Yat Siu's Big Ideas: We Already Live in the Metaverse

Magazine: Animoca was a successful mobile game company, with 10 million downloads and various apps in the top 10 of Apple's App Store. Then you were suddenly kicked out of the store in 2012. How did that change your perspective on Big Tech?

Yat Siu, Co-Founder of Animoca: The fact that platforms can become as powerful as they have become - the App Store, Google Play, Facebook, etc. - surprised many of us. Open source had become the predominant form in which code was written, and it was kind of a wake-up call when Apple just decided to push the button and get rid of us.

We didn't fully know the exact reasons, but there was no discussion, negotiation or process. Hundreds of people were potentially out of work and millions of customers lost access to the apps they loved due to the decision of one person or a small group of people who can never be held accountable. And that, for us, was basically a shock. It's not that we saw blockchain and decentralization as the solution back then, it's just that we knew there was a problem.

Deplatforming users without explanation seems very authoritarian, like having rulers but no courts and no strong laws.

Pretty Pet Store was one of the deplatformed games. Source: Animoca

Exactly. Blockchain is not only a technological solution but also, in many ways, a political-socio-economic movement. That's when people get into it. They don't get into it because "Oh look, it's a decentralized ledger. I can have copies of everything! No, they get into it because it means freedom. It means some kind of digital sovereignty at which they aspire to because they lost it in the transition to the digital world.

It took us a year and a half, maybe two years, to get back on the App Store. We were at the top of the space when we were kicked out, and then it was impossible to reclaim our position in the market because by then the competition, through the grace of Apple, had come to dominate the space.

But you're not a Bitcoiner?

I had a hobby mining rig and experimented with Dogecoin just because it was fun and silly. But because it was so financial in nature, it didn't click for me. We weren't from Wall Street, we didn't have that goal. But when NFTs came along with CryptoKitties, that's when we realized, oh, that's the culture.

It was in 2017, so we were quite late. We didn't see the light because of Bitcoin, we saw the light because of NFTs and what it could mean for virtual asset ownership. From early to mid-2018, we were all on the blockchain. That's when we acquired The Sandbox and invested in OpenSea, Dapper Labs, WAX, Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity) and others.

So, you just invested in an NFT or Metaverse related project?

Well, there weren't that many back then. And you could say, it's like a crazy gamble that we took. But it was not a bet for us. It just seemed like the way to go.

I bought my very first "virtual good" from a multi-user dungeon in 1990 or 1989. So this idea of ​​paying money for virtual goods stuck with me for decades. But now that you have the ability to own it and have the composability on top of that, it all sort of blew our minds.

If in-game ownership is such a natural concept for gamers, why have so many American gamers rejected NFTs outright?

I think the reason so many people in the West, especially in the US, reject NFTs is not because NFTs give you ownership. I think the rejection is partly due to changing feelings about capitalism. For the first time in my life, I am witnessing very strong anti-capitalist sentiment in America.

The consumer in Asia, however, sees capitalism as a net good. Things like democracy...