Animoca Brands Launches $10M Initiative to Fund AI Agent Development on Blockchain

MIAMI — Animoca Brands announced a $10 million investment initiative for developers building AI agent applications through its Animoca Minds platform on Wednesday. Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, outlined his vision in a keynote speech at Consensus 2026 in Miami on May 7, 2026.

He said the metaverse is evolving beyond immersive digital worlds, with AI agents increasingly handling commerce, payments and coordination through blockchain infrastructure in the background.

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. The metaverse may be coming to us rather than being a place that humans go to, Siu said.

Consumers could eventually rely on dozens or even hundreds of AI agents to coordinate their digital activities. “I think the point is that it’s going to be more agents than humans,” Siu said. ” An estimated 700 million to 800 million people globally now own some form of cryptocurrency.

Fewer than 70 million actively use blockchain applications. “My mom’s not going to be using MetaMask. It’s hard for her,” Siu said. “Blockchain technology is the ideal financial system for machines. We, the humans, were the guinea pigs,” Siu said.

CoinDesk reported that Siu argued the crypto industry may have misunderstood the metaverse. The next phase of virtual economies would arrive not through VR headsets or immersive digital worlds, but through fleets of AI agents transacting across blockchain networks behind the scenes.

Siu said AI systems would operate 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.

This marked a distinct pivot from the pandemic-era vision of the metaverse that Animoca Brands once championed, in which users were expected to spend increasing amounts of their social and economic lives in immersive virtual worlds. Instead, 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.

AI agents may interact naturally with wallets, smart contracts, and decentralized finance systems because they operate directly through code.

Unlike humans, agents would not need traditional banking infrastructure and could transact autonomously on-chain. ” If Siu’s vision materializes, the next major wave of blockchain adoption may not come from millions of new human users learning to navigate crypto wallets, but from billions of AI agents transacting autonomously with one another behind the scenes.