Crypto will reach a turning point when it becomes as useful for companies as the internet became in the 1990s, argues Animoca Brands’ co-founder.
Updated Jan 6, 2025, 4:31 p.m. UTCPublished Jan 6, 2025, 4:28 p.m. UTC
Yat Siu has seen a lot in his decade of investing in crypto as a venture capitalist.
The Hong Kong-based venture studio and game developer Siu co-founded, Animoca Brands, has grown to be one of the most powerful names in Web3 culture, with data provider CoinGecko pegging the market cap of tokens issued by Animoca’s portfolio companies at more than $45 billion.
But the crypto winter of 2022-23 proved to be a tough test for Animoca, with many of the tokens from its companies down nearly 90%. At the depths of these dark times in February 2023, the Financial Times even wondered if Animoca could survive.
Times have changed, of course. The price of bitcoin surged over 120% in 2024, the U.S. has a pro-crypto president soon to assume office and Animoca recently almost quadrupled the size of its office space in Hong Kong, even as the local traditional finance market there retreats.
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Siu now sees the crypto industry as being at an inflection point similar to the one he observed of the internet back in the 1990s when it first transformed business.
Back then, Hong Kong’s garment industry, now a relic of the city’s past, was reliant on physically shipping its samples to clients for inspection during the production process. There was no Slack back then, nor Dropbox or FTP, and the resolution provided by fax machines wasn’t sharp enough to be useful for this task.
“People used to design their patterns [and send them] to America by DHL,” recalled Siu in a recent interview with CoinDesk at Animoca’s Hong Kong headquarters. The process took days to complete and cost some firms as much as $80,000 a month, according to Siu.
Siu, however, offered a solution. He operated one of the first broadband internet service providers that allowed for garment factories to do high-resolution scans — difficult before because of limited bandwidth — and send them over to clients in the West.
The use of broadband internet made the client review process “infinitely cheaper” and more efficient, eliminating the need for what Siu called the “insane” practice of relying on physical delivery for design approvals.
A South China Morning Post clipping from 2000, interviewing Yat Siu at one of his prior web startups (SCMP Archives)
Siu equates this innovation to the advent of stablecoins and what he predicts will be their eventual mass adoption by traditional financial institutions.
“If you want to do commerce and trade with America,
