Animoca Brand’s Robby Yung Shares Insights on AI-Driven Investing, and The US Crypto Market Trends

During the 2025 Paris Blockchain Week, BeInCrypto sat down with Robby Yung, CEO at Animoca Brands, a leading force in Web3 innovation. In a wide-ranging conversation, Yung shared his insights on the Web3 landscape, investment strategies, regulatory shifts, the resilience of the Metaverse, and how Animoca is preparing for a decentralized AI-driven future.

From the current market dynamics post-US elections to the ambitious vision for Mokaverse and AI-powered investment tools, Yung offers a candid and detailed look into where the next phase of Web3 could be heading.

Robby Yung’s Assessment of the Current US Market Trends

The whole global economy is having a little bit of volatility at the moment, courtesy of the U.S. President. Indeed. But generally, for the Web3 space, we are quite bullish for this year.

Last year ended with a lot of positive sentiments based on the outcome of the U.S. elections. And I think that was a signal, not necessarily that we expect the U.S. to be hugely bullish and supportive of Web3 and crypto, which is possible, but not a guarantee. More importantly, we felt like, as an industry, that this is the end to the U.S. being a damper on crypto, of being a place where there was potentially regulatory overreach, suppressing innovation in the space.

We have seen in the first three months of this year that if nothing else, the U.S. has now succeeded in removing the constraints to the Web3 industry, primarily in the form of the SEC. So, all of the SEC enforcement actions that were initiated towards companies in the Web3 space have now largely been removed – well, have all been removed, frankly.

I think this is a huge benefit to the space, because what we found was not just direct action on companies in America taking activities in crypto, but also a chilling effect in other jurisdictions, where we noticed companies being reluctant to venture into the space because of fear of what the U.S. regulators might think. So, I think that fear, having been lifted, actually stimulates a lot of innovation, not just in the U.S., but around the world.

Crypto Regulations: U.S. vs. EU

There is always regulatory arbitrage, and this is true in any business. This will still be true, but I think that because the EU has been working on building regulation in this space for longer and in a more consistent way, with MiCA, for example, the EU is actually currently ahead, as far as if you’re comparing them as competitors.

Now, in the U.S., the short-term view, in my opinion, is not going to be a new regulation, but an absence of enforcement. It’s more going to be just an open playing field for people to try things, but without specific guardrails in place in terms of regulatory frameworks. The reality is that no matter how enthusiastic the current U.S. administration is about this, legislation takes time.

Robby Yung’s Investment Philosophy

We are, by nature, strategic investors; most of the capital that we invest comes off our balance sheets. We also have a venture fund called Animoca Ventures, which is more of a traditional VC.

So, they are primarily looking at a financial return. They have outside shareholders, etc. But most of our activity actually happens from our balance sheet investing.

And because this is our balance sheet, we try to invest in things that are strategic. What does that mean for us? We invest very broadly, as it’s known in this space. We have 550+ investments in the space across every category.

Everything from consumer entertainment, like gaming, to institutional financial services, related, you name it. And what we mean by strategic is projects in which we feel like we can become involved and help them have a better outcome. We can help them with support, with tokenomics, and help them design their open token economies.

We can help them with marketing, user acquisition, and onboarding new users. Also, we can help them with liquidity and aftermarket support, once they have a token live in the market.

All of these things along the way of supporting them in building, launching, and operating successful tokens, as long as we can be helpful in achieving a better outcome, then we’re interested in investing.

The Usual Structure of Investment for Animoca Brands

As a strategic investor, we’re also a native Web3 investor. Our philosophy is that tokens are basically the incarnation of network effects.

We’re interested in acquiring, holding, and possessing tokens. We want to understand the token strategy of every investment we look at. The company does not need to have a token yet, but there needs to be a plan for tokenization. If there’s no plan for tokenization, in our minds, it’s not really a Web3 business.

We’re happy to invest in equity. However, typically, the structures would be equity with a token warrant. So, when a token is launched in the future, there will be participation in the token for investors in the equity. Or, if there is already a token or a token in the process of being launched, then we can sign an agreement to invest in the future token launch.

The Structure of the Animoca Brands Team

We’re actually quite a big team. Even on the investing side, we’re probably 40 or 50 people. And overall, in the group, we’re over 1,000 people. So, it’s become quite a big business.

Like all investors, you cannot take care of all the investees at any given time. It’s about who needs you the most at any particular time. So we tend to spend the most time with the companies that are doing the best and doing the worst. The ones who are in the middle and can look after themselves call us when they need us. 

How Does Animoca Brands Value Token Holding?

I think the main area of accounting that causes the most confusion is in tokens that we create versus tokens that are created externally. For example, if I have Bitcoin on my balance sheet because we did not create Bitcoin, I can value Bitcoin, which is a liquid token, at the market value of Bitcoin.

But if I have SAND, which is from the Sandbox game we created, on my balance sheet, it’s also a liquid token with a market value and high liquidity. But I have to mark that at zero because we created it.

So, therefore, it technically has no value because it’s deemed under the accounting rules to have zero manufacturing costs, which is a peculiarity of the accounting rules that doesn’t actually reflect the fact that it’s a token that I could exchange in a liquid market for another value instantly. 

How The Sandbox Survived the Metaverse Winter?

Metaverse was a big subject back in 2021 and 2022.

For anybody who knows me or has heard me speak about the metaverse at that time and until now, I think the key to defining the metaverse is understanding what we mean by the definition of metaverse. And in my mind, the metaverse narrative, if you will, has never ended because the metaverse, in my view, is the sum total of all the experiences that we make in online spaces.

And the reason that it’s a metaverse and not a game or a website is because they’re interconnected and interoperable. Once we have all of these disparate experiences from Web 2 connected through tokenization, then that’s the metaverse. 

So, in my view, The Sandbox is actually not the metaverse, it’s only one piece of the metaverse. Because I view the metaverse as being like a country or like the world. And The Sandbox is only a country or a city. It’s not the whole world.

We hope The Sandbox is like Paris or New York, not just a small town, because we want to have a lot of users and critical mass, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. 

Now, I think the key to the longevity of The Sandbox is down to two things: a community of players and the community of partners. Community is a big word.

I think Sandbox has probably one of the broadest and largest arrays of partnerships with intellectual property providers in the Web3 space. Intellectual property is key to building any kind of entertainment experience because consumers love intellectual property. Sandbox needs to be a place to represent IP and also to build new IP.

That’s what we always wanted for it. I think as long as you can do that effectively, consumers and customers will always come.

Why The Sandbox Used Voxel Art Style

I think what we did with Sandbox was we decided to use this voxel art style because we wanted it to be a place for UGC, user-generated content, from day one. So, making UGC accessible has to be simple. It has to be like Legos. Because I don’t know about you, but I might have great ideas, but I am a terrible artist.

So, we wanted to make the tools so simple that anybody could use them. We also saw the success, the incredible success of Minecraft.

Minecraft inspired generations of kids, particularly, to create things because it had the simplicity of building blocks that meant anybody could make something and have fun. So, that’s where we started.

Now, I do think that we are now reaching a point, like you said, with ChatGPT and other AI tools, where there will kind of be an evolution to a Sandbox 2.0, which is primarily driven by AI tools that will enable creators to create much more complex games and experiences that we couldn’t dream of two or three years ago.

What Are the Main Criteria to Launch a Succesful Token?

One of the reasons that successful token launches are reasonably rare amongst the millions of tokens that get launched is because there’s a high degree of complexity and a lot of different variables.

This is why we ended up building an entire services organization devoted to helping our projects and the companies that we partner with to get this right. First, you need tokenomics to build a project based on an open economy, and that’s very complicated.

Building those open economies requires tremendous skill. Many of our tokenomics team members were recruited, for example, from hard and material sciences, physicists, and engineers, because they understand how to build and model highly complex multivariable systems. That’s the first part.

But then, once you’ve solved the tokenomics, you still need to build a community. You still need to onboard users and have a marketing campaign, maybe you work with KOLs and influencers. You need to have some kind of distribution strategy for your token, maybe involving centralized exchanges, for example. 

And then you need to think about who your token holders are. Is it going to be just users of your product or community members? Are you going to have institutional investors who are also long-term holders of the token because they’re trying to support the growth of the token ecosystem by buying the token and holding it over time?

How do you manage that token table to understand what the waterfalls and unlock schedules of the different constituencies should be? This is also quite an art form.

And then finally, after the token launches, how are you actually making a market in the token? Do you have market makers and liquidity provision? The whole management of a token as a product in a live market and exchange is actually a business unto itself.

We observed, for example, from the game industry, lots of game companies launching tokens and not understanding that the token doesn’t take care of itself. It needs maintenance. It’s a whole other product. 

So think of your monetary investment in the same terms. If you have a million dollar business, your token may also be a million dollar business potentially.

How Much Does Community Matter?

You want active trading in the token. The more liquidity you have, the more useful a token is. The community brings liquidity.

Let me give you a simple analogy. I spent much of my life living in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a highly liquid housing market.

When you buy a flat in Hong Kong, many people from Western countries are amazed, but the market conditions for this have been true for 30 years, with no cycles, 30 years straight.

If you saw an apartment and you really liked it, you needed to write a check to make the deposit while you were visiting. Because otherwise you will lose the opportunity. If you want to sell your apartment, typically it would take two to three days to find a buyer. That’s it. And the commission for buying and selling apartments is 1%.

In any given apartment building, they’re turning over five units a month, ten units a month, because they have high liquidity. What that means is: I’m more than willing to buy an apartment in a market like that because I know I can get out of it anytime. There’s liquidity. But if I’m in a market where I’m in a small town, in a rural place, and there are very few transactions, I’m very hesitant to make that investment because I don’t know if I will be able to get it back. 

This applies in the world of tokenomics when you think about having a game. How much do I want to pay for that in-game item that’s a super rare, valuable sword? If they’re very valuable and lots of people want them, it has high liquidity, so I’m willing to pay more. 

Trickle-down Effect Within Crypto

A few things happened. From the time of the US election until New Year’s, we had a kind of market that ran up and got a little bit ahead of itself. There was a little bit of over-enthusiasm. Which was fun while it lasted.

Bitcoin has always been the leading indicator in our industry. Because although Bitcoin may not have a direct correlation to the projects that we do every day, it is a little bit like a macroeconomic indicator for crypto. Like employment numbers or something like this.

If Bitcoin is doing well, then everything else in crypto will be easier because people will generally feel more confident about the sector. Also, one of the few areas where the term trickle-down economics actually works is in Bitcoin, because we notice that once fiat money comes into Bitcoin, it actually trickles down into the rest of crypto. Which is very good for the crypto space in general.

So I’m not concerned about the divergence of Bitcoin and other altcoins because I think this is actually just a reflection of where we are in the first half of this year of economic uncertainty, like tremendous uncertainty, frankly, right now. And Bitcoin is the most conservative digital asset.

Why is Yung Excited About the Mokaverse Project?

One of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about is actually a product that is making a big evolution at the moment, which is our Mokaverse project.

The Mokaverse has its roots as a sort of community-led project because we wanted to create an NFT collection and a token and everything for our community to embody the network effects of the Animoca Brands ecosystem. It would be owned and used by all our investee companies, our employees, our shareholders ; everybody who touches our business. 

Over the two years that we’ve been building this project, it has evolved, so we now have a very large network of Mokaverse ID holders who hold this decentralized ID we’ve created. And we’re now starting the B2B side.

We’re now trying to build this out to be, let’s say, a network of networks. We think that in Web3, our job is not to build and own the biggest network because it’s not about any one entity or company controlling everything. What we want is to build that interconnectivity between everybody else who is building in the space. And we see a huge opportunity to do that with decentralized ID. 

We have partnered with other big networks, particularly Web2 networks, like SK Planet in Korea, or Soneium, the new L1 blockchain from Sony in Japan. And we’re constantly partnering with others who are integrating our SDK.

This allows them to utilize our decentralized ID system. It means that the users from their Web2 ecosystems can then onboard through our ID system to Web3. And at the same time, our existing Web3 community can use their services because their existing ID will be recognized when they use their services. So essentially, we can connect these networks and grow much faster by linking networks together.

We have an underlying utility token called the MOCA token, which powers the whole ecosystem. We accrue value to the token because the more participants and utility there are in the network, and the more useful it is, the more value accrues to the token.

The Future Outlook For AI + Blockchain

We cannot ignore the elephant in the room, which is AI. AI has taken most of the venture capital and investment over the last 18 months out of the tech space. And we’re spending a lot of time on AI as well.

We strongly believe that AI and blockchain are complementary technologies that benefit much more from being used together than separately. So we are very pleased to see the public announcement of the DeepSeek LLM model because we think that this points to a decentralized and open-source future for AI models.

We believe that’s the best way to do it because, of course, we come from Web3. We love decentralization and open source. 

Amongst the sort of test projects that we put in place, we have something that we call Hey Annie. It’s a project we did with our portfolio company, Flock, that does federated learning.

We’ve created an LLM using all of the information. We basically taught it all about the investment activity that we have done over the last five to seven years. All our deal memos, all our investment committee meeting minutes – everything – to try to train the model in how to invest the way we invest.

Then, going forward, projects can send us their business plans to the model and the model will automatically evaluate the prospects as if they were sending their deal to our investor committee. We want to try to build an autonomous investing capability over time. 

 Not without, but we want to amplify the effectiveness of our human intervention. I’ll give you an example.

Every day, because of LinkedIn and everything else in the world, I must get, let’s say, five business plans. People send spam because they can find my email address, and I ignore most of it and throw it away because I don’t know where it comes from. But if you have an automated system that allows you to filter all that information, maybe you can actually “read” all the spam, and then it will just tell you where you need to spend time.

 If this works, then we form a DAO so that consumers can go and invest with the automated investments DAO. That’s the idea. It decides, through its own autonomous agents, what to buy, what tokens are interesting, and what tokens should be bought. It buys the basket, and you can then buy the token of the DAO, which reinvests into the basket. That’s the experiment. 

The DAO is the most democratic instrument, and we have to acknowledge that democracy is not perfect. It’s a beautiful idea, but as they say, it’s the least worst form of government. Because democracy is not perfect, it makes mistakes. But the key is to get everybody a chance.