"Animoca Is Building the AI Agent Ownership Layer Nobody Is Watching"

To investors,

Most people still think of Animoca Brands as a blockchain gaming company from the 2021 NFT cycle. As of late June 2026, the stock traded around $1.00 on secondary markets. It hasn't gone public in six years. The narrative is that this is a Web3 relic fading into the background.

The data says something different.

Animoca has quietly repositioned itself as an AI agent infrastructure builder. In May, the company announced a $10 million investment program for developers building on its persistent AI agent platform, Minds. In July, Minds went live as a consumer-facing service in partnership with Ethoswarm, a blockchain protocol for decentralized AI identity. The company is pursuing a reverse merger with Nasdaq-listed Currenc Group that would value Animoca at approximately $1 billion. And its chairman Yat Siu took to WebX Asia in Tokyo to argue that the ownership of autonomous AI agents - who controls them, who profits from them, who is accountable when they make mistakes - is going to be one of the most consequential debates in technology.

The AI agent market is projected to reach $52.6 billion by 2030, growing at a 46.3% compound annual rate, according to MarketsandMarkets. Goldman Sachs Research estimates agentic AI will drive a 24-fold increase in token consumption by 2030 as enterprises and consumers adopt autonomous systems at scale. MarkNtel Advisors projects the market growing from $10.9 billion in 2026 to $110.5 billion by 2032.

Every major tech company is building agentic AI. AWS, Databricks, Google, Microsoft, Palantir, and Salesforce all launched agentic AI solutions in 2025. Meta acquired Manus, a Singapore-based AI agent developer, for more than $2 billion. Salesforce acquired Convergence AI. Accenture predicts AI agents will be the primary users of most enterprises' internal systems by 2030. The World Economic Forum says CEOs will soon manage hybrid workforces of humans and AI agents.

Everyone is racing to build the agents themselves. Almost nobody is solving the ownership problem.

That's where Animoca's thesis lands.

The ownership problem no one is pricing

When an AI agent is generating text, ownership is a theoretical question. When that agent sends an email, moves money, signs a contract, or makes a purchasing decision on your behalf, ownership becomes a legal and financial problem. Animoca has stated: "Accountability is the debate hiding inside the ownership one."

Law firms are already scrambling. Mayer Brown published a 2026 legal update on agentic AI implementation contracts covering liability allocation, IP rights in AI-generated work product, vendor lock-in, and governance of autonomous agents acting at speed and scale. The UK Information Commissioner's Office released a report in January 2026 on the data protection implications of agentic AI, emphasizing that organizations remain responsible for compliance when agents operate autonomously. The fundamental question - who owns the output and decision-making authority of a persistent AI system - has no settled answer.

Animoca's bet is that blockchain-based identity and settlement layers will become the infrastructure for resolving this. The Minds platform deploys AI agents that maintain memory and context across sessions, collaborate with other agents, and can be accessed through email or Telegram. They're sovereign, always-on entities powered by the Ethoswarm protocol for blockchain identity. The agents operate independently of their stewards and can navigate digital economies.

In short: Animoca is trying to build the plumbing that lets AI agents own assets, transact, and maintain verifiable identity - something centralized AI providers haven't prioritized because it's not their core business.

The asymmetric setup

Let's run the three-component framework.

Breakthrough technology? Persistent, autonomous AI agents that remember context, collaborate across networks, and act independently represent a generational shift from passive chatbots to intent-based computing. You give the agent an outcome; it figures out how to get there. That's not incremental. It's a different paradigm.

Small market with mega-market potential? The $10.9 billion AI agent market in 2026 is tiny compared to the $110.5 billion projected in 2032. The ownership and identity layer is a subset of that - even smaller, but with uncapped upside if Animoca becomes the standard settlement layer for agent-based commerce. The $1 billion proposed Nasdaq valuation prices the company as a speculative infrastructure play, not a mature business.

Missionary founders? Yat Siu has been a relentless evangelist for blockchain-based digital ownership since 2014. He co-founded Animoca before blockchain gaming existed, built a portfolio of more than 600 Web3 companies, pivoted to AI infrastructure before the current agentic wave, and publicly frames the ownership debate as the defining question of the decade. He's been building toward it for a decade.

The narrative violation

Here's the gap between consensus and data. The consensus view is that Animoca is a ghost ship from the last crypto cycle - a blockchain gaming company riding the coattails of a dead trend. The data says the company has a $10 million developer fund, a live AI agent platform, a blockchain identity partnership, a path to a Nasdaq listing, and a portfolio of 600+ companies that gives it distribution and partnership leverage no other AI agent player has.

Most people don't see this because they're looking at the wrong story. They're watching OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic build the foundation models. They're watching Meta and Salesforce acquire AI startups. Nobody is watching a former blockchain gaming company with a $1.00 secondary-market share price build the ownership layer that those agents will eventually need to transact at scale.

The risks

The Nasdaq reverse merger through Currenc Group hasn't closed. It requires shareholder and regulatory approvals. If it doesn't happen, Animoca remains a private-ish company with limited public visibility and no liquidity for the broader market.

Minds is a new platform with no proven track record. The $10 million fund is small relative to what Anthropic, OpenAI, or Microsoft are spending on AI. Animoca is building in a space where it competes with well-capitalized incumbents who could replicate the blockchain identity approach if they decide it matters.

The blockchain ownership thesis for AI agents is unproven. There's no evidence yet that decentralized identity and settlement will become the standard for AI agent commerce. Centralized providers could solve this internally, or regulation could force a different architecture entirely.

None of these risks are deal-breakers if the thesis is correct. But they're real, and the company is early.

What to watch

The Nasdaq reverse merger vote and regulatory approval timeline is the clearest near-term catalyst. If Animoca goes public at a $1 billion valuation and Minds has a growing developer ecosystem, the company will have the capital and visibility to scale aggressively.

The substance of Yat Siu's WebX Asia panel - specifically whether he articulates a concrete regulatory or legal strategy for agent ownership, not just the philosophical case - will signal whether this is infrastructure-building or thought-leadership theater.

Developer adoption of Minds is the real proof metric. A $10 million fund with no follow-on capital and no product-market fit is noise. A growing ecosystem of specialized agents across gaming, finance, productivity, and social platforms is a signal worth paying attention to.

The bottom line

AI creates abundance of intelligence. That makes ownership, identity, and accountability scarce. Animoca is one of the few companies building for that scarcity.

The company is small, unproven, and carrying the baggage of a previous crypto cycle. But the three components are there, the market is nascent, and nobody else is solving this problem at the intersection of AI and blockchain.

The best asymmetric setups look unconvincing until they don't. This one has the data to be real.

The agentic economy is coming. The question is who owns the agents - and who owns the company that builds the layer for them.