Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu told Consensus Miami 2026 that the metaverse is finished as a consumer space, and that the 100 billion AI agents will be the main users of the blockchain.
Summary
- Yat Siu said that the idea of a pandemic era of humans living on Earth was wrong, and that the metaverse is a proof of concept for an AI agent infrastructure rather than a consumer product.
- He predicted that 50 to 100 AI agents will eventually operate on the Internet, outnumbering humans and operating automatically on blockchain networks.
- Animoca has announced a $10 million investment plan for developers building AI agent applications through its Animoca Minds platform.
Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu told Consensus Miami 2026 on Thursday that the metaverse, as the crypto industry thought during the crisis, was not really built for people.
“Where we got to is that the metaverse, based on the blockchain, was actually a proof of concept for agents,” he said. “In other words, it was never intended for people as the ultimate consumer.”
The lyrics mark a clean break from Animoca’s previous stance. The company was among the leading advocates of the metaverse concept of the pandemic era, which assumed that users would spend increasing amounts of their social and economic lives in concentrated environments.
Siu said that’s a misconception because of the perverse circumstances of the COVID-19 shutdown, when it seems like remote digital life will be forever. “Everybody thought, ‘Oh, we’re going to be home, and we’re never going to have to walk so far again,'” he said. “Of course, it was the opposite.”
Next: the agent economy
Siu’s new thesis is that blockchain’s most dangerous user base will not be humans but autonomous AI agents. “I think the bottom line is that there will be more agents than people,” he said, estimating that 50 to 100 billion agents could eventually operate online.
In today’s population, 10 to 20 agents per person produces between 70 and 140 billion agents worldwide. “Blockchain technology is the ideal financial system for machines,” Siu said. “We, the people, were essentially guinea pigs.”
The debate centers on the practical problem with crypto’s limited access. About 700 to 800 million people worldwide own some form of cryptocurrency, but as crypto.news reported, less than 70 million fully utilize blockchain systems, mainly because the technology remains too complicated for ordinary consumers. AI agents ignore that limitation.
They interact directly with code, don’t require traditional banking infrastructure, and can run automatically on-chain. As part of the pivot, Animoca announced a $10 million initiative for developers building AI agent applications through its Animoca Minds platform, framing agents as its next major investment phase after the metaverse era closes.
