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Animoca Brand’s Robby Yung Knew The Secret To Web3 Before You Did—Here’s How He’ll Outlive Us All

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In the smoky after-hours of 2025 Paris Blockchain Week, your humble scribe found himself in the company of Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands—a man who, judging by his expression, has seen the future and it mostly involves tokens, grandmothers confused by accounting, and the haunting specter of the SEC. We drank weak coffee. He talked; I listened, and occasionally tried to look wise. The details below, like all good stories, might contain traces of truth and caffeine. ☕️

For those who believe financial markets follow logic, I present: The crypto industry post-US elections. Yung, with a resignation only available to those watching history repeat for the twelfth time, offered musings on Mokaverse, AI, and investment tools—each more futuristic than the last. If Metaverse resilience were a stock, Robby would never sell. Or so he claims.

A Market Trend Diagnosis Fit for an American Novelist (Or Therapist)

The global economy? Ah, a billiard table mid-game, all, courtesy of a certain U.S. President with a penchant for plot twists. Still, for Web3? Bullish. The year ended giddy, everyone drunk on optimism, or possibly just on free conference wine.

The US stopped scaring the children in the crypto industry, and now the SEC has retreated—possibly to a beach, possibly to plot its revenge. The chill is gone, innovation no longer cowers, and everyone feels free to lose money in new and exciting ways. Cheers!

The Unbearable Heaviness of Regulations: Comparing U.S. to EU

Where the EU is knitting regulatory frameworks like industrious grandmothers making sweaters nobody asked for, the US is taking a break from enforcement. Kind of a “no rules, just right” approach, like a steakhouse mixed with a toddler’s birthday party. Suppose you like your markets wild and unregulated—may I introduce you to America, where sometimes the absence of law is its own law.

On Animoca’s Shiny Investment Philosophy

Animoca, it turns out, invests like your slightly eccentric uncle: everywhere, in everything, except things that make sense to normal people. Gaming, financial services, perhaps a shoe store, who knows. There are more than 550 investments—each, like a distant cousin, requiring advice, support, or money. If you have a token and a dream (and preferably some technical competency), they’re interested. But don’t expect them to call every day. They’re busy.

The Structure of Money and Teams: Or, How Not to Lose Track of 1,000 Colleagues

There are 40 or 50 people on the investment team. Maybe more. Maybe less. Numbers get fuzzy in blockchain. The secrets of success? Pay attention to those who are in trouble or those who are on a winning streak. Everyone else is an afterthought. It’s almost like parenting.

Accounting For Tokens: The Kafkaesque Experience

And here we discuss the curious incident of the token on the balance sheet. Imagine having a chest full of gold coins, but your accountant insists it’s worth nothing because you minted them yourself. If it’s Bitcoin, voilà! Value. If it’s SAND, also liquid and valuable, you write it down as zero. The laws of accounting, much like fortune, are mysterious and sometimes cruel.

The Sandbox Survives While the Metaverse Freezes

The years 2021 and 2022—years when “metaverse” meant you got a new job or took out a second mortgage trying to buy virtual land. Yung, philosophically, declares Sandbox is just one city in a vast world. Maybe Paris. Maybe Yakutsk. Either way, only one part of the puzzle. The metaverse dream limps on, fueled by community, partners, and, let’s be honest, people’s hope to become rich selling monkey pictures.

Voxel Art: Because Not Everyone Is Picasso 🎨

Why cubes? Because drawing is hard and rectangles are easier. Minecraft’s success gave hope to the untalented, and here we are: A world built out of blocks, where even your dog can create an avatar. As AI rises, perhaps Sandbox 2.0 will create worlds where no one can draw, but everyone’s an architect.

Launching Tokens: Like Baking a Soufflé While Blindfolded

Token launches are rare and mostly unsuccessful—so Animoca now employs people who used to be physicists, which probably explains the equations on the bathroom walls. Success means tokenomics, a giant community, a token table that doesn’t collapse, and possibly a deal with a higher power. Even then, the token (like most living things) requires care, attention, and marketing.

Community: The Bloodstream of Tokenomics, the Antidote for Illiquidity

Yung brings up the Hong Kong property market, where flats change hands like gossip at a parish dinner. High liquidity means you can always find a buyer—and in tokens, that means higher value (so long as you ignore the existential dread). If your sword is legendary and your community bustling, someone will buy it. If not, you’re left holding a rusty butter knife.

The Noble Trickle-Down: Bitcoin as Economic Weather Vane

The post-election market got positively frenzied, like a retirement home on bingo night. Bitcoin, as always, leads—when it’s up, people are happy; when it’s down, everyone blames the internet. Capital comes in at the top and dribbles down, providing a real-world example of trickle-down that actually works.

Mokaverse: The Network to End All Networks (Or at Least Link Them Together)

Mokaverse: born as a community NFT, now a decentralized identity network with ambitions large enough to frighten Facebook. Web3, according to Yung, isn’t about owning the whole city—it’s about setting up roads so everyone can visit, preferably bringing their own snacks. By partnering with giants like Sony, the lines between Web2 and Web3 blur, and the MOCA token, presumably, becomes slightly less mysterious.

AI and Blockchain: A Love Story No One Saw Coming 🤖❤️⛓️

AI has sucked the air from the tech room, but Yung sees a marriage between blockchain and artificial intelligence that’s more functional than romantic. Decentralized open-source AI sounds like a utopia, or maybe just a really fun programming assignment.

Animoca built a model it calls Hey Annie—an AI trained on seven years of investment committee memos. Some say it even dreams in spreadsheets. The grand vision: Projects submit their plans to the robot, which then decides what deserves attention. Humans remain necessary (for now), but when spam becomes too much, let the machine eat it.

When this works (optimism, meet sarcasm), they’ll make a DAO, let users participate, and admit democracy is the worst system except for all the others—though in DAOs, at least the arguments are on-chain and the errors crowd-sourced.

Whether any of this will save humanity or simply create more work for accountants remains the real question. But as Chekhov liked to say (probably): If you mint a token in the first act, someone’s going to flip it by the third. 🧑‍💻💸

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2025-04-30 19:08

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