Yat Siu, Chairman of Animoca Brands, believes the cryptocurrency industry may have fundamentally misunderstood the metaverse, arguing that the next stage of virtual economies will not be achieved through VR headsets or immersive digital worlds, but rather through vast numbers of AI agents conducting transactions behind the scenes via blockchain networks.
Siu said in his keynote that the metaverse may come to us, rather than us going to it. Consensus Miami 2026.
For Animoca, this marks a clear shift away from the metaverse vision it once championed during the pandemic era, when users were expected to spend increasing amounts of their social and economic lives in immersive virtual worlds.
Siu now suggests that a more profound shift may be AI systems operating on behalf of humans in the physical world, handling transactions, bookings, coordination, and business activities in the background, while blockchain networks serve as the infrastructure connecting these agents.
Siu believes that the next stage of the internet may revolve around AI systems that operate continuously in daily life, handling tasks such as bookings, payments, scheduling, and online transactions on behalf of users.
He said that consumers will ultimately be able to rely on dozens or even hundreds of AI agents to coordinate their digital activities, with blockchain networks serving as the financial and identity infrastructure connecting these systems.
“I think the key is that the number of agents will surpass that of humans,” said Siu, predicting that eventually there could be “50 to 100 billion agents roaming the internet.”
He believes this shift can also address one of the long-standing issues in the cryptocurrency space: how to attract mainstream users.
Although an estimated 700 million to 800 million people worldwide own some form of cryptocurrency, Siu notes that fewer than 70 million actively use blockchain applications, as cryptocurrency remains technically intimidating for mainstream consumers.
“My mom doesn’t know how to use MetaMask,” he said. “It’s too difficult for her.”
He believes that AI agents can run directly through code, enabling them to interact naturally with wallets, smart contracts, and decentralized finance systems.
Unlike humans, agents do not require traditional banking infrastructure and can execute transactions autonomously on-chain.
“Blockchain technology is the ideal financial system for machines,” said Mr. Xiao. “We humans are essentially just test subjects.”
The broader argument reflects a growing perspective in certain areas of the cryptocurrency industry that the most scalable users of blockchain may ultimately be autonomous software agents, rather than humans.
Within this framework, wallets, tokens, decentralized identity systems, and on-chain payments become the foundational infrastructure driving the emerging "agent economy."
As part of this initiative, Animoca announced a $10 million investment program to support developers in building AI agent applications through its Animoca Minds platform.
If Siu’s vision is realized, the next wave of mass adoption of blockchain may not come from millions of new users learning how to use crypto wallets, but from billions of AI agents autonomously conducting transactions in the background.