Published on January 24, 2026
Watch the video of this fireside chat on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel:
Fireside chat with Yat Siu (Chairman of the Board at Animoca Brands) and Evan Szu (Co-Founder and CEO at Gamma Prime)
Yat Siu (Chairman of the Board at Animoca Brands):
So, to me, I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. And the reason I say that is: think about the value add of DATs. I was being a little facetious when I said DATs came and went, but the important element of a DAT is institutional access to the token.
What we learned was that if you’re a family office and you want to buy a token, you basically can’t. I mean, technically you can—but do I set up a wallet, or do I give it to a company called Coinbase that my boss, who’s 70 years old, has never heard of? Or he’s heard of it a little bit, but he’s not really sure.
And then if there’s a problem with the Ethereum token, what do I do—call Vitalik and say, “Hey, I need some help”? None of that works, because it’s decentralized, it’s run by a foundation, and nobody is responsible.
Then someone like Tom Lee or Michael Saylor comes in. They buy it and they say they’re responsible—but they’re not buying the token. They’re buying the stock of S-BED, or Sharplink, or Strategy, or whatever it is. And if there’s a problem, he’s accountable, and I can go to him.
Essentially, it’s about protecting yourself, right? I can say, “Well, he said so, and all the analysts like him, so I didn’t make a bad decision.” That’s the institutional playbook. It’s basically the insurance playbook. That’s why institutions do it.
Now, retail is different. Retail is going to come into the tokenized era through platforms like Robinhood, eToro, Revolut—all of them are heading firmly in that direction. But they’re not selling to family offices. It’s not billionaires buying shares on Revolut. It’s all of us here—mom and pop, and the youth.
In South Korea, almost 60% of people under 30 exclusively own crypto. So the point is: if you want to sell equities, you have to tokenize to reach them. They’re not going to set up a brokerage account.
To me, this is about broader access. New users will join the financial ecosystem, become more financially literate, and start trading assets—but they won’t trade on traditional stock markets. They’ll trade in places where they can deal with tokenized assets.
Evan Szu (Co-Founder and CEO at Gamma Prime):
That’s an interesting thought. This actually gives me a different perspective on your stock. I’m almost viewing it as an index fund for halts, right?
If that’s the case, I want to dig in. First of all, did you say you guys make $300 million in revenue?
Yat Siu:
So we’re a nine-figure revenue company. Our financials are public because we’re a public company, even though we’re unlisted. We’ve been reporting nine-figure revenues for pretty much the last four years.
And I think this comes down to how people perceive us. People think of us as gaming and metaverse because that was our original image. But what we realized is that all these tokens are actually financial systems and ecosystems. We’re much more of a fintech company.
Our broader view, by the way, isn’t that we’re becoming a fintech company—it’s that the whole world is becoming fintech.
If you remember back in the day, there was this idea of “going digital.” Most of you are probably too young to remember, but in my generation I had to print emails for my boss because he treated email like a fax machine. Those people didn’t understand it.
And the ones who didn’t go digital died. The ones who couldn’t be discovered on Google died. The ones who didn’t understand social media—Instagram, TikTok—lost to competitors who did.
To me, it’s the same thing with tokenization now. If you don’t tokenize, you’re going to die. You won’t reach the youth. You won’t reach larger markets that only access assets through tokens. And you won’t reach AI agents, which only deal with tokenized assets.
Everything is becoming financial in nature. And the broader point is this: if your organization isn’t optimized with financial systems in mind, you’ll lose to competitors that are. Size doesn’t matter.
If you’re a gaming company and you can create liquidity from your in-game assets, you have an advantage over a gaming company with the same number of users that can’t. That’s why Steam and CS:GO skin trading are so dominant compared to other gaming companies—they have skin trading, and the others don’t.
