Building the Agentic Era at Animoca Brands as CEO

The world is entering one of the most consequential technological and economic shifts of our lifetime, and Animoca Brands is building the infrastructure to ensure this new era creates lasting value for our ecosystem and investors.
Over the past decade we have emerged as a powerful champion for digital property rights. We shaped our organization on the conviction that the creators, developers, and participants who generate value in the digital economy must have a meaningful stake in the value they create. Through our investments, products, and ecosystem, we helped pioneer a global movement that changed how the world thinks about ownership in the digital age.
Now, agentic artificial intelligence is bringing about an even more profound transformation. AI agents are evolving from passive chat prompts into autonomous actors that work, create, transact, and generate economic value on our behalf.
In the process, agents will become the primary interface through which humanity interacts with a new internet. As I noted in an essay titled Sovereign Multitude: The Internet After Users, the shift is unfolding in real time. Across the digital economy, autonomous agents are already deploying capital in liquidity protocols, purchasing compute bandwidth, coordinating complex supply logistics, executing micro-contracts, and writing production software without human latency.
We are witnessing not just an important technological breakthrough, but also the beginning of a new economic paradigm in which artificial intelligence is becoming both highly productive and highly accessible to billions of people.
Web3 has struggled with a thorny barrier to mainstream adoption: the abstruse and unforgiving user experience. Complexities like wallet signatures, gas mechanics, bridging, and cryptographic handshakes create friction that turns away billions of prospective everyday users.
It’s a dramatically different situation for agentic AI, where the barriers to entry are low and keep getting lower. Even today, at the threshold of the agentic era, it is becoming remarkably easy to set up and run agents. Our agentic platform Minds by Animoca Brands (“Minds�) has contributed to that accessibility by enabling anyone to launch a customized sovereign agent in a minute or two, without any technical friction or hardware constraints.
There is a remarkable synergy between agentic AI and Web3 because agents provide the natural-language layer that decentralized technology has desperately needed for over a decade. Instead of wrestling with raw protocols and risking costly errors, users can simply state what they want in plain words and let an agent handle the complex mechanics quietly, safely, and automatically.
By removing virtually all friction, agents dissolve the barriers that lie between thought and execution—even in difficult-to-use environments like decentralized ecosystems.
That’s why I am confident that the convergence of agentic AI and decentralized technology will unleash human creative and entrepreneurial potential on a scale never seen before. In the very near future, billions of people will be able to participate in the global economy in ways that were previously unimaginable, not merely as consumers but as creators, traders, and owners.
Imagine a world where every human can be augmented at the touch of a button. Today agents already enable you to build software without knowing how to code, or conduct specialist research without being a specialist, or scout and trade cryptocurrency markets without knowing the intricacies of blockchain transactions. On Minds, deploying such capability takes mere minutes and requires no technical experience.
It’s important to remember that we are still in the early days of this paradigm shift. AI technology continues to improve at an unprecedented pace, at a rate of adoption that exceeds any other technology in history.
In the world of tomorrow, industry leaders agree that humanity will be assisted by billions of tireless agents that measure time in microseconds, operating unencumbered by the tyranny of biological constraints such as human attention or processing time. These agents will act autonomously and continuously on our behalf and in our interests, even while we sleep.
But there are challenges on the road to that future: to fulfil their role and properly serve our interests, agents will need to know an extraordinary amount about us. They will need access to our financial lives, personal preferences, relationships, and private records. They will accumulate a body of knowledge and contextual intimacy about us more extensive than anything that any institution has ever commanded.
That level and depth of knowledge introduces a fundamental civilizational question for the agentic era: who ultimately owns your agents?
If your agents reside within the closed walled gardens of Big Tech, then you are leasing your agents from a digital landlord and assuming significant risk in the process.
Just as closed Web2 platforms extracted user data and monopolized audience distribution for their own benefit, closed AI platforms will naturally configure their agents to serve the platform first and foremost.
We saw this dynamic define Web2: a centralized platform like Instagram does not actually exist to serve your business by expanding your reach; rather, its ultimate purpose is to extract data, capture audience, and maximize margins.
Relying on leased agents exposes individuals and businesses to the same old risks: deplatforming, fee extraction, and arbitrary access changes. Centralized platforms will naturally optimize agent behavior for the platform's revenue rather than the user's priorities; would you trust Meta with the kind of power and intimate data that your agents will possess?
Web3 provided the blueprint for digital property rights, and agentic AI is giving us digital agency. These two technologies are deeply interdependent. Agents can act, but to be truly effective they need something to act with: a verifiable identity, property rights that can be programmed and enforced, and payment rails that run around the clock in fraction-of-a-cent denominations. Traditional banking was built for humans operating at human speed and keeping human business hours; it cannot serve machine economies consisting of billions of agents.
Blockchain can. It was engineered for exactly that purpose. Together, agents and the true digital ownership conferred by decentralized protocols can fundamentally redefine the entire global economy.
A blockchain-native agent can hold a wallet, prove who owns it, and pay or be paid in real time. But it also needs verifiable provenance: cryptographic proof of who created the agent, the integrity of its data, and the precise authority it carries. Through technologies like Moca Network and the AIR stack, we are building the identity, reputation, and provenance layers that allow agents to transact with trust. And the inherent digital ownership of blockchain ensures that the value created by agents can flow primarily to the people they work for, instead of to the platforms that host the agents.
The question of ownership is paramount because if we don’t own our agents, they will end up serving the platform's purposes before (or instead of) ours.
I have always believed that the greatest opportunities lie in building for the future before that future becomes obvious. We did this with digital property rights, and I believe we have a similar opportunity with agentic AI. Our product Minds was launched in beta around six months ago, and is consistently ranked within the top three of the Personal Agents category on OpenRouter (as of 7 November 2026).
Recognizing the critical role of our institutional business alongside the convergence of agentic AI and sovereign ownership as defining frontiers for our company, the Board of Directors has determined that I will step into the role of CEO of Animoca Brands, effective 1 December 2026, while continuing to serve as executive chairman.
I take on the CEO post with total conviction in the importance of melding agentic AI with genuine ownership. My focus will be to unify our long-term vision with decisive operational execution as we scale our core businesses and ecosystem.
Over the past decade, we have assembled an unrivaled ecosystem of more than 600 portfolio companies, deep tokenized infrastructure, and millions of consumer touchpoints. As CEO, my job will be to focus our network advantage into high-impact products, real-world utility, disciplined operational and capital efficiency, and long-term shareholder value.
An economy that operates 24/7 needs financial infrastructure that can do the same. Blockchain provides a foundation, and the participation of financial institutions adds investment expertise, capital, and the governance required to serve clients at scale. Connecting these capabilities is an important part of our opportunity, both for investors today and for the emerging agent economy.
Our institutional business connects traditional finance with digital markets via multiple initiatives. NUVA and our collaboration with Franklin Templeton both aim to broaden access to tokenized investments. Anchorpoint Financial, the joint venture we entered into with Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) and HKT, holds a Hong Kong stablecoin issuer licence supporting programmable payments and settlement. In the UAE, our subsidiary Animoca Asset Management (AD) Limited received a Financial Services Permission (FSP) from the FSRA to manage a Collective Investment Fund within ADGM, Abu Dhabi's international financial centre.
Our priority is to translate these and similar institutional capabilities into adoption and sustainable revenue, while building toward a future where AI agents can access investments, allocate capital, and transact on behalf of their users.
We will continue to scale Minds and AIR, expand our institutional business and tokenization infrastructure, and build out the open identity and settlement rails required by the machine-to-machine interactions of the agentic economy as we leverage our large ecosystem.
At the same time, we will continue to reinforce our corporate governance, reporting cadence, and compliance infrastructure. Year-to-date we have completed our 2022 and 2023 audited financial statements and we continue working toward clearing our historical backlog during 2027 to support a future relisting on a major public exchange. My belief in the work we are doing and the opportunity before us remains stronger than ever.
I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Evan Auyang for his leadership and contributions as group president of Animoca Brands as he moves into his new role as senior advisor. Evan has been a trusted partner, a dear friend, and an exceptional leader throughout a pivotal chapter of growth and industry turmoil. He was instrumental in maturing our organization and establishing the foundations of our institutional business.
Building on these foundations and expanding our institutional business will remain an important priority under my leadership, and I am especially grateful that we will continue to benefit from Evan’s invaluable strategic counsel in his new role.
The next internet will be populated by billions of autonomous AI agents acting as economic participants. The defining question of the agentic era is whether those agents ultimately answer to individual users or rent-seeking platforms.
Animoca Brands helped to shape the era of digital ownership. Together with our partners and supporters, we are now building the foundations for the era of digital agency.
Thank you for your enduring conviction and partnership; none of this would have been possible without your support.
With gratitude,