Web3 & Crypto Will Change The World As We Know It! Yat Siu

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and USBC. They will be supporting Ripples's upcoming launch of r l USD. So this is a really great rewards program and if you'd like to learn more, please visit the link in the description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward, and joining me today is Yatsu who's the co founder and chairman of Anamoga Brands yacht. It is great to have you on.

I actually have a degree in music. That's actually what I first started doing. And you know, I think it wasn't because I wanted to study music. It was it was because in particular that's what my mom knew how to do. And it's a classic immigrant story, which is kind of like, well, you know, you you know, originally from from well actually Tawan and China, so moving to a place like Austria in her case because she wanted to study music, but also in a way to escape

what was going on in China. You have to remember that in the seventies, China was not a great place to be cultural revolution, conflict between what's going on, you know, between really Taiwan and China, and to some degree Hong Kong.

In fact, what interesting story is that my mom's family sort of after the culture sort of after the Civil War which was in sort of which ended in forty nine, they were moving sort of not originally to Taiwan, but actually living in Hong Kong, and my great grandfather had to sort of evade several assassination attempts at the time because he held a certain type of political office in

China at the time. Well no longer then because at the end of the war, so they had to move to Taiwan for instance, as a family, right, So that's that was kind of the era that people that my mom grew up in, to an extension, my father as well, and so you know, this was a generation people who never thought they'd go back to China, right, and therefore they trained their children also to kind of sort of

never go there. And there's almost like an erasing of your Chinese culture because it was kind of a bad thing. And we see this same type of cultural sort of sort of I guess changes for immigrant stories all over the world, maybe with different cultures, whether you're you know, from an African nation or maybe Middle Eastern country that has gone through a similar situation. You know, they don't try to assimilate and maintain their culture as much. They

try to sort of integrate with that local culture. So, you know, we spoke German at home. German is my mother tongue, for instance. You know, she really, you know, she really tried to sort of integrate me into local culture as much as she could. And Europe was also an interesting time because it was split really between East and West Europe. This is the other thing that maybe today's generation might not fully appreciate. So I grew up at a time where communism was literally around the border.

You know, Vienna was at the edge of that. It was literally the outer edge, you know, because bordering Hungary, and then of course there's you know, what used to be Czechoslovakia by now sort of split up, and And

and Poland, and these were all communist countries. And my mom used to work at the eastern side of Berlin later on her career, which meant that to visit her, I would cross literally across the border through checkpoint Charlie's Child and I would basically see my mom, and you know, that was fine, but you know, you'd literally cross into It's like going from you know, a western democratic society in the west side of Berlin and then moving to the eastern side, which is like a scene out in

nineteen eighty four. I mean, it's hard to describe that because today you might feel this experience going into either horror horror scene set or some kind of you know, like like like Disney said, like you would go in and sort of experience something completely wild and different, and here that was actually reality. That was That was how life, like a sort of life is like literally like where

food was scarce. You know, you had like supermarkets where you know, it was wide and you would have literally can spread apart roughly half a meter to a meter, so the food would be distributed around because you didn't have enough food. Like you know that That's how wild

it was. Anyway, sort of going on a bit of often a tangent, but I would say that that background shaped me a lot in terms of thinking about I guess a little bit about society, you know, capitalism, culture, socialism, all that type of stuff, and you know which kind of I think to some extent affected my thinking, especially today around Web three and the meaning behind it all. But the way I got into technology was I wasn't

really a great musician. I was actually pretty bad compared to my peers, because you know, with music, it's one of those things where when you have talent, you can really really tell second athlete, sorry, you can just run faster. You know, there's there's no no kind of equal opportunity. Okay, you're not as tall, so let's give you better shoes.

That type of stuff doesn't happen in sports. It doesn't happen in music either, So you know, I had to work ten times harder than all my fellow students sort of colleagues, who were just simply more gifted, or they had better physical attributes, like if we played piano, having longer fingers helps. Okay, it's just biology, right, And so you know, I did composition, and in order to give

me an edge in composition, I used a computer. And you have to understand back in the eighties at that point, you know, the computer was really the atarist that I

was using at a midiport. So I was basically able to play music that would then show up on the screen or basically you know, I would write the software that enable that and then I can edit that, whereas the old way of doing it was literally sort of pen and paper, okay, And so there's a kind of a disconnect, but that's what people would do, and so

so that was quite helpful for me. My teacher was absolutely not impressed because this was the time when calculators were banned in class Can you imagine asking a computer to help you. It's kind of like the debate we're having to day a little bit with AI. But right like, I'm using AI in classroom? Is it okay? So not okay? Obviously I'm a generally positive proponent of it, but it's one of those things where you know, it was really

sort of it wasn't disruptive because it wasn't scaling. It was just more like I was like the weird or bad student. But the software was uploaded on this pre internet service called computer, and there I met a community of people and it starts to sound all familiar, like from you know, community people. And they didn't really care where it was from, how old it was, because it was basically a teen and you know, frankly what nationality I was from, it didn't matter. I just wrote software

that they appreciated. And so that the aha moment was, you know, when people send me money. Now, the way you send money in that era wasn't. It wasn't like a PayPal or some kind of digital money that didn't exist. They literally sent me checks in the mail, and so you would open your post office and you'd literally see people write you some kind of check. And I remember

this was like twenty five years dollars. I was like, oh wow, because and back then the idea wasn't a subscription for people who are writing software, you know, sort of what we called shareware, which is kind of a category of public domain. It's like, if you like the software, you know, send some money to this address if you appreciate it. And I didn't do it because I know expected anyone to send me money. It's kind of bragging rights.

It's like if you write software and you put shareware, you just do that, right, Like today, nobody puts their address by the way, you know, they put in the share and they put their sort of a sort of contributions online, right, But back then was totally normal. Anyway people started sending me money, and you know, twenty five years dollars back in the day was a lot money.

So that was what I think. But also too I didn't have a bank account because it was a kid, right, So that experience also taught me about how to open a bank account and how do I cash in basically

check that's in dollars. Went back then the Austria wasn't even part of the EU, or the EU wasn't even created back then, it was it was the shilling, So it was like a weird thing, and it catapulted me in sort of into this era of sort of you know, digital communities and an early early version of I guess digital commerce, which then led to a job at a Tari because Atari appreciated the software I was writing and asked for me to come in and say, hey, we

like what you're doing. It might be an opportunity. And I show up and they're like, how old are you? But it didn't matter. I still got the job. And I think this parallel is true for every technological innovation cycle, at least for opportunities for young people. For instance, if you're even today, if you're good at what you do in crypto and web three, if you can program well, it doesn't matter how old you are to be eighteen nineteen twenty, you don't need a university degree. If you're good,

you're hired. You get paid a lot of money for it, right. And we saw this in the early days of the web. To build a website doesn't matter how old you are. I mean, we used to pay a million dollars for websites, can you imagine, right? Or if you're doing mobile you know mobile apps right, if you know, only mobile apps during the era of smartphone growth, didn't matter how you were or where you're from. You're hired. You do a job.

Didn't matter if you're in the Philippines or whether you're in Taiwan, or whether you're in you know, in the Middle East. You know, you didn't have to have a degree in some kind of great local university. You were just given the opportunity. And I think that was really attractive and that really drew me into sort of the space. And then because of Atari, I went to the US.

They went under that we created a startup that eventually led to us doing a business around Silicon Graphics, which is basically SGI for those who might remember what that is. All the great movies and special effects. It was sort of produced with SGI machines if you industrial light and magic sort of gives you any kind of sort of reference. And we were working in a I guess three metaverse type of product category you could call it, which is called VRML. And so VRML was essentially the VR version

of what HTML was at the time. It stood for Virtual Reality Markup Language, so literally HTML, except it was a it was a virtual reality version, which sort of catapulted us into that particular space. And that led me to go basically from from you know, the US to Asia and I started one of the Asia's very first online sort of ISPs caulled Hong Kong Online and anyway, I mean, I could go on, but that was kind

of the initial initial period of my life. At that point, I was in my early twenties and and that was in the early nineties, so I'm really dating myself now.

sing called mosaic, right, this was even pre Netscape. Yeah, and then and and I think what what then happened was is Mark and Reason basically launch Netscape, and that was really the beginning of you know, at the time sent the whole sort of portal business and the whole idea of the website or presence perspective, and from an attention point point of view, you know, my my, my model.

And I think this is I think why people like marketing recent in particular, look at the Web three and they sort of and while we're I don't think with the exactly the same age, but we're from let's call it same or similar web generation because he started, you know, building Netscape, and we're basically you know, building a version of GeoCities back in Asia roughly during around that time, which is called you know, Hong Kong Cyber City, anyway,

the point being is that we're in sort of different areas, but building in some spaces having the same fascination about you know what today we call web one, but back then was just the Internet, right, and we're just using browsers and and and so the fact that he has this vision around Web three and he sees the future the way that he does to me is completely natural, right.

I think any person who has experienced what we have would basically see Web three as in a way or sort of almost like going back to the future type of experience. It's like, we see this pattern, and we see the possibilities, and we see the way that the Internet should have been, because that was a promise of Web one, right, this idea that you know, what, however, was sort of distributed and decentralized was information and the value and the distribution of that information, which was the

kind of power. Right. And you also remember that in the eighties and prior to that, you know, what was really powerful was knowledge. Right, So everyone talked about knowledge economies, and everyone talked about you know, like, if I had certain kind of knowledge, would get certain kind of jobs? And what that is to some extent true, Right, The most valuable thing today isn't knowledge because that's been commoditized,

you know, because of the Internet. Is actually what knowledge creates, which are network effects inherent, which we see representative of things like AI very very sort of viscerally so, but even before that, you know what's happening when network effects and things like Instagram or Facebook, very social networks, or

Amazon or Google or Apple. These are all companies that have built powerful network effects from our knowledge and information from the social graphs that essentially we give to them, right, but they are sort of captured in this web to world. And so we both witnessed this era where this open Internet were really open source and being open was the ethos. The standard somehow became sort of closed and sort of

this walled garden in Web two. And so the parallel, I want to sort of give here it and you know, we take it, took it from slightly different approaches. But the parallel here is when you look at market reasons early days on things like Netscape and sort of what he was doing on building sort of you really sort of a distribution platform with the web. What he was doing was essentially looking at how he can generate value from the attention that is being generated in this new era. Right.

And this is also the time when Bill Gates famously said, you know, basically what he talked about sort of content being king, right, and content being king, because he recognized also that in this era everyone could be a content producer, and it was no longer you know, just just sort of the distribution or the sort of the large publishers that had controlled, because everyone could basically become a content

producer because of the web. Right. And again we're talking about these forms of attention, right, It's just you know, you had a website and you create attention, whether it's a blog or whatever, and then these these forms of attention sort of generate value for them. And that form of value was advertising, right, And that advertising was the proxy for how successful your attention based economy was, whether

this is a website or maybe a game. And you know, in Web two, this type of attention was consolidated in platforms like Instagram. So instead of going into this is my website, dot com or whatever? Right, remember the dot com era, we went into what's your Instagram handle or

what's your TikTok handle. So we suddenly moved away from being in our own independent, decentralized status into some kind of centralized environment, and then not recognizing that our contribution to this actually enhanced a larger network effect as a whole,

which then gave the platforms all this power. And we see this zeb where now in the Web two world and then with Web three with tokens, there is essentially the same type of narrative around attention, except now tokens are the representation of that attention, but in an ownership and capitalistic perspective, So that means that value is distributed and descibralized, but attention can now be owned, which wasn't really possible before because of the tokenization, so which means

that you can translate it as well. To the extent that we saw, you know, millions and millions of websites launch, some big and many small. We're seeing the same thing

with tokens. It's going to be you know, millions and millions of websites, tokens actually already millions, you know, one hundreds of millions of tokens launch, of which the vast majority will be small but still meaningful for the businesses involved, and a handful of them will be really really large and important, but in a much more distributed and decentralized way, in much way that the early days of the Internet

as well the Internet was. And I think we're all believers that Work three is just the better Internet because we can actually own it and we have mechanisms in which we can sort of compose of building it in the free way, in much the way same way that open source built the foundations of the early Internet. So I see it as really going back to the real principles of what the what the sort of free and open internet was supposed to be.

token of maybe tokenizing their business or tokenizing themselves. If that's the future we're headed in. Do you does that make sense? And do you see that happening where it's more yeah, you know, more multipaceted on that front.

tokenization as a whole. So tokenization can manument can can be many things, right, So you can you know, that can be used for our WA's and you can sort of tokenize real estate or some I don't know, some some some some some precious art or you know that that's that's one example, right, And then if you look at stable coins, right, I mean, that's that's one of the most sort of I guess sort of obvious of our w is in a way that it takes a construct that is from the physical world, right in this

case of currency like the dollar, and you basically translate that very directly into the digital world with as a stable coin. But the sort of one that's really growing is this sort of network asset. And so this is where it's interesting because you know, technology has had a way in which it opens up new paradigms in which you can do things you can do before. Right, like before we you know, its idea of digital ownership was just not possible because actually you know who owned it

was really the platform. But what made it possible was a database. So I think when you really go down into the very fundamentals of you know, it doesn't mean why it's blockchain or whatever, that the whole data paradigm only works and the construction of the networkers only works because we invented this thing called the database. But the

question becomes who owns that database? And so for the longest of times, all the data in the database owned it was owned by a central platform, and that wasn't necessarily by its intentional design. It was just that there was a limitation of that technology. And of course businesses never thought of sort of you know, like when you talk about building a database and only the data. That wasn't the early in the WHEB one era, wasn't really a construct other than a tool to facilitate, you know,

the navigation of the web. It wasn't really thought of us as it was today, where you can basically suddenly build these knowledge graphs and create these network effects that have become much more powerful. And because of that technology, the sort of network effects business became possible. Now you mentioned Metcalf's laws. So Metcalf's law is a great example of I guess the traditional telecom example of the network effect, which is, you know, it is designed that way and

then as a theory because of basically the telephone line. Right, so you know you're and you know, measuring societies. If I have X number of telephone lines, I can kind of measure how many more telephone lines that could grow and what the value of that business could be. Right. But it was very linear in a way. Although they added some kind of sort of sort of curve to it, it was generally a fairly linear curve because you know, there's only so many connections you could make with one

single phone call between other people. Right. But you had the sort of new extension around this one which was you know, known as Read's law. And Read's law is sort of this added version where they basically didn't just take metcal law, but they say, okay, here's Medical's law.

But actually under this new construct with the Internet, you had the ability to create networks within networks that might be even larger than the main network, except like a telecone infrastructure for a phone line can't be bigger like like my home, like my phone in my home wouldn't be bigger than you know, you know, like a phone network in and then like a city or something. It's just it's it's it's directly correlated by where the phone

line would be for the most part. But for online network effects, you know, for instance, if you take something like you know, Reddit subgroups, right, or Facebook or Instagram, you'll have a collection of groups or people that might represent maybe eighty percent of the traffic, right, But then they add to the whole, and then you benefit from

that type of growth, right. And that's basically the kind of explosive growth that was happening in the online community is frankly in Web one and then the Web two because of the data paradigm they managed to after that.

And then of course the other thing is is that we never really valued data until much later because we couldn't harness it, we couldn't create network effects for it, because our systems and compute wasn't powerful enough, Right, So I liken it a little bit too, like, oh, you discovered oil, but you didn't know what to do with it, so you just kind of left it there. That was actually Web one data. It was spilling all over the place, but there was no way that we could process it.

And then we started getting a little bit better with the AI and compute started getting a little bit more powerful, and around two thousand and five two thousand and six, we started to be able to mine that data more productively and suddenly there was value. But because it happens behind the scenes, we didn't really know what was going on. And now these companies that own these network effects and our power in these values are actually the most valuable

companies in the world. You know, whether this is Google, but this is Facebook, we even Microsoft or Apple. Right, they are the biggest and richest companies in the world. And of course the ones who provide the compute like Nvidia. Right, these are the most powerful value company in the world. What are they actually selling us? They're selling us entirely virtual goods. There's nothing physical about their value proposition. I mean, yeah, Apple sells phones, sure, but the reason why you buy

an Apple phone is because of their virtual ecosystem. You're not buying an Apple phone because you can make great phone calls with it, right, You're buying it because there's the app store, and there's social applications on it, and there's ways for you to connect people. That it's entirely virtual value and it comes from owning these monopoly effects in their own network effects. So today the most valuable. So let's call it acid class. That is a new

asset class that didn't exist. Is the sort of is a network and the ownership of a network effect. But who owns a network effect? Are the richest companies in the world today? You know, Apple knows three trillion, you know Meta ad like I know, two trillion, like whatever, like like crazy crazy figures. I mean, you know, I think fifteen years ago the biggest company was maybe half a trillion company and it was and that was like

I think egg egg on mobile. It's like an energy company, right, And so it just kind of shows to you sort of where we've come today. And so this is a long winded to say to say, there's this new as a class now that can be available to be owned by the end user, and that is essentially a network

asset and that basically is represented through tokenization. And you look at this, for instance, whether you own bitcoin or whether you own ethereum, or where you own any kind of token that's out there, You're not buying it because of its pure yield that they generate, right, That's not why you buy the token. You buy the token because it gives you an ownership in a network, and if the network grows in whatever facet of that network effect that it may be, then its value will sort of

increase commensurately. And network effects have a powerful thing where they embed amongst them. So the most obvious network effects, and you talk about before things like religion and politics, Yeah, I mean they're kind of network effect. In fact, money is a kind of network effect. There's an interesting parallel around money, by the way, where you know, you have to give away money in order to give it value, but if the same kind of money is used by

a lot of people, then it has value. Right. It increases the chility and actually increases its network effect, which can be seen by things like the dollar. Right. And I think tokenomics is very similar as well. Like you don't give out the token. If the token isn't used by a lot of people, it doesn't matter that you own all of it. If you own all of it, it's worth nothing right to kind of like a little bit like like art. If you have you might have a piece of art that you know, it's super rare,

that could be thousands of years old. If nobody knows about it, it's worth nothing. Right. You need to you need to you need to. It needs to be distributed in form because everything inherently has value because of its network effects. It just hadn't been really able to be represented across the board. And again tokenization enables that.

a whole, right, and that really revolutionized things. And if you think about it, you know, from my own experience as in the pre Internet era, right the knowledge I had was distributed to the rest of the world in some form of fashion, they appreciated and I received value for that, Right, That was that was kind of you know what happened. What happened there in Web three, I think is the problem we have in the world to

some extent as well. It extends that into digital property rights because now everything that you have digitally, you now own it represented through a token or through toganization, so you basically have ownership of that kind of property, which is the foundation of capitalism. Right. You know, the fact that I own a house is the ability for me to maybe leverage it or do a mortgage or for instance.

The other form of property right which is virtual, which is you know, very relevant I think today in the conversation because people like Jack Dorsey and Elon are like, oh, you know, kill IP rights, but IP rights are actually foundation are really one of the very very first sort of sort of virtual property rights, which is the which is the fact that hey, because I invented this, or I created this, or I made this music or I wrote this book, I have a certain type of right

for a certain limited period of time to monetize and benefit from my original creation and just to sort of sort of put a sort of number on it. In the US, almost half of the US people, of the youth population is employed by companies whose primary business is in the intellectual trademark or copyright type of business right where it's technology, whether it's art, music, US on right and the global market for IP rights as it were, is about sixty eight trillion dollars, last estimated by Whippo.

So that's that's sort that's just actually again, you know, that is the most valuable thing. That is the most valuable thing that exists out there. So the foundation of property rights and the fact that we can own that right is actually foundation of how wealth can be created

and how we can take a share in that. And and you know, I'm sort of explaining this little background story there because it's very relevant for today in terms of how we should think about token edition and then sort of the thinking we have with this, because the foundation of copyright law actually started really one hundreds of years ago in this thing called the Statute of Ann And the Statute of Ann was really one of the very was really the first way in which you sort

of tried to sort of encapsulate actually that authors. It was really for books, because you know, books was the presiding medium. And by the way, the books became popular because of technological innovation called the Gutenberg Press. But the Gutenberg Press actually enabled everyone suddenly to cheaply make books because back then, if I wanted to read a book, someone had to write it by hand. Okay, So they had a real limitation as to how many books you

could publish. So then when the Gutenberg Press came out, sudden everyone could write books. But who were the ones that actually ended up having monopoly over it. It was the publishers because they controlled the printing presses, so they were the ones who could print those books. If I was an author, I had to work to the publisher and they controlled everything. And so the Statute of van basically wasn't so much about just the property rights around

the authorship of the content. It was also to be very clear to say the author the rights of the content belonged to the author, they didn't belong to the publisher, right, which basically took away power from the publisher and essentially gave agency to the authors, decentralizing that power and also creating what you could say a kind of cultural revolution

of book writing. And it was around that period of time, basically fifteen sixteenth century, where there was an explosion of philosophers and book writers and content creators of that generation that emerged because now there was an economic reason for me to take a risk to maybe write something a little bit subversive or controversial, because I could earn income from it as opposed to publisher who actually would censor you.

And I say this example because we're kind of in that similar era because you know, we were very open and then we started getting into Web two, which created these walled gardens who were our publishers. I mean, Facebook is our publisher, right, Instagram is our publisher. And what were they doing, as we know today, they were doing censorship.

They were deciding what you can and cannot see based on things that they thought they would benefit, right, because essentially authors have no right in their content, like you have no rights on Instagram, right that you don't need, they decided for you. And even with YouTube, if there's something they don't like or someone else with powers as you don't like, you give to get the platform, right,

So that's kind of very similar. So so we're kind of seeing itself history repeat itself, which comes back down to sort of you know why I share this is because I think there's a lot of lessons in history that we can study about sort of you know, human behavior and the patterns that get us there. So many of the things around you know, capitalism or even if you take a look at some of the early works

from from from John Locke or even Adam Smith. I mean, these are obviously in many ways dated, but the principles around what they were trying to solve is actually not that different from what we're trying to solve in a way, because you know, they were still grappling with the changes of their time and thinking about sort of you know, what is the way in which we can have some you know, in this case freedom, right, And the basis of that freedom is that you need to have ownership

in something, and you need to have ownership in you know, back then the labor theory value. But it still has the same principle, which is that hey, I need to I need to have ownership in something that is protected. And what is the role of government? And here it's interesting because things like blockchain actually start to take over what philosophers have passed used to think were the role of government, right in terms of the consistency and the

laws and the rules applied. Blockchain actually basically automates that in a very open and transparent manner, in a manner that governments simply can't because you still have human error involved, as we see time and time again. Right, So those are the things, and so I think, you know, studying history, being interested in philosophy, being a humanist is so important. And I think this is even more important today than it was before, because again we came from an era

where my generation certainly was an era of specialization. You're an engineer focused engineer, your medical doctor going to medicine that you're really really focused on the one topic and of course, in classic sort of Asian tiger parenting, that's what they would want to do as well. And do you want to to really really focus on the thing

that you're supposed to be super good at? But today, with AI and technology and information, you're you're kind of better off being a bit more of a generalist, using the tools around you to help you, and a mass as much kind of different knowledge. And what is the kind of knowledge that you know you would be better at and that you can harness better than what a computer can do? I mean, computers can better than your math.

Let's just face it, okay, I mean, you know, maybe there's some crazy genius, but for the most part, we're better off having the computer do the math us, right,

So what are we better at? We should be better things that relate to our human experiences, things like you know, you know what makes us human, you know, whether it's love or emotions or feelings, our passions, our interests, you know, and these are things that we didn't have time to explore because we're literally sort of worried about being machines.

I mean, that's what we've trained in traditional schools. And now in a way, you know, we should try to liberate ourselves, in a way to sort of step back a little bit and say, Okay, how does the world really work? And I think this is even more relevant right now because so much of the sort of fake news and and sort of of categorizations we see around the world comes to the fact that they don't know what's happening in the world, Like you know, one one

side of the argument. I see this like in colleges, and I think this is where a lot of American politics, particularly in the Republican side, are so sort of you know, horrified. But there's this you know, how it's cool to talk about Marx and how communism is suddenly in vogue right and you know, you know, if you understand why it's in vogue because of the fact that what caused communism

was inequality in society. Right then, you know, back looking back in history, then maybe you need to address it that way. So there's obviously from a sort of diagnosing the symptoms, you know, Marx was actually correct, and if you just look at that part, you know, we're seeing

history repeat itself. His solution is a disaster. So let's not go there, but the but the but but but we have lessons that we can learn from all of those people, because you know, these these things were going through you know, we were experiencing and even with authors and science fiction writers, I mean, you know, they also kind of sort of have a view of the world that it gives us a little face in the traces as to what the world could look like and think

about that. So so I would say, you know, my interest in the humanities and my interest in those eras really shaped me. And having then had the I guess in some ways privilege of growing up in really a split world, you know, so I was as shared I

was in the Western world. Then I would visit my mom and let's see what was you know, East Eastern East East Berlin like was like which is basically communist as a communist and it was but but Europe was still a socialist democratic framework, so it was capitalist with socialist essentially sort of rails, shall we say. And then I went to America and there it was like you know,

it was there's completely sort of open capitalism. I mean, then I went to Hong Kong, and for those who don't really know Hong Kong, you know, Hong Kong is is like capitalism on steroids, right, and it's and and it's so bad that they didn't even have social security when I got there. So this is the this is the capitalism gone totally bad where you had extremely wealthy people. I think at the time when to Hong Kong in the in the nineties, I think it had like the

highest density of Rolls Royces in the world. It's a little bit like what maybe Dubai is today. Right at the time, right, you know, it was it was that kind of stuff, like everyone had a role. It was

just really wild and crazy stuff. But then you had also you know, you know, seventy or eighty year old grandpas and Grandma's literally pulling up trash on the other side, right, So that was the and in some ways looking at that, you can also see, yes, capitalism was really positive, but if left unchecked in a certain way, it can go

in this direction. And you know, if you look at how Hong Kong developed in the early periods before they started introducing some form of social safety net, it's kind of what was happening in the Western world today between sort of you know, the one percent and the rest of the world, right, And it creates the same kind of tension and conflict. So observing your environment and studying I guess history, I think is really important.

you can know where your tax dollars are going. Do you see this technology solving some of those old world capitalism or whatever economy you're running inequalities, not solving everything, but making it better.

a net basis, are we better? I would say so? Right, I think I think most people would agree with the fact that we're we've seen progress, right, you know, less people are hungry, you know, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I think I think we're in a broadly better space because of it. Now that leads me sort of into sort of some of the specifics around

Web three. So I had shared earlier on the fact that sort of, you know, Web three's innovation is around you know, basically a value and bund bridge of property rights. What it really does is, if we succeed in sort of getting people onto Web three, is that it teaches you about financial literacy, right, And that's the one area of value sort of knowledge that has been kind of hidden.

And our contention is that the reason why we have this sort of really large gap in the world for the most part is because there's a percentage percentage of the world, which is very small, that understands money and investing and value in you know, a capitalist society, and so they understand capital formation. You know, whether they were trained or inherent doesn't really matter. They kind of understand it, right.

And then there's the rest of the world, partially because of the education system and also culturally that don't understand money because money was really just used as a means to a certain end, but they don't actually think of it as you know, investing or building capital. And they're

still stuck in a labor world. And when you look at, for instance, labor, if you look at where labor was and where capital is, you know, if you had, like, for like invested your labor value and your capital value, capital far exceeded that of your labor value over the last twenty years, right, and so and so this whole idea of well, you work hard and you make money and you're fine, it's all gone. It doesn't work, right, But that's what we're being told. And by the way,

we're still being told that, right, you know. And again this is not to say don't work hard, of course, but and I don't want to sort of taste this trope about work smart because you know, it's kind of it's a little bit demeaning as well, what do you mean by that, right? But rather it's to say that you need to have the right kind of knowledge, and this in this case, it means you need to have financial literacy. But financial literacy is one of those interesting

things where it's a very specific subsector. But because we acknowledge that we live in a capitalist world, therefore you must be financial literate to succeed in a capitalist world. Right, And this is the irony. Right, you're saying, we endorse capitalism, we want promote it, but you don't teach it in school. So you go, I mean, we don't learn anything about

capitalism when you're in primary school. And I have three kids, so I've seen this and I had to teach them about it because you know, basically going from primary school, middle school, high school. Frankly, what's your first experience with with you know, really real capitalism. It's you know, for a lot of people, it's you know, a student debt, okay, and your face with the really the other side, which

starts to feel a little bit like indentured servitude. Suddenly, right, And so are we really surprised that things like topics like Marxism and communism are becoming popular, particularly in the younger generation. Like if you just think of it this way, we're creating indentured servants. They have to pay back, you know, some kind of you know, basically virtual debt. You don't

understand anything about money. They have to pay that back in many cases for maybe the first ten or twenty years of their life, whatever it is, you know, they

have to take a job to pay back the debt. Right, Like all this stuff, right, and it starts with this idea that they don't understand even basic things like compound interest and how it works, or for instance, you know, money supply, right, you know, like when when you know, especially during COVID, but actually you know, during the you know, basically Leman banking crisis, you know, in two thousand and two thousand and nine, you know, which was really the

birth of bitcoin. Right, that was kind of the whole thing of we we reject basically this betrayal of the monetary system. How many people really understood what governments were doing to our money? Right? They have? Very few really understood the one percent of the world did, and so they did. They did the right strategies. Whether they invested in certain assets but real estate, bought bitcoin, doesn't matter.

They understood what was going on. The rest of the world doesn't understand what's going on, right and so and so, and so they lost out because they had a lack of knowledge that was necessary for financial literacy. So that's kind of that's kind of the fund sort of let's call it, I would say, the sort of the base foundation that imagine a world where most people are somewhat financially literate, like in the same way that most people had some but had more knowledge through the Internet. Now

we had more knowledge and understanding money and investing. You've completely changed the framework of the world, and you'd also create much more equity. And so this comes down to some of the constructs now, which is that, for instance, to tokenization, we can now actually embrace in something that we like to call stakeholder capitalism. Capitalism has a bad name in large part because the structure of particularly the share of the capitalism experience today is very concentrated. So

take a look like a company like Apple. I think Apple has about eighty thousand shareholders. Okay, or you know, which means eighty thousand shareholders. Sure, some of our mutual funds and they're distributed, so maybe the indirect holding is larger. But the point is it's a very small number of people that essentially own the world's most valuable company in the world, which is basically what three trillion or whatever whatever day we look at between three to three point

three trillion dollars. But that's it's time, right, So, how many people who buy an iPhone actually have an interest in the success of Apple, right, you know, scarcely anyone? Or call it Facebook, or call it pull at Google, doesn't matter, right, And so so how do you create a framework where both the customer and the company are

actually true stakeholders. It means they have to have a stake in with you too, but even administratively, imagine if every Apple owner, Apple, Apple, MacBook owner or something was also an individual share Facebook. Well, first of all, it's unmanageable. You'd have like hundreds of millions of shareholders, which you can't manage, right, And we're a public company and you know, we have thousands of shareholders, and when we set out notices and stuff, it takes forever and like in our case,

we even have to you know, freaking print stuff. So it would just bankrupt us to simply to send paper out to the world, right, because we're still stuck in that. But through tokenization, you can basically sort of create a shareholder registrar that basically could extend to millions of people. You could vote in real time on stuff. For us to get a vote going, we need at least twenty one days, actually more like twenty eight days, right because

people have to be informed and stuff. And I don't know whether you own the shares because I have to

verify it through some central register as supposed to. I own the token, so I know I can vote and I can make a decision, Like we can change governance where you can literally you know, govern if not you know, you know, if you want to do it even daily, right, So there's things you can really really do in through tokenization, and that to us, you know, we believe in capital, so we believe that we need to spread property ownership or what property ownership can be spread broadly. You know,

it's not physical, it's virtual, it's digital. Right, In the same way that IP rights has really become that growth opportunity which is an early form of virtual property rights. Sort of this type of digital property rights that we see through token addition to these new network sort of

states can extend broadly throughout the world. And so that means that, you know, what would the world look like if every Instagram user actually also had a stake in Instagram as an example, Right, that would be very different.

Or you know, what would Uber drivers feel like if they were you know, if there were also shareholders in Uber the company for instance, Right, even if it's just you know, like a relatively small percentage compared to the people built it doesn't matter, right, they would feel very differently. They'd be like, oh, okay, in the future, AI is

going to take my job. But that's okay because my contribution helped basically build this company, where then I have an income stream and secured into the future because I own a stake in a company that I helped build through my labor, because I am a stakeholderness. Right, So those are the models that would we think would create a fair or society. And the last point I want

to sort of find. Sorry, I guess just rambling on a bit, but I guess the last point I just wanted to add was one thing that blockchain does really good, does really well is and that again is the foundation of property rights. Is the rules of the game are known, right and they're open, and they're transparent. And so you see this in nations and countries, in nations and countries, or we have this right now through our legal system.

If you have a consistent legal system that you can trust and protect your rights, then this is where property rights can flourish. This is a capitalism and flurish because I can now build business and trust and build stuff for the long term, because there's the kind of stability

that exists. If I arbitrarily change the rules whenever I want to, which you happen to see in fairly sort of corrupt systems, then nothing works, right and and and you can't build anything except for the next five minutes because and also nothing nothing can build to last. So for blockchain, this is all on chain. And so while not everything can be done this way, the rules of the game on the virtual side will be known. Like

if I buy your bitcoin, it's your bitcoin. It's like and no, and and maybe the rules are super simple, but on that basis of that foundation, there's a trust that can build on top of that. And so with smart contracts, which is essentially a virtual way of creating

legal rules, right you. Basically I think of every every blockchain or every token that's out there literally applying forms of mini constitutions of their own, and they evolve and every time someone does an improvement, you know, improve improvement sort of a sort of proposal. Actually, what they're doing is they're really adding an additional amendment to the constitution of that particular blockchain, and that gets voted along, right, and so it grows from that and so and so.

So there's constant improvement that's happening, but it's all chain and transparent, and that's basically the stuff nations, right, So so I see that essentially virtual nation sort of building, but with the community in mind.

I have my digital identity, my driver's license, my passport, I can pay, make payments or credit excuse me, cryptocurrencies and stable coins at a coffee shop if I want to, And I can control my data and sell it to publishers or advertisers and earn it in that way. How far away are you from that?

up to about three point five percent. So it means that if any given population somewhere around the world roughly three point five percent or more engage in some common direction, let's say in this case, you know, for a leadership change or something, it tends to have a revolutionary outcome that basically topples governments and that kind of stuff. And

they saw this things like Arab spring and whatever. They did some numbers around that, right, So you know, I don't know whether it's two point five percent, but there is a tipping point number where suddenly it becomes really inevitable.

And to be clear, I think we've hit that number for crypto adoption already because you know, there's about four or five hundred million people that own crypto around the world, mostly bitcoin or some version of that, and that is and if you look at it from a global population standpoint, basically at least for the ones that is in the connected space, right, you know, that puts it out around five percent, give or take, right, or maybe maybe actually

a little bit more, right, because depending on how people are online, right, so maybe five or six or maybe even eight percent, right. So, so and I think we can see this inevitability feeling of owning crypto. But what we care about is one step sort of deeper, which is on chain activity, right. And so the on chain activity is important because you know a lot of people own crypto are just using it for speculation, for holding

an asset. There's a value attached to it, but they're not actually using it, right, And so what we care about when we talk about sort of future web three is what are you doing on chain like when you're playing a WORB three game, you know you have to do it on chain. That's the value of it, right,

So how do you create that kind of adoption? And right now on chain sort of active users is probably around fifty sixty million, right, maybe a bit more, but generally speaking, and I think you know, if you took channel with number, then you would say it would be roughly one hundred and thirty one hundred and fifty million people.

So that kind of gives you a way to sort of look at the delta, say, okay, we're at sixty and we need to hit around one hundred thirty two hundred and fifty to get there, so twice the number. But of course, as we know with network effects, even with classic things like Metcals law and of course Reads law, you know you know one plus one isn't just two when you have a network, right, so they start to grow, and it took us a long time to get to the number we have today, but every day it's growing

larger and larger and larger. And so we think that that kind of inflection point is going to happen somewhere in the next eighteen to twenty four months, where on chain utility is going to be reaching you know, one hundred twenty hundred thirty million plus users, which then basically draws everyone in because there's a lot of value being built. And you know, we see this a little bit in the space of things like you know, TVL and eterium and whatever, but it's mostly still building on a financial

sort of basis. And just to sort of elaborate a bit in that, because the people who appreciate crypto tend to be more financially literate, it draws amongst the base of people who understand money, which it tends to be a minority of the world. Right. It's also interesting by the way that it draws the kind of societies that

are also less secure about it. So it's much more common for immigrant societies to have crypto in whatever country that they're in, for instance, than incumbent societies, because it's not just hey, I can send crypto back to my family at home. It's also a form of security, right, right, And so as a ratio, you see that developed. So it tends to build from these fringes and then basically sort of extend beyond that.

that last year, gaming tokens haven't done very well. Okay, so we've we've you know, we're we're one of the biggest investors in gaming, about five hundred and forty companies we invested in one hundred and six year in gaming. We also have projects like ourselves at the Sandbox for instance. And while you know there worth billions of dollars, So

don't get me wrong, you know we're not hurting. They are certainly not outperforming the market when you look at, for instance, things like AI agents and and AI AI tokens in the Web three space. Right, But what but at the end of last year went close to seven million daily active players on worb three games. That's up, like, you know, like seven times from where it was like

three years ago. So it's massive growth, right, And there's definitely many more people playing Web three games than using Web three AI agents, I think for users that So why is it that AI agents have done so much better? And that has to do with meta market sentiment, as in the market's broadly and so what's powerful about the whole sort of global liquidity and because of how crypto and tokens function is that they're basically doing what the

markets have always done, which is their market information. Like pricing is market information, right, and it tells you something where things are, and tokens just exemplify that even more. And by the way, this is also why mean points are interesting. Again, I'm not an endorser of certain mean points, but the point is that meme coins are indicators of

market interest. Like I found out about and became momentarily cool because of my kids because of the token, not because I'm on TikTok or something right, right, because it showed some kind of attension that was happening in the world, and I got to learn a little bit about that, right. And so when when you have this type of mechanism that tokens represent, which we kind of think of like an open polling market, right, then you know, if an industry is broadly doing well, because the tokens in that

space are doing well as well. And we've experienced this, you know, for instance, when when Facebook renames of meta and it was covid and everyone was talking about the metaverse, right, you know, things like our own Sandbox and one of our other portfolios like the Center Land and of course Axieinfinity again another one of our portfolios, really exploded in value.

And while they were doing really really well, don't get me wrong, they didn't have one hundred million users, okay, right, you know, and yet and yet they they had these incredible market cap evaluations precisely because of the whole way that tokens work in terms of the meta market aspect.

So that means that the utility, which is one measure of growth, is connected also with the market sentiment, which is another measure of growth in the token, because it a token has both the network utility and the financial utility in mind. And we have not reached the stage yet where the network utility is the predominant use case of the token, and therefore pricing marketing information becomes more

relevant to that. Right, So from a mass adoption standpoint, you know, more people have joined Web three in gain in the gaming world, and in large part this is again one of our sort of portfolio is because of tone as in Telegram, right, Telegraph has really opened up basically the floodgates for a you want to do Web three stuff, you can use a network and you do to the tom blockchain, which is why we're supported them.

So they've onboarded a lot of people in that in that way, and so we've seen that already happen because for instance, like NFTs in games are not allowed at Apple, right Apple, Well, Apple basically has rules that restrict you from using NFTs in a certain way, which makes it impossible for a Web three game to really succeed on Apple for the time being. Right, So that's why you have to rely on other platforms that have kind of

sort of stunted growth. But again I go back to the portion of those Web three users that they play worb three games but did not know much about money. It's the portion of them that became interested in money that then migrated down to the rest of the area of DeFi and suddenly started thinking about the space. We

saw that with Axinfinity in the Philippines and so on. Right, Not everyone, you know, basically continued on, but those who understood what was going on became more financially literate and started to invest, and suddenly they built that space out. So I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing a trickle down effect where it's not only about the utility.

You could have millions and millions of people play a game and they could not know that it's Web three, but it's only a portion of them that will then trickle further down to say, oh wow, I own this asset. I could do something with it. And so that's why it feels slower. But you know, mass consumer scale opportunities. And of course the other one is of course generating wealth opportunities. That's another one, right, and of course that's a major driver of course as well.

Every financial group is not talking about it, and you know, banks possibly are going to start issuing their own stable coins, you know in the US, you know, with the upcoming stable coin not who knows. But the point is that, you know, we're we're a little bit in that phase when it comes to media, entertainment and gaming still. So Apple is not going to do it until they're forced too, because everyone else is sort of moving and growing in

that space. And I think, you know, I think the fact that the US regulatory framework is of course much more friendlier today than it was before it may ease things, But that doesn't mean policy wise, Apple would like to do it. Because Apple is very very protective of you know, the way it generates revenues, right, And and so if I want to issue NFTs, are they going to They're probably going to say, well, if you launch NFTs inside inside Apple, we want to make sure that we get

a cut of everything outside of Yeah. Sorry, And you know that's that's that's something that you shouldn't be able to do. But that's basically what they'll try and do. So you have a little bit of that sort of

you know, push and poll. But our belief is that because the economic opportunity and the value generated from you know, blockchain games, you know web three games or just generally digitalizted ownership is still large, that you eventually just circum bend or choose another product to be able to participate

in that. And so you when that choice happens, that's when Apple has to make a decision as to whether they can really be a walled garden like this or they'd have to open up or else they will lose market share. Right. So, so I think we'll get to that point. We're not quite there yet.

Kong is the largest by far. I think something like eighty to ninety percent of if you know, international remen b clearing is happening in Hong Kong, you know, to the tune of like I think it's like, you know, two hundred to two hundred and fifty billion dollars a day, Okay, So that that just kind of gives you an indication sort of how important Hong Kong is essentially the Chinese economy, which by the way, is also the reason from a

geopolitical standpoint that the US has decided because Hong Kong used to have this from a US perspective, used to have a special trading status, and they basically said, no, we're not giving you that status anymore. And they used a sort of you know, human rights excuse as a way to do it, but it was really just really what they wanted to do was contain China from a financial standpoint because Hong Kong was that international sort of

financial clearinghouse for them. I don't think it's worked well, but anyway, that's that's the reasoning. So, and you've seen that Hong Kong has now given licenses to many more exchanges, so again very open, much more open to to so and you know, we ourselves, together with Stantish Arder and Honggo Telecom, have been given essentially a sampbox sort of a stable coin license and we're experimenting that hopefully we'll

be able to launch that later in the year. And again, I mean, you know, Standish Harder is a note issuing back in Hong Kong, So that's pretty significant partnering up with a web three company in Hong Kong. I mean, just imagine like this, like imagine if that if this happened somewhere else around the world, that would be that would be quite unusual to have sort of best kind of tie up. And so it kind of shows you, I think, how progressive Hong Kong has gotten into the space.

And I think it's also pretty apparent that Hong Kong isn't going to do this without at least, you know, the approval of China. Right. It's like, you know, and the thing that I tell people about is like I think I think it was during Fintech Week, and I think it was last year or maybe the year before, I don't remember when Fintech Week sort of launched in Hong Kong and they were talking about all their web

through policies. CCTV, which is essentially you know, national broadcaster in China, had a show about bitcoin in Hong Kong. So it's not that they're saying, hey, you can buy bitcoin in China, but they were telling people about bitcoin on the Chinese show on national television about what's going on in Hong Kong, right, So you know, so so so you know, is this a coincidence? You know, Like I don't know, but but you know, it's it's like

it's like a pretty coordinated coincidence if that was the case. Anyway, The point being that there are many tactical reasons why China wants, you needs Hong Kong to be a web three and block chain hub. You know, it's it's it's the next generation of of as financial services. Hong Kong needs to be relevant to that if China wants to partake it. China is not going to you know, has capital controls, so China is not going to be you know,

an open market. I think a lot of people are saying, oh, you know, China's going to start trading crypto, not going to happen in the way that you think it is, right, But in Hong Kong you can do it. So to your point, you know, Hong Kong already has you know, basically a bitcoin ETF and ethereumy tfs, but they're not allowed for mainland buyers. But basically could they do in

the future, We think that's much more likely. Or when you have a stable coin and for international trade through Hong Kong, will you probably be using some kind of stable coin probably, right, So, so I think of that as an extension. I think you know, you should expect, let's call it official Chinese flows into crypto to happen through Hong Kong. Certainly, that's what we think will happen.

And we shouldn't forget, of course that Chinese all around the world are you know, amongst the largest percentage of holders in crypto generally speaking. Right, it's you know, and when you think about you know, a lot of the activities in some of the biggest exchanges in the world, they are very much influenced by sort of global Chinese investors, right, So so I would say, you know, it's kind of already there. And for sure China knows that this is happening.

I mean that's you know, if there's one government or world the world that has a pretty good insight as to what its population is doing, it will be China.

Right But but right now I think I am. I'm actually quite you know, just because of my upbringing and because of the fact that I, you know, we tokenized the violin with with the strata arras earlier, uh, and so the interest in that, and so so I'm currently quite into Tchaikowsky just because of just because of that. But again, it's thematic and momentary, you know, Like again, I like all sorts of music. So so ask me this question next month. It's gonna be something else.

whimsical fun movies. And the one movie that I remember enjoying a fair bit it was actually Edge of Tomorrow, you know, with Tom Cruise and and and and again. It's it's not a it's not a deeply intellectual movie or anything in this, but it's kind of interesting thematics around sort of you know, changing the future. The action that's the action piece and uh and so yeah, I mean but yeah, I mean I'm a big fan of Lord of the Rings as well. From a movie standpoint,

I tinkets it's it's a masterpiece. But but you know, if there's a movie that I sort of like popcorn like that I kind of just sort of shut off, it would be something probably like Edge of Tomorrow. Yeah.

But you know, like I do read a lot of sort of philosophers and I'm i, you know, sort of going back into sort of you know, books from mess or Highek. Like again, I just I just like to cover them, but I don't necessarily read them end to end because they're not as digestible, right, So so although I did do that once before, but I like sort of reading passages, right, and so I don't think of it as reading a book end to end anymore. But I like going back to sort of all things and

then discovering new things as a result. Like for instance, most recently I started really sort of and again as a topic I understand I did study before, but I started going back into sort of you know, bordieous forms of capital. And the reason why that became relevant is because of the work that we're doing with NFTs, right and understanding different forms of capital, be it you know, cultural and economic and social and symbolic, which is kind

of what we do in real life. And so so again, this would not have been a relevant book of interest before because of the work that we're doing. Suddenly becomes relevant and and the aha moment starts to click now that didn't click before even though you read it before, right, So so again, I think books are also reflections a little bit of sort of where your attention is at this moment in time, oh for sure.

of something grand about them. It's a little bit also like a reminder of sort of you know, your place in nature and society and and the role that you should you should be playing, not in the kind of diminutive way, but more in terms of there's a bigger picture, and there's a bigger role, and there's something you know important here, right, and you just look at that and people interpret it in different ways. But I find that kind of piece that that comes from that, and it's

you know, quasi meditative. So I do I do. I do love nature a lot.