51 Insights – What Matters in Digital Assets Why altcoins will be bigger than Bitcoin, with Yat Siu, Co-founder of Animoca Brands
Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
“Capitalism is the superior system broadly. But when left unchecked, it has a lot of problems. And the reason communism and socialism have become more popular is because most people in the world are not participating in the capitalist system.”
That’s Yat Siu, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, outlining what drives Animoca Brand’s investment thesis. Animoca has quietly built a $1.4 billion portfolio of over 600 companies. Their bet? That while Bitcoin is the reserve asset, the “Altcoin” economy, representing culture, gaming, and data, will ultimately be the larger asset class
In our conversation, he breaks down why Animoca Brands is looking to go public on the NASDAQ and why “digital property rights” are the only viable path to re-enfranchise the global population into the capitalist machine.
And here is his biggest take:
“No king willingly gives up their kingdom. Spotify won’t decentralize. Facebook won’t tokenize. It’s not innovation from incumbents, it’s creative destruction. A new company will disrupt them, and they’ll have to adapt or die.”
In this episode, we sit down with Yat to unpack the philosophy of digital property rights and the future of Animoca.
About Yat: Yat Siu is a Hong Kong-based technology entrepreneur, investor, and a leading advocate for Web3 and digital property rights. He is best known as the co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, a global leader in gamification and blockchain with a portfolio of over 600 companies.
He’s been investing in blockchain since the earliest days and is known for his philosophical approach to technology and economics. Before Animoca, he was an early investor in mobile gaming and founded multiple companies.
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🎧 Jump to the best parts
* (00:52) → From Checkpoint Charlie to Web3: Yat Siu grew up crossing between East and West Berlin. He explains how seeing “scarcity vs. abundance” side-by-side shaped his belief that property rights are the foundation of freedom.
* (05:16) → The problem with modern capitalism: Why real estate, compound earnings, and the stock market have become impossible for most people and how QE destroyed the savings mechanism.
* (13:06) → John Locke’s labor theory in the digital age: Why your data and ideas are the new “apples you plucked” and why Big Tech is essentially enslaving creators.
* (30:59) → The Altcoin Thesis: Why Animoca views itself as a leveraged bet on the altcoin market, and why Yat believes the collective market cap of altcoins will eventually surpass Bitcoin’s “digital gold” status.
* (36:30) → From NFTs to digital identity to stablecoins: Why Animoca invests across every layer of tokenization.
* (44:47) → The vision for the next 5-10 years: Why tokenization will make everyone financially literate.
Important Links
* LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/yatsiu
* X: https://x.com/ysiu
* Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ysiu/
* Animoca Brands: https://www.animocabrands.com/
* Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yat_Siu
🎙️ In our conversation, we discussed:
* Why capitalism is dying (and how to save it): The failure of antitrust, the rise of tech monopolies, and why data (the new oil) needs to be owned by the people who create it, not the platforms that exploit it.
* The NASDAQ Strategy: Why Animoca plans to go public to allow broad retail participation, contrasting with the closed nature of VC funds.
* Where to tokenize: Tokenizing liquid assets (like Treasuries) adds utility. Tokenizing illiquid assets (like real estate) doesn’t magically make them liquid, it just wraps the same problem in a token.
* Digital identity as the killer app: Why privacy ≠ anonymity, and why blockchain needs reputation (what Animoca is building) before it can scale trust.
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My biggest takeaways from this conversation & who to bet on:
1. Altcoins will be larger than Bitcoin