Yat Siu, president and co-founder of Animoca Brands, predicts that in 2025 there will be a return of opportunities in the metaverse sector. In his speech, Siu analyzes what role Play-to-Earn, the NFT market, and crypto might return to have.
Summary
Metaverse 2025 and the return of opportunities: the statements of Yat Siu of Animoca Brands
In a blog post, Yat Siu, president and co-founder of Animoca Brands, analyzes the metaverse once again, in anticipation of the newly started 2025.
Siu predicts that there may be a return of opportunities, especially in those categories involved with the Blockchain-based metaverse, such as Play-to-Earn, the market NFT and crypto.
This return refers to the boom experienced in 2021, when the concept of profit based on ownership in blockchain games had reached great popularity. In that year, dominating the scene of Blockchain-based metaverses were Axie Infinity, Decentraland, and Sandbox.
Then, however, in 2023, such “open metaverses” faced several obstacles. Already in 2024, however, after the crypto winter, Siu states that the current situation of Web3 and the metaverse has significantly improved, overcoming all the challenges of recession and difficult macroeconomic conditions of the previous year.
In fact, as of today, the co-founder of Animoca Brands believes that the Web3 and metaverse industry is more consistent and more focused.
From this base, Siu believes that it may also be able, for the first time, to attract significant institutional support for digital assets from companies such as BlackRock, VanEck, and others.
Metaverse 2025: category crypto and NFTs
Speaking of crypto del metaverso 2025, Siu considers such fungible tokens as a store of value and a medium of exchange that grows the economy. It’s somewhat like the “money of the metaverse.”
In this regard, Siu reports that as of January 13, 2025, the open metaverse crypto has a daily trading volume well over eight times the average daily trading value of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for December 2024, despite having only about 70% of its total market capitalization and a small fraction of its history.
Speaking instead of NFT, Siu identifies these non-fungible tokens as the “ownership and culture of the metaverse.”
Not by chance, NFTs can represent anything unique in the metaverse, such as digital identifiers (DID), avatars, personal profile pictures (PFP), or personal records of any kind. Then there are virtual real estate properties, artworks, collectibles, and much more.
The value of NFTs is represented by the “disintermediation” of Web3. With NFTs, both in the metaverse and in general, all creators who sell their works receive almost all the proceeds from the sale, minus a marketplace commission (usually 2.5%) and any gas fees.
Not only that, the end users of a Web3 network also receive rewards for contributing to the value of their networks. Siu reports that in 2024, these users received the equivalent of 14.9 billion dollars in the form of airdrop.
The NFTs continue today to be preferred over the traditional intellectual property industry, that of Web2.
The prospects of Siu of Animoca Brands
Another factor that Siu then wanted to consider for the 2025 metaverse is Artificial Intelligence (or AI).
The co-founder of Animoca Brands sees a close interconnection between AI and the crypto world. In this regard, Siu believes that as AI agents become more autonomous, they will increasingly rely on the blockchain for verification and on cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange.
In general, Siu expressed his optimism for the growth of the metaverse sector 2025 and Web3 as follows:
“I predict that 2025 will be a crucial growth year for Web3 and the open metaverse, with an acceleration of the paradigm shift towards property rights for our online lives. The growth of the open metaverse since I gave my TED talk more than a year and a half ago has been impressive, despite the intervening period of bull and bear difficulties.”
The year in which crypto adoption goes mainstream
Recently, Siu spoke also about the crypto adoption, stating that 2025 will be, according to him, the year it becomes mainstream.
Siu predicts that this year that has just begun will be the turning point, especially if the crypto become useful primarily for companies. To support this development, Siu stated that it is necessary to create rails for the crypto.
In addition to crypto, Siu predicted development also for the category of memecoin, defining them as the “crypto for the community.” According to Siu, in 2025 there will be more and more memecoin that will create their own layer 1 or layer 2, giving rise to new ecosystems.
In that speech, the co-founder of Animoca Brands stated that the gaming and Web3 sector is not yet ready for its breakthrough like other categories, but reiterated his optimism.