Animoca Brands' Yat Siu on How Crypto Laid the Groundwork for Agentic Commerce

Animoca Brands' chairman Yat Siu believes that the agentic economy inherited some key concepts from crypto, but left behind others. According to Siu, the agentic thesis, where autonomous software actors with wallets transact on their own, was not always the intended destination. The inspiration for this concept came when Animoca saw what OpenClaw could do, despite being buggy at the time.

The company's involvement in CryptoSlam's $9 million round in 2022 was initially about blockchain-native data analytics, not agentic commerce. However, Siu says that the machine banking perspective, where blockchain and crypto provide financial rails for autonomous agents, is what carries over from crypto. This includes digital wallets functioning as bank accounts for software, stablecoins providing medium of exchange, and blockchains serving as settlement layers.

The infrastructure thesis has gained institutional validation, with the x402 Foundation launching under the Linux Foundation in July 2026. The foundation's 40 founding members include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, and AWS. According to Siu, the goal is not to displace human commerce but to create a transaction surface that could not exist before agents had wallets.

The challenge now lies in closing the trust gap, as only 14% of consumers currently trust AI to execute purchases without verification. The governance bottleneck is no longer about moving money but verifying intent. Animoca's own trajectory reflects this long-term bet, with a peak valuation of $5.9 billion in July 2022 followed by a decline in bookings and token reserves during the bear market.