Bitcoin's Next Buyer Isn't Human - Yat Siu

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: "Bitcoin's Next Buyer Isn't Human" — The Wolf of All Streets

Host: Scott Melker | Guest: Yat Siu | Released: June 28, 2026

---

Overview

In this provocative episode, Scott Melker dives deep with Yat Siu (Animoca Brands) on the thesis that the next major catalyst in crypto isn’t human—it's AI agents. The conversation explores how the rise of autonomous AI will fundamentally reshape blockchain use, alter the economics of altcoins, revive NFTs, and challenge global monetary systems through new forms of stablecoins. The pair also touch on national security, fun in crypto, and practical AI applications.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Dawn of Autonomous Agent Economies

[00:00–05:16]

• AI as the next big on-chain user:
  Yat Siu predicts that AI agents, not humans, will drive the next wave of blockchain adoption:

  "If every human is going to have tens, if not hundreds of AI agents... We're going to have hundreds of billions of AI agents. They're going to have their own wallets, transact with each other, and find stuff for you. That's actually the use case for blockchain." — Yat Siu [03:06]

• A paradigm shift from platforms to agents:
  AI agents will automate app discovery, commerce, and even matchmaking, bypassing traditional interfaces.

2. Reframing Adoption and Blockchain’s Use Cases

[05:16–07:43]

• Microtransactions flourish:
  With trillions of autonomous transactions too small for legacy payment rails, blockchains thrive as efficient, decentralized ledgers for AI-to-AI commerce.

• Human adoption comes via abstraction:

  "Mainstream adoption for humans will come, but it will come because agents are there." — Yat Siu [06:52]

• The metaverse is not dead—it's arriving through agents, not goggles:
  The metaverse blends into life via AI, making everyday experiences more interactive and transactional.

3. Economic Value—Altcoins, Stablecoins, and Commodities for AI

[08:48–15:15]

• Tokens as AI commodities:

  "The tokens that use inference become commodities for AI systems... a representation of compute and energy." — Yat Siu [08:55]

• Altcoins with strong communities and practical integration into AI economies could see renewed value.

• Stablecoins and National Security:
  Non-dollar stablecoins are expected to proliferate as governments seek to avoid "dollar colonization."

  "If people start using the dollar, why do you need the euro? That kind of dollar colonization is already happening." — Yat Siu [14:19]

• Regulatory choices will shape which stablecoins thrive, with countries likely to push their own as a protective measure.

4. Retail Recovery, Fun, and the NFT Renaissance

[16:35–21:09]

• The crypto industry needs to reclaim fun and build trust:

  "NFTs were fun. The metaverse is fun. Gaming is fun... We gotta bring that spirit." — Yat Siu [19:53 & 20:05]

• NFTs as status symbols and agent identity:
  As wealth returns to crypto, NFTs regain status. AI agents, too, may seek NFTs to establish their own identity and credibility:

  "If you're working with an AI agent that has a Bored Ape, you're going to take that agent more serious than the agent that doesn't have one." — Yat Siu [21:09]

• The AI-human (and agent-agent) relationship is becoming increasingly parasocial, akin to early internet social dynamics.

5. Real-World Applications and Product Advice

[22:10–24:53]

• For projects and investments:
  Companies must ensure their services are legible and callable by AI agents (via APIs, etc.) or risk irrelevance.

• AI agents drive down real-life costs:
  Through price comparison and optimization, agents can unlock meaningful savings—hundreds of dollars monthly—even on mundane expenses like groceries.

• AI-supported arbitrage is powerful and democratized.

6. Investment and Development in Agentic AI

[25:01–26:13]

• Yat Siu's firm is actively investing in startups building “agentic” AI—launching a $10M fund for such projects via hello Minds.

• The agentic AI wave is poised for even faster growth than Web3 gaming’s $10B emergence in the past cycle.

7. Human Productivity and Concerns

[26:13–30:39]

• Hyperproductivity and Workload:
  AI agents enhance decision velocity but increase the number of decisions and potential for work:

  "I'm doing a lot more decisions than I did before because the agent does actions overnight and the next morning is like 50 things I gotta say yes or no to." — Yat Siu [28:26]

• On job displacement:
  Yat Siu believes AI will create more productivity and opportunity, rewarding the capable and adaptable rather than destroying livelihoods.

• Managing dozens or hundreds of agents becomes a new skillset and edge.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "For the last six or seven years, we humans were the POC [proof-of-concept] for the agents." — Yat Siu [06:20]
• "NFTs are essentially a symbol of the wealth class in crypto… I also believe that agents are going to be buyers of NFTs as well." — Yat Siu [20:34]
• "We've lost a lot of trust... between all the fraud... [and] the relentless war that Gensler had on crypto." — Yat Siu [16:35–17:41]
• "We gotta bring back the fun." — Yat Siu [19:53 & 20:05]
• "If you can leverage agents, you are going to be valuable and there’s going to be a spread that’s measurable." — Yat Siu [28:36]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–03:44: AI agents and blockchain’s next wave
• 03:44–05:16: The abstraction of adoption—agents for everything
• 08:48–10:41: Altcoins as AI commodities and chain value mechanics
• 14:02–15:15: Dollar colonization and national stablecoins
• 19:53–21:09: Fun, NFTs, and AI identity/status
• 22:10–24:53: Real-world savings and agentic arbitrage
• 25:01–26:13: Investing in agentic AI ($10M fund)
• 28:26–30:36: Productivity and the human-agent interface

---

Tone and Language

The conversation remains energetic, speculative, and deeply optimistic about the coming transformation, while pragmatic about industry challenges and regulatory realities. Yat Siu combines technical vision with relatable anecdotes and clear calls to action for builders and investors.

---

Summary Takeaways

• The future of crypto and blockchain may hinge less on onboarding billions of people and more on billions of AI agents acting autonomously on users’ behalf.
• The economic center of gravity may shift from major L1s to altcoins operating as commodities for AI computation and microtransactions.
• NFTs and other fun, social layers of crypto (once written off) are poised for new significance—this time as identity and status layers for both people and AI agents.
• The next cycle will favor projects and people who can adapt their offerings for agentic AI consumption and who keep “fun” at the heart of crypto innovation.

---

Transcript

[Host]

What if the next crypto bull market isn't driven by people, but by AI agents? In this conversation, Yatsu lays out a provocative thesis. AI could become the biggest catalyst crypto has ever seen, creating millions of autonomous agents that need wallets, own assets and transact on chain. He explains why altcoins may become the commodities of the AI economy.

[Yat Siu]

You're already spending tokens for OpenAI and Anthropic and Gemini. That's actually a spend in tokens, right? Now imagine turning that into a commodity. It's a representation of compute and energy. There's real utility, there's an actual burn mechanism that actually has purpose.

[Host]

Why NFTs could make a surprising comeback.

[Yat Siu]

NFTs are essentially a symbol of the wealth class in crypto. As crypto becomes wealthier again, NFTs become that status symbol. I also believe that agents are going to be buyers of NFTs as well.

[Host]

And why today's crypto market is missing the one ingredient that fueled every previous cycle.

[Yat Siu]

And the other thing I think that's missing in our industry much more is we gotta bring back the fun. NFTs were fun. The metaverse is fun, Right? Gaming is fun. Right. We gotta bring that in.

[Host]

If Yat is right, the biggest opportunity in crypto may be hiding in plain sight. Let's go.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Let's dope. Is this thing on? I've got. I'm newly invigorated by actually eating food for the first time today. It was a big move for me.

[Yat Siu]

Oh, you did it fast or something or.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

No, I just never got a chance. But I had a two o' clock break, so it was good.

[Yat Siu]

It works too.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Awesome. So I was with Dan Tapiero earlier and he told me, ask Yat about Animoca Mines. Yes, yes, that's what he told me. I said, give me some, you know, good insights. I want to hear about it.

[Yat Siu]

Yes. AI agents.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Yat Siu]

Are we on? Tata?

[Co-host / Interviewer]

We're on.

[Yat Siu]

Oh, there.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Let's go, let's go.

[Yat Siu]

Well, I mean, just very quickly. So Animoca Mines are now called hello Minds. AI is basically our agentic platform. You can basically set up your own AI agent. It's very similar to OpenClaw, with one exception that you basically don't have to set anything up. It's just basically put it over email. It communicates with you over email, over telegram, over WhatsApp, that kind of stuff. Right. But more importantly, it has a personality. It's sort of more like a coworker or a friend. And now, you know, we are still in Beta. We just sort of relaunched the website. We have thousands of thousands of skills now. You know, they, they, they, it's, it's wild, the kind of stuff that's happening that, you know, for instance, I asked him to write, you know, like a wordle game. You know, instead of going to the New York Times just for something quickly, within 10 minutes, he just constructs a game custom made for me and basically I just play it with my friends or something like that. It's, it's, it's, it just gives you a window of how the world is changing. And by the way, we think that AI agents are going to save blockchain.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

I'm now remembering that you sent this to me in dm.

[Yat Siu]

Yes.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

And I put it on my I'm going to check this out list and didn't. Right, so now that you've sent it to me in person, I'm definitely going to check it out.

[Yat Siu]

Well, I mean, and you know, I mean, for instance, for yourself, and how many AI agents do you think you'll have in the future?

[Co-host / Interviewer]

I mean, incalculable. Yes, exactly. I literally think it'll be hundreds.

[Yat Siu]

So I have 200 right now. Right. And yes, I agree with you. So now think about it, right? If every human is going to have tens, if not hundreds of AI agents, then how many AI agents are we going to have? We're going to have hundreds of billions of AI agents. They're going to be all floating around on the Internet. They're going to basically have their own wallets, they're going to transact with each other, they're going to find stuff for you. And basically that's actually the use case for blockchain, where we're going to basically bring the billions on chain, but not because they're on chain, because their agents are on chain. They're going to do business with each other, they're going to trade things. They're going to basically also buy things from each other at basically microtransaction fees that won't work with a visa or MasterCard but will totally work on something that's on chain.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Yeah, we've had these conversations now for four or five years. How did we miss the part when we were saying, how are we going to get a billion people on chain that we didn't ever need to?

[Yat Siu]

Well, I mean, yes, I mean, I think, you know, I think those are people.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right. We're going to have trillions of people, you know, transacting on blockchain, but they're

[Yat Siu]

there on our behalf Right, Yeah. And I think this is the, this is the powerful thing because this is not just a shift from sort of, you know, hey, we have agents doing stuff for us. It's a shift of the entire Internet. Just think about, for instance, app discovery. Right now we are going to a website, we're going to the App Store, we're going to steam to a place or location because that's actually how we're used to discover stuff. But what if you have an AI agent that basically just finds stuff for you? You no longer have to go in App Store, they'll just discover everything for you and they'll just negotiate with other AI agents, other platforms to find the best product, best, cheaper, better, faster, whatever. Actually the kind of stuff that blockchain is good for, right? Or for instance, things like the dating scene. You know, I talked about this. It seems to resonate with people, which is that, you know, you're not going to go on Tinder or, you know, Bumble or these kind of apps that you have to download. You're just going to have your ask your AI agent, hey, I'm looking for these kind of dates, I'm looking for these kind of people. They're going to find you a connection with other people looking for that. And it's not going to be a platform, they're just going to link to each other and they'll probably be pre vetted because the agent's going to ask them questions and figure out what they're looking for. Much more detailed than basically some kind of app where you swipe left or right, unless that's fun for you, that's a different story. Right?

[Co-host / Interviewer]

What happened to meeting a girl at a bar?

[Yat Siu]

Well, I mean, you know, that can still happen or that. But, but my point is just that, you know, the, the experience of basically that kind of efficiency basically extends to everyone.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right?

[Yat Siu]

And I think this is where, you know, when you think about sort of the back end, we're totally being monetized through advertising, right? This year the forecast is we're going to have close to a trillion dollars, like 950, $960 billion in online advertising. But what is that? It's a transaction of our time and attention. We just never get paid for it. Right. I'm looking, I'm using Instagram, I'm using TikTok. They make money in the advertising. Someone pays for that. For that I get a service that's now all going to be abstracted by AI agents on the back. Because when was the last time, I mean, you probably use Gemini or Google. Right. When was the last time you clicked through on a website after you basically did your search?

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Never. Right, right. Of course. I got my answer.

[Yat Siu]

You got your answer. Right. And that's the point. Right. Normal traffic is down, so they get basically paid through these microtransactions instead of the traditional forms of advertising.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

You know, I think of all the iterations of these ideas that we've gone through over the years, everything to earn, Right. I mean, play to earn, game to earn. Is all that dead, or is it just the agent does it for us?

[Yat Siu]

Well, it's a different.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

You talk about, you know, there's trillions of dollars in that.

[Yat Siu]

It's a different form of earn.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right. Yeah.

[Yat Siu]

And so know, one way to think of everything on blockchain is that for the last six or seven years, we humans were the POC for the agents.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Yat Siu]

We basically were the playing ground. We were testing ground. And then we made it work. We went from cryptokitties would kill Ethereum, basically because it couldn't handle that, to now. Trillions of dollars of volume of transactions, no problem. And now, you know, we still haven't grown on chain traffic, however, that's where the agents come in.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

So is it over for the previous narratives where we actually cared about mainstream adoption from the actual humans?

[Yat Siu]

I think mainstream adoption for humans will come, but it will come because agents are there, because agents represent business opportunities and opportunities in and of itself. Right. It's just that we don't have enough opportunities on chain that exist. So when you have billions of agents doing stuff, we expect a future where basically agents and humans are going to interact with each other also on chain. Right. But right now, if you go on chain, it's kind of lonely for the time being. I mean, we're still only at the sort of 40, 50, 60 million number we need to be at the hundreds of millions numbers. And I think this is basically where AI agents will come first on our behalf, but then also drive us into that area. Right. And so that kind of made us think also that, you know, the metaverse is not dead. It's just that we thought about the metaverse in the wrong way, which is that instead of going into the metaverse with our goggles and with the devices, actually the metaverse is coming to us in the form of AI agents.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Yeah. The most interesting iteration of the metaverse was always something that interacts with your daily life rather than you have to realize completely, you know, like maybe you're driving by and the ad is you know, you click on something in the ad that you see, it goes and purchase that for you, you know, rather than I have to go put on my goggles and exist in a cartoon world to do that.

[Yat Siu]

Yeah, but I mean, for instance, with

[Co-host / Interviewer]

the agents, that's all moot.

[Yat Siu]

It's exactly. But also like, for instance, you know, I wrote a very simple agent. Just, just basically took me like, you know, literally just told it to do a price comparison on, on local supermarkets. And I discovered, at least in Hong Kong, that it was like a 75% spread between basically grocery goods for things like eggs and, and milk and like water. And you don't think about that because you go to a supermarket and buy stuff. So just alone, that type of stuff can probably give you a huge savings, right? And, and that impacts your real life, right? Never mind even like travel booking and scheduling and that kind of stuff. Just, even the small basic stuff. And because of an AI agent, it comes to you with suggestions as opposed to a chatbot where you ask it, it gives you an answer that is only valid for that moment in time as opposed to one that keeps looking for stuff for you that optimizes that.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

So the value accrual of all this, is it to stablecoins, is it to the chains that the stable coins are moving on?

[Yat Siu]

I think it's going to be in altcoins because the tokens, particularly the tokens that use the inference, actually tokens become the commodities for those AI systems. I mean, think about it, right? You're already spending tokens for OpenAI and you know, Anthropic and Gemini. That's actually a spend in tokens, right? Now imagine turning that into a commodity. It's a representation of compute and energy and there's real utility, there's an actual burn mechanism that actually has purpose, right? And then basically you can hedge, you can trade, you can. That other kind of stuff. No different than what you do with commodities in the physical world with like semiconductor chips or manufacturing of a different kind of. So that's kind of how we see that of course stablecoins are going to be a big winner in the sense of utility and usage, right? But of course, you know, that doesn't mean that, you know, stablecoins themselves don't appreciate, right? But you know, if you, if you're in the business of stablecoins, it's great because that's a natural onboarder. And of course, I think the core assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, you know, the Majors, Solana, I think they'll do fine because they're going to be using those chains. However, I think we said this before, I think the value pool for the chain mechanism isn't going to be quite as big because I view them like telcos, right. Which they're really important and the infrastructure growth will be there, but it's not going to be sort of, you know, they're not capturing value in the same way because if they capture too much value, people don't use them because the fees are too high.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right. I mean the faster cheaper fraction of a penny doesn't add up enough and that gets arbed away and competed away over and over and over again.

[Yat Siu]

Unless you have 100 billion agents on chain.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right. And then microtransactions count. That's right, yeah. I just wonder when you say it'll be altcoins and tokens, is it altcoins and tokens that have yet to be created or is there some bid for coin number 74 on coin market cap that we so deeply believed in, you know, last cycle?

[Yat Siu]

I mean I think one, it has a lot to do with community building on that as well. Because basically if the tokens have a community and they can basically attract the use of, let's call it this agentic system on that platform you've got a base, right. And at the end of the day size matters. So if you have a reasonably sized, and I don't mean that they have to be billions, but a reasonably sized community with a reason, we could talk about some liquidity. That is you can use that as a base, right. As opposed to a brand new project. I'm not saying it can't be a brand new project, it's just that there is an advantage around that. But of course is that project going to be adopting AI? Are they going to do agent AI, Are they going to do move in that direction? That's a different question. But I definitely see value in the altcoins that are out there and some of the majors.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

So they'll have to be sort of reskinned for what their purpose is and.

[Yat Siu]

Well, it's actually utility.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Wonderful.

[Yat Siu]

It's actually utility, Right, Yeah.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

That's so fascinating to me. Is that that way you are entirely focused right now?

[Yat Siu]

Well, I mean, so no, I mean we, you know one of the big news we also had as a business is, you know, our joint venture AnchorPoint received the stablecoin license and there's only been two stablecoin licensed receivers in Hong Kong for the sort of from the hkma. So our joint venture with Santa Chartered and of course hsbc. Right. So that's kind of one of the big news. The other one is, you know, we're doing a lot of stuff with RWAs. I think RWAs is another example. I think RWAs are going to be another winning category because, you know, the institutions, users around the world and agents around the world are going to be wanting to buy certain type of assets that actually deliver, you know, actual yield. And that's something that they could do on chain. You know, again, better, faster, cheaper. All right, so you expect that kind of stuff area to grow. And of course the agentic stuff is a big focus area because we think everything that we've built so far was in service for these agents.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Stablecoins of things other than United States dollars. Right. What are we at? 99% probably of stablecoins are dollars.

[Yat Siu]

Yes. Well, that's also because most stablecoins haven't launched yet or were able to launch. And I think it's an interesting point that Hong Kong was able to launch a regulated stablecoin before the Genius license licenses, which I think is due for next year. But I do know that, you know, there seems to be a lot more optimism around Clarity at this moment in time. But let's see, you know, who knows?

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Not for me.

[Yat Siu]

Right. Yeah, I saw Coinbase's stock pop a little bit because people thought that there was a compromise. Anyway, that's just a heads up.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Circle went up 20% or something. Coinbase, I think, went up as well, but Circle saw the bulk of that one. I mean, it makes sense that the market would price that.

[Yat Siu]

Exactly. Right. So, yeah, so I think generally sort of positive on this area and I think again, how do you demystify the process? Right. My mom's not going to buy Bitcoin. She's not going to set up a metamask, but the agent will do that for her.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Well, that's the interesting part, is that we always talked about how will Grandma use this? She'll never save her private keys, but now all Grandma needs is an agent platform and she'll never know what's happening.

[Yat Siu]

And I think there's plenty of things that someone might want to buy on Chain more and more. But now the problem is, you know, how do I do it even if I want it or don't want it badly enough that it did this? We were able to do that before with certain elements, but the masses basically, you know, just want that convenience. I think the agent which dissolves the traditional interface will do that.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

So stable coins and Foreign currencies other than the dollar, do you think that they're going to find a, that, that they'll be popular, that they'll replace? I think so too. I think people seem to think that only the dollar can work.

[Yat Siu]

Well first of all, I mean if you look at the Hong Kong dollar, a US dollar stable coin, it's pegged to the US Dollar. Right. So that's kind of one version of that abstraction. But at the end of the day I actually think a lot of nat governments are going to be pushing their stable coins as a matter of national security.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Yeah. Because they're going to have.

[Yat Siu]

Yeah.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

If they don't, the dollar takes over,

[Yat Siu]

they're going to get dollar colonized. Right. I think that's actually one big risk for places like Europe where you know, if people start using basically the dollar then why do you need the euro? And that kind of dollar colonization is already happening in Africa, South America, probably even parts of Southeast Asia if they're not careful. So I think that's actually something that I think many governments aren't really sort of thinking about and I think that's basically going to be a reaction to that. And I do think that some of them will react in a manner where they might not even allow US dollar stablecoins unless they're regulated in their local countries to do so as a matter of protectionism. I think that's some trend we're seeing because I think before when talking about global markets, you know, America was like yeah, global market, global market. Now America is like tariff, tariff, tariff. Right. It invites essentially other countries to do the same or react in a different way. So I think we're seeing, we're seeing more of that. So I would totally expect that it would be more national, let's call them stablecoins, emerge through a national mandate in the future.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

So it could even be a dollar stablecoin issued by the bank of Brazil or. Yes, yes, because the bank of Brazil, for example, their central bank just said no more cross border payments and stablecoins.

[Yat Siu]

Exactly.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

And it makes sense. Yes, it really does. Because who's going to use their currency when they have access to a dollar that can settle cheaper, faster or are they going to send a wire in

[Yat Siu]

and they can move it somewhere else around the world easily, which may for some bases. Well you know, yeah, a bunch of

[Co-host / Interviewer]

things that was their issue specifically. They said kyc, AML and sovereignty basically.

[Yat Siu]

Yeah, I think KYC and AML is solvable for any stablecoin sovereignty and sort of national security that is probably the bigger issue.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

I, I just didn't have it on my bingo card. Just talking about crypto as national security now. I mean, you had, you know, the four star Admiral Paparo and Congress, they're running a bitcoin node.

[Yat Siu]

Yes.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

And, you know, Secretary of War Hegseth said the same thing. You know, we're, we're monitoring the situation, but it's a national security interest with China and Russia. I mean, how did we get here? It's crazy.

[Yat Siu]

Well, I mean, I think, but I think that's part of the maturation and it's also, frankly, the value of the asset class. Right. I mean, national security is holding gold, it's holding assets, and now holding bitcoin and being in the bitcoin ecosystem. So I think you've come a long way. So I think it's positive. I think what our industry, though, needs is a recovery on the retail side.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right.

[Yat Siu]

That's something I think we need to sort of do more on. And I think, you know, one of the things that sort of might be interesting for the audience is and a lot of people have sort of counted things like, like NFTs as dead. Right. But, you know, the last time, not lately actually, the last time that sort of bored Apes was this price was August of 2021. Right. So I kind of think it's, it's starting to feel better. You know, Bitcoin 81K, despite everything that's going on in the world, starting to feel better. Right. Hopefully we can keep that momentum and build some sort of, you know, goodwill on top of all the applications and use cases and basically bring back. Because I think we've lost a lot of trust we've had, you know, between sort of the scenarios of all the fraud that happened in the earlier time, then of course, the relentless war that essentially Gensler had on crypto, followed basically by, unfortunately what I think was a really rough year, because, you know, I think I said this on your show, but crypto is, is Trump's 10th child. Like, it's, you know, not his favorite child. Right. And, and unfortunately that meant that a lot of things happened to our industry that was just negative. And, and I think all of that needs healing and I think we're getting to that point.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Yes, Trump's a tough one, man. You know, it's like incredible how you can have such a bifurcation of like with the regulatory, legislative side and just thought, yes, yes, pain points and World Liberty Financial and all of the insanity. I mean, what do you make of

[Yat Siu]

all of that, Well, I mean, look, I mean, I think at the end of the day, I think they had the right idea in terms of crypto as a future, so it made sense for the family to look at that. So I think. And I think. But I think what the industry may have miscalculated is the fact that at the end of the day, it's a business to them. Right. And I think if you viewed it with that kind of sanguine manner, it would have been fine. But I think a lot of people sort of. Kind of, sort of had this sort of quasi messianic approach to it and saying, oh, it's going to save everything, when in fact, it's just, you know, a business operator doing business things. Right. And I think. And I think if we, you know, I think the message really is for us in the industry is, you know, we got to fend for ourselves, we got to fight for what's right for us, and we got to basically protect, you know, basically our sort of, you know, our area and, you know, make sure that people play by the rules that we want them to play with as well. Right. And I think we just kind of lost sort of the eye on that a little bit. I mean, right now we have a different kind of saga. The whole sort of Justin sort of WFI thing is a different story. I don't know anything about it. It's like soap opera. And I'm like, you know, like, I'm not watching TV anymore. I'm just watching what's going on in sort of, you know, sort of crypto drama, as it were. In fact, cryptodrama. That could be a channel. But that aside. Right. That aside, I think that trust needs to be rebuilt. And I think, unfortunately, because of the politicizing of it, if you don't like Trump, you don't like crypto. I think there's an element of that which was not. Yeah. Which was not something that we had a year ago.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right.

[Yat Siu]

But again, you know, time heals everything, and we just got to keep building use cases, showing how it's practical. You know, if you do RWAs, for instance, yes, it uses crypto technology, but nobody really thinks of it as crypto. Right. I also think meme coins have. Unfortunately, they were fun in the beginning, and then they became extractive, and then it became manipulative again. It's gone in a direction that wasn't positive as well. Right. So again, we have to. And the other thing I think that's missing in our industry much more is we got to bring Back the fun.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Well, yeah, there's no fun now.

[Yat Siu]

We're a bunch of suits, look at me. Institutions, that kind of stuff, that's okay. And that's why NFTs were fun. The metaverse is fun, right? Gaming is fun.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right.

[Yat Siu]

We gotta bring that in, bring that spirit and then I think the industry will enjoy it. Right. It's like, don't just invest in things just to make money because investing in entertainment and fun and sort of, you know, personal enjoyment, that is as much of an investment as it is just in sort of, you know, having a return in capital like personal health.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Do you think that we see those return? I don't know if the original NFTs, I'm sure we will see future use case of your NFTs, but it does feel like NFTs are kind of quietly coming back.

[Yat Siu]

Yeah, think there's a, there's, you know, it's not all of them and it doesn't have to be right, but, you know, it shouldn't be right. But there's a whole bunch of the, let's call it the sort of, you know, the sort of blue chip ones. They're all starting to come up. There's a community that's building. And of course, that's the other thing. NFTs are essentially a symbol of the wealth class in crypto. As crypto becomes wealthier again, NFTs become that status symbol. And then the other thing is, I also believe that AI agents are going to be buyers of NFTs as well, because that's going to be a way in which they can distinguish their identity. If you're working with an AI agent that has a bored ape, you're going to take that agent more serious than the agent that doesn't have one. Right?

[Co-host / Interviewer]

That dude spent tens of thousands of dollars on an ape, whether it's a

[Yat Siu]

dude or an agent. Do you care?

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Yeah, well, I guess I shouldn't call the agents dudes.

[Yat Siu]

Well, I mean, so, you know, talking about that, right, we notice with hello Minds, right, When people start starting off the agent, they first give them functional names like Calendar QA or Robot X or something like that. And then they started calling them names like Ingrid or Sarah or whatever. And then actually the relationship starts to become more parasocial and then they basically enjoy them in different ways in terms of I, I, I like their company and I, I, you know, I want to use them for, yes, calendar and services, but they're valuable to me emotionally, not just for the, what they do. And that is by the way, how the Internet evolved as well. The early days of the Internet, everyone talked about utility, everyone talked about what it does for me. And actually, at the end of the day, it became social relational.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

I feel like it was just chat rooms.

[Yat Siu]

Yeah, well, I mean, Instagram, TikTok, I mean, it's all social relational. I think agents become the agents of social relational in this new web.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

So how do you repurpose all of the things that are in your portfolio for this future?

[Yat Siu]

Well, I mean, first of all, you

[Co-host / Interviewer]

guys have what, 600 investments, 630 investments, right?

[Yat Siu]

I mean, everything in DeFi, everything in Depay, and every of those areas would make sense, right. RWAs and stuff we're doing in stablecoins. Obviously, that's very much agentic payment. You know, if you're basically doing content, you got to start thinking about how agents can find you. Right. Basically, you need to have interfaces for them, whether it's MCP, CLI, APIs, whatever. Because if the agent can't find you, right. It's not just good enough to have the agent discover you in terms of search, it has to be able to use you. If it can't use what you offer, then you're invisible to them and then essentially you're irrelevant. Right. So that's kind of one area that we tell portfolio companies to look at, but also take advantage of what agentic AI can do, you know, for sales, leads generation, for productization, for support. You know, I have, you know, of the hundreds of agents that I have, I've got agents that, you know, optimizing, you know, basically sort of, you know, our search index optimization ones that handle sort of, you know, portfolio. I've got ones that even tell me sort of price indexes between sort of, you know, food prices, you know, and it's not that, you know, I. It's not that I care necessarily about a 10% spread on eggs.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right, right.

[Yat Siu]

However, it just feels bad if you're paying more for something. Why would you. And then imagine, then you export that service to people who actually. It makes a difference too. Right. Saving hundreds of US Dollars. I mean, you know, we talk about arbitrage in trade and finance, but we don't talk about arbitrage and groceries, which

[Co-host / Interviewer]

is actually Wilder actually matters.

[Host]

Yes.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Where it actually matters to 99% of the population.

[Yat Siu]

Exactly. Right.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

And then, you know, imagine that your agent does the shopping and it arrives at your door and you don't even worry about it. You just confidently know.

[Yat Siu]

I mean, this is the next phase where you've got Your robot goes, yes, the agent finds it for you. The robot does the action.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right.

[Yat Siu]

But the point is that, you know, even if you do it yourself, let's say you don't want to go to two different shopping sort of supermarkets. If you know what you're buying, it'll tell you net or you'll have a better savings. You'll go there. And here's the crazy thing that I.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Even if you didn't save as much on bananas, you saved $50 on the whole order.

[Yat Siu]

Exactly right. But, but here's the thing that I discovered when I was running that agent. They change the prices every day. They don't change the prices a week or a month. The price index is changed daily because the eggs are $10, maybe you know, on Saturday and then on Sunday it's $11. So they're fluctuating around because people don't notice. Or maybe it's $0.10 more. But $0.10 on a $2 item is a big, is a big spread. Right? And that's something. And again, I don't know if this is true for other places, but for Hong Kong, I was shocked how wide this, I wrote about this and, and I was like, wow. I mean, you know, like. And there's so many people where this would make a huge difference to their life. They would be literally saving. I think the agent estimated between 500 to 700 US dollars of savings a month on grocery shopping. Is that crazy?

[Co-host / Interviewer]

So how are you guys now deploying capital when you are vetting new companies and looking at new deals? I mean, do you have to be AI or.

[Yat Siu]

Yes. I mean, but let me be clear, everything is AI. Yeah, but specifically are you agentic AI? And I don't think there's that many companies doing that. We actually this morning just announced a $10 million basically investment opportunity for anyone building essentially agentic AI on hello Minds. So you can go to website hello Minds AI. And basically if you do that, you can, basically if you build an application, a service or business, then we'd fund you. I think of it very similar to the early days of, you know, basically NFTs and Web3 gaming as well. And again, as long as people love to shit on web3 gaming, it's still a $10 billion industry. And it was a zero dollar industry, you know, five or six years ago. And I think it's all relative to the value. And we're at that same phase. I mean it took us from 2018 to 2019, basically two to two and a half years for that industry. To mature to a point where it became relevant. But with AI agents it's going to happen much, much more accelerated because it's already here. And also this is the kind of service that I think everyone can use.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Yeah, everybody needs to use. Well, that's the difference. Like you didn't need to participate in Web3 gaming. Very soon you're going to need to have agents doing things.

[Yat Siu]

Exactly.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

I think the problem is that that's going to be how you transact.

[Yat Siu]

That's right, exactly. I think the challenge is that a lot of people are still in chatgpt mode. Right. They're using AI and Google Search. It's Google Search plus. Right. But actually AI agent for them doing stuff. That's actually where the real power comes. And if you are early in this, you have an advantage. It's a classic sort of be early.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

So what's the first iteration that, what's the first thing people do when they come to hello minds?

[Yat Siu]

Yeah, I think the first people do is actually we had to change it. Where? In the very first, you know, when it was animal combines with AI, very first interface that we had, we basically let people just, you know, log in and they got their email. And it was funny, the drop off rate was massive because people were like, what do I do now The AI is asking me what I want and actually turns out I don't know what I want. Right, right. And I think for people like us, where we're building businesses, there's five things I can do. Right, right. But if you talk to most people, they're like, do I really, you know, like I have a question but what do you want me to do? That's different. Right. So then we basically had to come up with predefined categories like sales, marketing or that kind of stuff.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Right.

[Yat Siu]

And I think one of the sort of primary use cases has been around sales generation because it can go out and find leads for you. But then the other thing, of course I build a genealogy mind. This sort of ancestry found a sort of interesting stuff and then that was interesting because other people ended up using that. You can share skills and then they basically sort of utilize that. And it's better than ancestry.com because it's using AI to go deep and deep and deep. And now, you know, actually it told me I had to buy a book from a certain library somewhere in China. I basically ordered it and then I basically gave it information. I kept digging. It's astounding what it can do now.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Do you have any concerns?

[Yat Siu]

Oh, plenty of Course. Right. I mean, but the thing is, unlike openclaw, you know, I'm not giving it access to my computer. Right. It doesn't have sort of, you know, basically root access to everything I do. I, you know, I have, I give it a separate calendar, I can read my calendar, you know, that kind of stuff. Usually you can build your sort of

[Co-host / Interviewer]

safeguard an email and it tells me what's in my emails. But it's not in my email.

[Yat Siu]

Exactly, exactly right. And I think that's how most people will use it. But of course, it's incredible to see what it can do from an efficiency standpoint. But yeah, all these, all these elements. But I think again, the value add is the time it saves. And one thing that's interesting also is I'm doing a lot more decisions than I did before because the agent does actions overnight and the next morning is like 50 things I got to say yes or no to.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

It's more work. Yeah, yeah, I'm hyper productive. I have to answer a hell of a lot more questions.

[Yat Siu]

Exactly.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

It really is that way. It's not like it makes my life easier and harder at the same time.

[Yat Siu]

But that to me though, is the indication of where the world is going. Everyone's like, oh, AI is going to kill jobs. I actually think it's going to do the opposite. It's going to make people more productive. If you have not productive before, yes, okay, you're toast. But that would have been true no matter what. But if you can leverage agents, you are going to be valuable and there's going to be a spread that's measurable. If you can measure, if you can get value. Out of 10 agents, 100 agents, 60 agents. Right. And the more agents you can manage, well, the more valuable you become.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

When you say you have hundreds of agents, are you individually interacting with like,

[Yat Siu]

So I have 212 agents right now and it's growing every day because every time I have an idea, I just launch a new agent.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

But your agents also create agents. Right? I mean, I've been an open cloud, which now we've kind of just shifted to Claude, but I'm sure we'll go back and forth. But it's creating the agents. It just says I'm going to create four agents to do this task.

[Yat Siu]

And but these agents, sub agents, that might not be around. I'm talking about permanent agents in my case. But of course, these permanent agents also have a way in which they store your memory and they can do stuff. So that's valuable. But what the way I do it is, you know, of the 200 plus agents, half of them are failed experiments. Yeah, right. Where I tried something, it does it, but it doesn't quite do what I like. You know, I basically just keep going and going. Right. So I have probably 20 to 30 agents that are my main agents. Orchestrators are one that I deal for most of the stuff and then the rest they work with the other agents. Or I'm just experimenting or I'm doing something, I want to try something. Oh, I say, oh, you know, one of the great things I love is like, oh, there's a new API that's out there or new application. I no longer go and sort of search a website and look at it. I just send the agent and what I do is I make a new agent that's just focused on that, that tests it because then it tests the API, it runs, does something and then I can tell if it works or not. And you know, it's how many projects that out there saying, oh, we got an API doesn't work right. Because they just sort of doing the marketing side. But the agent will figure it out for you. I don't have to waste my time. Right. You know, all that kind of stuff.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Yeah, we've experienced the same. It's incredible what the productivity unlock it is but like I said, it makes me actually work more.

[Yat Siu]

Yeah.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

Because I want to. Yes, but. But yeah, it's. It's relatively. It's really incredible. Man. It's always so much fun to talk to you.

[Yat Siu]

Pleasure.

[Co-host / Interviewer]

We run out of time so fast, but thank you. Yeah, thank you. Pleasure, man. We have to do it again soon.

[Host]

This podcast is sponsored by Weeks and was recorded live at Consensus 2026. You can find out more about what they have to offer by clicking on the link down below in the description. Thanks to Weeks for sponsoring.