Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu presents Web3 as a revolutionary economic model that shifts power from corporations to users through tokenization and digital ownership.
Digital assets is already a $3.8 trillion market, Yat Siu notes. “The total amount of tokens that are traded on a daily basis ranges from about $100 to $200 billion a day” with 220 million monthly active users. “They’re using blockchain actively not to speculate or trade, but they’re using it basically for business operations and developing”, Siu makes clear.
Crucially, Web3 changes the ownership paradigm of the digital economy. “In Web3, for the first time, you have the ability to own a piece of the network”, the Animoca Brands co-founder explains, highlighting how tokens represent both utility and economic ownership.
Web3 allows participants to share in the value they create, he says – a stark contrast to the present where “you could be a very big influencer on Instagram, but it gives you zero economic ownership in the value of Facebook.”
The impact of this sea change can be witnessed in the gaming industry, which has been pioneering many Web3 concepts. The 3.4 billion people who are playing online games basically are “already accustomed to digital assets”, Siu notes. “They buy skins, they have virtual currency that effectively have effects that are very similar to tokens.”
Crucially, though, the gamers who buy over $100 billion of virtual goods every year don’t own them. “They’re actually renting them”, Siu says. “But in Web3, because of blockchain, you get to own them, and that’s why people can trade them, pass them on, or pass the identities elsewhere.”
At the intersection of blockchain and artificial intelligence, tokenization enables AI agents to become truly autonomous economic actors. “The market today in Web3 for these AI agents is at roughly $14 billion”, Siu points out. “This is a massive space that is emerging and growing.”
