Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu declared a strategic end to the pandemic-era metaverse vision at Consensus Miami 2026, saying the immersive virtual worlds crypto once hyped as a mainstream consumer destination were never really designed for people — they were a testbed for autonomous AI agents.
“Where we’re landing is that the metaverse, the blockchain-based one, was really the proof of concept for agents,” Siu said, adding that the metaverse “was never really destined for humans as a prime consumer.” The comment marks a clear pivot for Animoca, which was one of the loudest proponents of the metaverse during COVID lockdowns. Siu blamed pandemic-era expectations — when many assumed remote living and virtual social life would become permanent — for inflating the metaverse dream. “Everyone thought, ‘Oh, we’re going to be at home, and we’re never going to travel as much anymore,’” he said. “Which, of course, turned out to be quite the opposite.”
Siu’s new thesis: blockchain’s most scalable users won’t be people but autonomous AI agents. He estimated there could eventually be 50 to 100 billion agents online — and, using current population math, suggested 10 to 20 agents per human would amount to roughly 70 to 140 billion agents globally. “Blockchain technology is the ideal financial system for machines,” he said. “We, the humans, were basically the guinea pigs.”
The shift answers a practical adoption problem that has limited crypto’s mainstream traction. Roughly 700–800 million people globally own some form of cryptocurrency, yet fewer than 70 million actively use blockchain applications, a gap industry observers attribute to user-unfriendly complexity. Autonomous AI agents bypass many of those barriers: they interact programmatically, require no traditional banking rails, and can transact on-chain without human intervention.
Backing that bet, Animoca announced a $10 million initiative through its Animoca Minds platform to support developers building AI agent applications — positioning agents as the company’s next major investment category now that its metaverse era has wound down.
Siu’s remarks underscore a broader industry recalibration: from selling virtual worlds to building infrastructure for machine-to-machine economic activity, where blockchains could serve as the native payment and coordination layer for billions of digital agents.
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