't transfer to Epic. Your credit score doesn't cross borders. "Right now, we're asking everyone in the digital world to do this every single time you go to new platform. That's ridiculous."

With over 1 million Moca IDs across 400+ companies, Mocaverse builds portable reputation using zero-knowledge proofs. Users prove trustworthiness without revealing underlying data.

The immediate application is DeFi. Current on-chain lending requires over-collateralization because there's no credit history. With reputation scores, under-collateralized or unsecured lending becomes possible.

"How do you include people into the financial ecosystem? You don't do it by asking them to over-collateralize."

Animoca is already testing this through EDU chain student loans in the Philippines and Indonesia, combining on-chain identity with traditional credit scoring.

But Yat makes a critical distinction: privacy is not anonymity.

"We've conflated privacy versus anonymity. If you're someone who benefits from being extractive, you want anonymity. We don't care about anonymity. In fact, we don't want anonymity."

High-trust societies have higher GDP. You don't need to know everything about someone to trust them. Zero-knowledge proofs enable exactly this: proving trustworthiness without revealing net worth or transaction history.

Making Everyone a Capitalist

Ask Yat about his endgame and you get something unexpected: stakeholder capitalism.

"Less than 10% of people in the world own property or have a stock portfolio." 

Historically, this inequality leads to revolutions. The typical response is redistribution.

Yat thinks this is wrong.

"If you make them a participant in the system, then they have something at stake, then they'll fight for it. Make everyone a capitalist, that's the answer we think."

His example is Elon Musk's trillion-dollar Tesla compensation. Shareholders approved it because the condition was making every shareholder a millionaire.

"I'm okay for you to be super wealthy, because you'll make me wealthy too."

Tokenization enables participation at scale. No accredited investor requirements. No minimum investments. No gatekeepers preventing someone in Manila from owning the digital economy.

And in an age of AI automating labor, Yat believes everyone needs to become an investor to survive.

The Current State and What's Next

Of the roughly 500 million people globally who own crypto, only 10% are actually on-chain using non-custodial wallets and decentralized applications. Yat's target is 150-200 million active on-chain users, requiring about 1 billion total crypto owners.

His timeline? 12 to 24 months.

On institutional adoption, he gives crypto an 8 out of 10, driven by BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF and institutional understanding of digital property rights. On retail, a 5 out of 10.

"Retail is really what we want here."

The 2026 IPO will test whether traditional markets can value a crypto-native conglomerate holding hundreds of tokens across gaming, identity, and infrastructure. But for Yat, it's just the next evolution.

"The moment you start identifying with, this is what we once were, look at the glory days, you're done," he says. "Time moves forward, not backwards."

We spend most of our waking hours in digital spaces, creating trillions in value through attention, content, and network effects. Yet we own none of it. That's what Animoca is building to change: tokens representing ownership, portable identities, and economic systems where creating value means owning value.

In 2026, traditional investors will be able to bet on that future for the first time.