For Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, 2025 will be remembered as the year of Trump. Not because President Donald Trump saved cryptocurrencies, but because the industry bet too much on him, mispricing everything from tariffs to interest rate cuts.
President Trump was supposed to be the crypto cheat code in 2025. Instead, Bitcoin (BTC) is limping towards the end of the year, facing its fourth annual decline in history. Memecoin liquidity has been sucked into political sub-quests, and one of the sector’s longest-running builders believes the market is overconfident in the new president.
“If I were to give it a grade, I would say B-/C+,” Siu said. Traders have been treating Trump as if cryptocurrencies were his “first child,” when in reality, “we’re probably his third, fourth, fifth, maybe even eighth child,” he said.
President Trump’s priorities (tariffs, trade wars, fight over the Federal Reserve) are hitting risk assets hard, and Siu said the president is “not thinking about what the price of Bitcoin will be” when he starts a tariff war.
He said that the crypto “tramp deal” will not be rolled out in 2025, and in 2026 the industry will be forced to focus on compliance and real-world use cases. Animoca’s planned reverse merger listing is his bet that general investors will want an “altcoin agency” once the U.S. rules are clarified.
Related: Chart for March 2025: Trump trade war hits Bitcoin, DeFi hack costs $22 million
Animoca’s IPO as an altcoin agency
If 2025 is the year of President Trump, Animoca hopes 2026 will be the year we finally get a liquid altcoin alternative on the public market. The company plans to go public through a reverse merger with Currenc Group, a Nasdaq-listed fintech company, with Animoca owning 95% of the combined entity. “Technically, they’re buying us, but we’re in control.”
The sales pitch is simple and clear. Although MicroStrategy has become a leveraged public vehicle for Bitcoin exposure, there is no equivalent for the long tail of the token. “If you’re an investor and you want to get into cryptocurrencies, you definitely have to have Bitcoin…and you have a ton of altcoins. How can you get into it?”
He argues that purchasing base layer tokens like Ether (ETH) or Solana (SOL) only limits access. Animoca’s answer is to position itself as a publicly traded SoftBank-style aggregator of altcoin upside, offering public market investors a way to own a diverse slice of the altcoin and Web3 stack.
Siu said the company has more than 620 portfolio companies and invested in about 100 new projects last year alone, all of which have been taken off its balance sheet. Animoca reported unaudited accruals of $314 million in fiscal 2024, making the company EBITDA (organic earnings before loans and taxes) positive for the fourth consecutive year.
In time, Siu hopes that Animoca itself will be fully tokenized, allowing the company to become a bridge between traditional stock markets and on-chain ownership.
Related: Animoca plans IPO, bet on altcoin rise to attract investors
Clarity, genius, and the “token or die” moment
Siu’s bet on altcoin proxy initial public offerings (IPOs) makes sense once the regulatory foundations are solidified, and he sees key US laws like the Clarity Act and the Genius Act as facilitators rather than sustainers.
“The phrase we like to use is ‘tokenize or die,’” he said. He expects a large number of incumbents to enter the market once companies establish a clear framework for issuing, trading and supervising tokens. “Crypto companies are happy to live on the edge…but if you are an established company, whether public or private, why should you take a chance?”
He pointed to how big brands responded when the rules for stablecoins were solidified in Washington and suddenly, after years of struggle, “everyone was doing stablecoins.” And he expects the same pattern to emerge next year when the Clarity Act formalizes rules for token classification and market structure.
Established issuers will issue tokens tied to their existing businesses because they finally have “legal certainty that they didn’t have before.”
Here, real world assets (RWA) and tokenized securities serve as a bridge, an industry expected to grow into trillions of dollars by 2030. Animoca has already begun unwinding its partnership with RWA, including an agreement with Grow, a large Chinese asset management company working on tokenization and access to the token market for traditional customers.
Related: Animoca expands focus in 2026, eyeing stablecoins, AI, DePIN: Exec
2026: The year of utility tokens
Siu believes the next thematic shift has already begun. “The theme of institutionalizing cryptocurrencies will continue,” he said, but 2026 will see the entry of a “new retail industry” with clearer rules and products built around usage rather than mere speculation.
Previously, he said, there was a lot of attention on existing crypto traders and launching tokens and meme coins on platforms like Pump.fun, a trend that peaked during meme coin season.
In that environment, builders could launch tokens, not worry about where their customers would come from, and focus on the story rather than the product, but now market conditions are forcing a reset.
The “meme coin madness” ended earlier this year with Trump and Melania Trump’s branded tokens. Official Trump (TRUMP) is down more than 75% from its peak, Melania Meme (MELANIA) is down almost 90% from its peak, leaving hundreds of thousands of small wallets with losses.
Siu said it was “a veritable vampire attack on the meme community” that burned down many retail stores and sucked liquidity from the rest of the market.
As capital moves away from pure speculation, the next wave will rely on products that solve real-world problems for gamers, creators, and brands, drawing in users who never thought of themselves as “crypto people” in the first place.
With the Clarity and GENIUS Acts paving the way for compliant issuance, “2026 will be the year of utility tokens. Everyone will launch tokens that have a use case, so we can talk about it,” he argues.
So basically, are crypto companies growing?
“They have to, they have to…We’re not the only ones doing an IPO.”
