Animoca Brands' Yat Siu on Studio Ghibli and Why 2025 is the Year Web3 Wins

In a world where attention is the most valuable currency, Animoca Brands Chairman and Co-Founder Yat Siu believes the future belongs to those who understand how to share it.

Speaking on the recent viral uproar over users turning to ChatGPT to create Studio Ghibli versions of their photos, Siu explains why it could actually be showing the budding net-positives for creators.

"The whole 'Ghibli-fication' was interesting because there was a whole wrath of people that came out and said, 'this is awesome, this is great.' And there's a whole sort of slew of other people, particularly content creators, who were saying, 'this is terrible,'" Siu said in a new Coinage interview. "But imagine if Studio Ghibli was going to launch a new movie, maybe even pre-sell it in the next three to six months. Do you think they'd sell more now, or less?"

Siu isn’t naive about the friction that arises when new technology challenges legacy frameworks, but as the founder of one of the largest Web3 companies ferociously investing in digital property rights, he sees value in what many critics deride, especially when it comes to ways NFTs and tokens are re-framing the creator economy. His company Animoca Brands has continued to double and triple down on big bets that the gamification of culture will create new ways for value to be distributed. Not just financially, but socially.

While Bitcoin may have been first crypto to show how Web3 can be used to have a community derive value from shared network effects, the rise of culture onchain may be upon us. Community-owned projects like Coinage, which recently became the first Web3 media project to pay a distribution to NFT holders in the US, are gaining steam. In the Animoca portfolio, the same thinking has given rise to various two-sided marketplaces, including TinyTap — an educational platform that helps teachers monetize lesson plans and parents find content for their kids. According to Siu, the tokenization trend is only going to continue to further unlock network effects around value on the internet that previously wasn't possible.

"Money is essentially a social currency of form," he said. "It only has value because it's shared, so in fact, the distribution of money and the fact that it's in everyone's hands is actually why it gains power as well."

This belief underpins how Siu sees the Web3 space evolving. "We want to help the whole world become tokenized, which is what we describe as digital property rights." Through its tokenized projects like Mocaverse and its Anime ID partnership with Sony's new blockchain, Siu envisions a future where users own their data, reputation, and digital assets no matter where they go on the internet.

To be fair, that reality may have taken longer than many people predicted — perhaps due to delays in many projects being able to promise their users any utility whatsoever — but Siu predicts big changes on that front this year. Particularly as major entertainment players like Sony start to move their IP onchain, new opportunities are expected to arise for Animoca as one of the industry's leaders in digital property ownership.

"I think last year we did about $350 million revenue, close to $100 million EBITDA and we're sitting collectively, you know, between on and off balance sheet at about $4 billion worth of assets as of last year," he said about Animoca's recent performance. "It's about intellectual property rights in a way, and sort of extending that essentially into the digital world, especially in the face of what's happening with AI, for instance [and] the whole sort of thing that's going on with Ghibli, for instance."

And despite the eye rolls from skeptics, Siu remains unfazed. "You know, you can attain a certain amount of wealth, but if you don't share that wealth, you're actually going to be probably more miserable over time." In his view, it's the network effects — not even necessarily the products from creators — that creates lasting value. "All we're trying to do is help people build bigger network effects."

That, he says, is how Web3 wins.

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