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The metaverse isn’t a place: Why Animoca’s Yat Siu says the future is 100 billion AI agents
Yat Siu said the metaverse is evolving beyond immersive digital worlds, with AI agents increasingly handling commerce, payments and coordination through blockchain infrastructure in the background.
May 7, 2026, 9:09 a.m. 2 min read
What to know:
- Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu argued that the metaverse’s next phase will be driven by fleets of AI agents transacting on blockchains rather than humans in immersive virtual worlds.
- Siu predicted tens of billions of autonomous AI agents will handle bookings, payments, and online transactions in the background, using blockchain as their financial and identity infrastructure.
- He said this “agent economy” could solve crypto’s user-onboarding problem and announced a $10 million Animoca Minds initiative to fund developers building AI agent applications.
For Animoca, this marked a distinct pivot from the pandemic-era vision of the metaverse it once championed, in which users were expected to spend increasing amounts of their social and economic lives in immersive virtual worlds.
Siu now says the more consequential shift may be AI systems operating in the physical world on behalf of humans, handling transactions, bookings, coordination and commerce in the background while blockchain networks function as the infrastructure connecting those agents.
Instead, Siu argued the next phase of the internet may revolve around AI systems operating continuously in the background of everyday life, handling tasks such as bookings, payments, scheduling, and online transactions on behalf of users.
