Web3 Inherently Has Anti-Monopolistic Qualities Embedded in it: Animoca's Yat Siu

Hong Kong-based entrepreneur and angel investor, and co-founder of Animoca Brands Yat Siu in all sincerity, refers to himself as 'An advocate of true digital property rights,' and rightfully so. At present, he's intensively working towards making the gaming market a much more democratized and decentralized one.

- PAROMITA GUPTA

Having started Animoca Brands in 2014 as a mobile games developer, Siu pivoted the startup towards blockchain gaming and NFTs in 2018. Gaming has been one of the fastest adopters of it since it is a digital-first and a digitally native experience. From its struggling days almost a decade ago, Animoca Brands was last valued at about six billion dollars and has Torque Burnout, Torque Drift, Benji Bananas, Base One, Siegecraft Commander, Crazy Defense Heroes, and Crazy Kings as its primary game offerings. Its 450+ Web3 investment portfolio includes Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis, OpenSea, Dapper Labs, Colossal Biosciences, MoviePass, and CryptoKitties. It counts Mocaverse, Anichess and The Sandbox as a few of its blockchain projects. The Brands is slated to launch two new projects- MotoGP™ Ignition and Formula E: High Voltage.

Safe to say, Animoca Brands has gone on to become a global leader in gaming and blockchain. While 2023 saw the Binance-CZ split and US SEC crackdown, along with a lull in funding space, especially for Web3 startups, Siu terms the year as a ‘clean up’ one. One can call him an optimist because, after all this time, he’s still able to point out the silver lining, “the situation with Binance could have ended worse than it was and turns out that with the settlement, Binance is kind of like any other bank in a way. And in some ways that's actually comforting to know that the US has now viewed Binance in that fashion and penalized.”