The next hundred million crypto users may come from gaming, Animoca founder says
With highly anticipated blockchain games set to hit the shelves in 2023, Animoca Brand’s Yat Siu sees the next opportunity to onboard the generation of crypto users.
Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2023. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchains share their industry predictions for the year ahead.
Yat Siu
A veteran technology entrepreneur and investor based in Hong Kong, Yat Siu is the cofounder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, a blockchain and gaming specialist.
Animoca taps into blockchain technology which unlocks digital property rights for gamers by creating new asset classes, play-to-earn economies and the metaverse.
Predictions for 2023
Gaming will drive mass crypto adoption
“Gaming will really, really accelerate even more than it has this year, which is already been quite dominant. The reason why is because of the quality of the games that are coming out right now… A good game takes a few years to build, so the games that started to build last year are starting to emerge and come out.”
“We’re going to basically see a big wave of high-quality games that are emerging in the market, which will basically bring on more mass adoption. So that will basically come into full effect somewhere in 2023, maybe spilling over 2024. And so, we should expect actually a wave of potentially hundreds of millions of users entering the space for that reason.”
The metaverse makes a comeback
“When people, for instance, launch products and sell stuff on the Sandbox, they’re generating revenue. The metrics in the metaverse are now not just how much are you trading, but what are the employment like. How many people are being actively engaged in an economic capacity? All of that is basically sort of developing in really exciting ways. We’re sort of setting the framework for potentially a very strong 2023.”
Metaverse and blockchain interoperability gain more spotlight
“In the same way that there’s going to be many metaverses, there’s going to have to be more and more interoperability between the chains. We can also see today that the chains that have decided on a less interoperable approach have actually become smaller. They haven’t really managed to expand beyond. Everyone now talks about interoperability because they realize that without interoperability, they can’t grow. It’s a little bit like as a nation-state, if you’re not part of the WTO, you can’t grow either. You have to be able to trade items between each other and basically share value and expand the market overall.”
“Four years ago, there was still a little bit of this attempt to be the chain. If you remember the narrative years ago was ‘Ethereum killer.’ And now, I think nobody talks about being an ‘Ethereum killer.’ Everyone talks about plugging into Ethereum.”