Yat Siu, one of the early major advocates of blockchain gaming and digital ownership, says gamers remain at the forefront of blockchain adoption.
Gaming company Atari launched its Atari Capsule Collection on March 31, 2021, featuring non-fungible token (NFT) collectibles inspired by classic video games including Centipede and Pong.
The collection, curated by two of Atari’s best-known creators, Dona Bailey and Al Alcorn, was developed through a partnership involving Atari and Animoca Brands, the Hong Kong-based Web3 company that has become one of the largest investors and builders across blockchain gaming and digital property.
NFTs, unique digital assets whose provenance and ownership can be recorded on a blockchain, have evolved considerably since their first major wave of mainstream attention. Digital collectibles, gaming assets, tokenized intellectual property and other blockchain-based assets have become part of a much broader digital ownership economy, even as speculation around individual NFT collections has risen and fallen through multiple market cycles.
“And now it’s really a race of brands to bring these collectibles,” Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, told Presence in an interview about NFTs, digital property rights and why he believes gamers can help drive mass blockchain adoption.
Siu, who was born in Vienna, Austria, is a classically trained musician who plays piano and cello. He began his technology career at Atari Germany in 1990. In 1995, he moved to Hong Kong and established Hong Kong Cybercity/Freenation, one of Asia’s earliest free web page and email providers. In 1998, Siu founded Outblaze, a white-label software-as-a-service provider, and later sold the company’s messaging business to IBM in 2009.
In 2014, Siu co-founded Animoca Brands. Originally focused primarily on traditional mobile gaming, Animoca later repositioned itself around blockchain, digital ownership, gaming and Web3 technologies. By 2026, the company’s investment portfolio had expanded to more than 600 companies across over 20 verticals, including gaming, infrastructure, DeFi, AI, digital culture and real-world assets.
Animoca was also an early participant in the CryptoKitties ecosystem, publishing the pioneering NFT game in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. CryptoKitties, which allows players to collect, breed and trade virtual cats, became one of the earliest examples of blockchain technology achieving significant adoption through gaming. Since then, Animoca Brands has expanded from a relatively small gaming business into one of Web3’s largest investment and development groups.
The following Presence interview with Siu has been edited and condensed.
What’s driving the continued role of NFTs and digital ownership in gaming?
NFTs are actual property rights represented in tokenized form, effectively digital property rights with real utility. With gaming in particular, that utility is easy to understand. You use assets inside a game, so there is a very clear reason why you need them and why they have value.
NFTs and blockchain assets became an important force in gaming because people play games for a purpose and acquire assets within those environments. With decentralized finance, the possibilities around those assets expanded because of true ownership. You can use assets as collateral, fractionalize them, lend them or transfer them. These are things people have always been able to do with physical property in the real world, but historically they were difficult or impossible to do with digital assets.
See related article: Guide to tokens and NFTs: what is tokenization and how does it work?
Gaming itself has also continued to expand as a major form of digital entertainment and social interaction. The pandemic accelerated that transition, but the behavior remained after lockdowns ended. Online games increasingly function as social platforms where people meet, communicate, compete and spend time together. You can see that across Roblox, Fortnite and many other gaming ecosystems.
Games allow people to interact socially while having something to do together. The activity might be different from playing volleyball or another physical game, but the underlying social behavior is similar: people are sharing an experience.
These broader gaming trends continue to pull other technologies into the space, including blockchain assets, digital ownership and NFTs.
Animoca Brands has spent years combining traditional free-to-play gaming with blockchain features such as NFTs, tokens, DeFi and governance. What’s the thinking behind that approach?
We have always felt strongly that gamers can bring mass blockchain adoption because gamers already understand and feel comfortable with virtual assets in virtual worlds. You don’t need to explain to a gamer why someone would buy a virtual sword. You also don’t need to explain why someone might value virtual currency because gamers interact with those things all the time.
Traditional free-to-play games are generally designed around monetization systems where the platform controls the virtual economy. Blockchain-based games introduce another possibility, where players can actually own part of that virtual economy and retain ownership of assets independently of the game operator.
The broader gaming industry has grown substantially since the early days of blockchain gaming. Following renewed industry growth in 2025, gaming entered 2026 as one of the world’s largest entertainment markets, with monetization increasingly driven by pricing strategy, platform economics and more efficient ways of generating value from existing player engagement.
Our thesis is that if you create true ownership of these assets, players should become more willing to participate economically. If I actually own something, I may be willing to pay for it and potentially attribute greater value to it. That is fundamentally different from buying an item that exists entirely at the discretion of a centralized game publisher.
What experiments such as Crazy Kings and Crazy Defense Heroes were originally designed to explore was whether blockchain could give gamers a way to earn value and potentially have a greater say in how the game economy develops.
A player who knows nothing about blockchain should ideally be able to simply play the game and earn digital assets or tokens through normal activity. At some point, that player might recognize that those assets have value. They can then decide whether they want to interact with the blockchain layer, acquire other digital assets or participate more deeply in the economy.
See related article: Are blockchain game voxels the new square foot?
One important idea behind these systems was that participation should be community driven rather than requiring every user to become a crypto investor before they can even play.
Gaming communities are often extremely vocal and active, with strong opinions about what a game should contain and how it should develop. Someone who has played for years may naturally understand the game better than somebody who joined yesterday. Blockchain provides mechanisms through which participation, ownership and governance can potentially be combined with a game economy.
Setting up a cryptocurrency wallet can still be a barrier for non-crypto players. How should onboarding be designed?
Opening a wallet to play a game, even if the process itself is relatively simple, can still be intimidating for a first-time user. Our view has always been that onboarding should be as simple as possible, but simplicity cannot come at the cost of users losing control over their assets.
The motivation should therefore be reversed. A user should have a reason to open a wallet because they already have something of value, rather than being required to create a wallet before they understand why they need one.
For example, earlier blockchain games often required users to connect a wallet before they could meaningfully interact with the product. That creates an immediate barrier for someone who isn’t familiar with crypto. A better experience is to let somebody play first, generate or acquire something valuable and only then introduce the wallet when there is a clear reason to use it.
What do you think about companies such as Dapper Labs making NFTs and blockchain assets easier to access through traditional payment methods?
We were fortunate to be among the early shareholders in Dapper Labs. We were the Greater China publisher for CryptoKitties, so our relationship with Dapper Labs goes back to 2018.
The Dapper team demonstrated that adoption could come from targeting audiences that strongly appreciate collectibles but may not already own cryptocurrency. Allowing people to purchase digital collectibles using familiar payment methods removed one of the major onboarding barriers.
Ultimately, approaches like that can help bring adoption through better onboarding. It doesn’t mean you can’t create similar experiences on Ethereum or other networks. The question is how transaction costs are handled and how much of that complexity the user actually needs to see.
Every resilient decentralized network ultimately has some economic cost because somebody has to pay for the infrastructure and security that keeps the network operating.
If payments and infrastructure are completely centralized, you inherit centralization risks. With decentralized systems, economic incentives are part of what motivates participants to maintain the network.
Ethereum’s economics have also changed significantly over the years. Transaction costs remain an important consideration, but scaling networks and Layer 2 infrastructure have transformed how many applications interact with Ethereum. The broader lesson remains the same: mass adoption requires infrastructure that makes blockchain costs and complexity largely invisible to ordinary users.
For someone entering the ecosystem for the first time, even a relatively small blockchain transaction fee can feel expensive because they calculate everything in fiat currency. Someone already earning and operating inside a crypto economy may perceive that same cost differently. It is relative to the participant.
To reach mass adoption, however, the industry needs scalable networks, Layer 2 systems and other technologies capable of supporting large numbers of users at low cost.
See related article: NFT mania: Are blockchain art and crypto collectibles a fad or the future?
Ultimately, we think digital assets will exist across many chains. They won’t necessarily remain isolated on one network or another. Assets should be able to move between ecosystems where appropriate.
What the early NFT boom demonstrated was that demand for digital assets wasn’t limited to a small group of crypto-native users. Mainstream demand for verifiable digital ownership is possible.
And that’s why it became a race for brands and creators to enter digital collectibles and digital ownership. What began with sports, entertainment and gaming brands has since expanded into a much broader market involving intellectual property, communities and digital economies.
How do you see NFTs today: are they primarily driven by speculators or collectors?
A large portion of people who buy NFTs buy them because they want to own something, although of course there are also participants focused on trading and profit. Fungible tokens can often be much more speculative because people can trade them instantly and sometimes before meaningful utility develops.
NFTs are different because they are naturally less liquid. If you willingly acquire an NFT knowing that liquidity is lower, there is often another reason you want it. It might be art, a collectible, an in-game asset, membership or simply something personally meaningful to you.
That is similar to traditional art and collectibles. You generally don’t buy a Picasso because you expect to sell it tomorrow. The collector argument is that ownership itself has value. The same dynamic exists with sports cards and other collectibles. Maybe you sell them eventually, but part of the appeal comes from saying, “I own this. I was part of this.”
For many token traders, the psychology is different. The value comes from making a good call, making a strong investment and generating a return. With collectibles and many NFTs, part of the value is simply owning the asset and participating in the culture around it.
The market is smaller and less liquid than fungible crypto markets, but that difference can create completely different ownership behavior.
NFTs and digital assets can be transferable and interoperable. Do you still see that as an important trend moving forward?
This is perhaps one of the most important things for NFTs if they are going to become central to what we consider the content revolution.
One of the ideas that emerged during the early internet was that “content is king.” To an extent, that was correct because the internet enabled almost anyone to create content and distribute it globally.
But distribution also became extremely cheap. Eventually there was so much content that discovery itself became the problem. Platforms that aggregated and curated content therefore became extremely powerful.
That led to another idea: content may be king, but distribution is queen. Without distribution, it is extremely difficult for content to succeed. Think about how much major entertainment franchises have historically depended on the platforms distributing them.
We think future content, games and platforms can increasingly be built to benefit assets that users already own. Today, users generally bring their content and assets onto a platform in exchange for discoverability. In an ownership-based model, the content itself can increasingly become part of the platform.
That creates a different creative economy where creators retain greater control. If their content becomes widely used across different applications and environments, the underlying asset can potentially become more valuable as well.
Open digital assets are, in some ways, comparable to open-source code.
Open source demonstrated that millions of people can collectively contribute toward systems and create outputs that are extremely difficult for closed ecosystems to replicate. It is one of the strongest examples of decentralization succeeding on the internet.
Content historically couldn’t work in quite the same way because the internet effectively became a giant copying machine. Content could be duplicated endlessly and increasingly cheaply, sometimes to the point where identifying the original creator became difficult.
Blockchain introduces provenance. You can identify an original creator and trace an asset or piece of content back through its history.
That value layer means people can build additional experiences on top of open digital assets. If I buy a car, I have the freedom to paint it, replace the seats, modify it and potentially sell it for more if I believe those modifications increased its value.
Digital ownership can introduce similar freedoms online. We can add layers of experiences on top of assets and potentially create additional value, which is something we have always done with physical property but historically struggled to reproduce with digital goods.
Do you see assets from one game moving into other games and interoperating in the future?
Absolutely, including transferability.
Nobody says an asset needs to appear identically everywhere. A Formula One car doesn’t literally need to become a Formula One car inside a medieval game. It could become a shield, an item, a badge or something completely different.
It’s a digital world. There is no reason to restrict ourselves entirely to the rules of physical objects.
Another important change is that games can increasingly be designed around adding value to digital assets. Traditionally, virtual goods exist primarily to support the game. The game itself isn’t designed to support those assets.
In an ownership-based gaming economy, successful game design can instead involve creating additional utility and value for assets players already own.
That reverses the traditional relationship between games and virtual goods. It represents a fundamentally different approach to game design.
What about regulatory concerns?
The regulatory environment around NFTs and digital assets has become considerably more developed, but classifications still depend heavily on the structure of the asset and the jurisdiction involved. NFTs are not automatically treated as securities simply because they exist on a blockchain, while fungible tokens and investment-like structures can require substantially greater regulatory consideration.
Projects need to ensure that assets have clear functions and understand that different jurisdictions apply different rules.
The industry is also much larger than it was during the first NFT boom. As more real money, institutions and consumers enter digital asset markets, regulation inevitably becomes more important.
The jurisdictions that create progressive but credible regulatory environments are likely to attract talent and capital.
There is a natural balance involved. Too much regulation can suppress innovation. Too little regulation can damage users and ultimately hurt the industry as well. The jurisdictions that find an effective middle ground stand to benefit the most from the economic activity created around these technologies.
What is your outlook for NFTs and digital property rights, especially in Asia?
Generally speaking, NFTs are one representation of true digital property rights.
The broader argument applies not only to Asia but globally. Historically, major expansions of property rights and free trade created enormous amounts of economic activity and wealth because people could own assets, exchange them and build financial services around them.
The same basic principle can apply to digital economies.
Gaming now represents one of the largest entertainment industries in the world, with billions of players participating across mobile, PC and console ecosystems. The industry returned to stronger growth in 2025, with PC and console gaming revenue increasing 7% year over year, while digital economies inside games continue to account for enormous amounts of consumer spending.
The important question is what happens when a significant portion of those virtual economies becomes an ownership economy.
We think it can ultimately be worth trillions.
And this isn’t simply an Asian phenomenon. It is global. If true digital property rights become a standard part of the internet, the transition could represent a structural change comparable in significance to earlier stages of the internet itself.
Any final insights to share?
A lot of people ask why we don’t simply choose one blockchain or another. Our view has consistently been that we want to work across many chains.
That’s important because decentralization shouldn’t apply only to the assets themselves. Discovery and the platforms hosting those assets should also provide users with choices.
For content to truly flourish, the environment needs to remain open and competitive.
If you think about traditional app stores, their enormous concentration of distribution power can reduce some of the democratic elements of discovery. Even if those platforms work hard to improve discovery, their dominance means a relatively small number of systems determine which applications reach users.
If there were many major distribution platforms with meaningful audiences, the system would become more competitive. Individual platforms might be somewhat smaller, but the overall ecosystem could become larger because more creators would have opportunities to reach users.
That’s how we should think about the future of blockchain and digital content discovery as well.
More choices create better conditions for creators, users and ultimately a more open and creative digital economy.