The crypto industry may have fundamentally misunderstood the metaverse, according to Yat Siu, president of Animoca Brands, who says the next phase of virtual economies would arrive not via VR headsets or immersive digital worlds, but via fleets of AI agents transacting on blockchain networks behind the scenes.
Siu said the metaverse could perhaps come to us rather than being a place where humans go, during his speech at Consensus Miami 2026.
For Animoca, this marks a distinct shift from the pandemic-era metaverse vision it once championed, in which users were expected to spend an increasing part of their social and economic lives in immersive virtual worlds.
Siu now says the most consequential change could be AI systems operating in the physical world on behalf of humans, handling transactions, reservations, coordination and commerce in the background, while blockchain networks operate as an infrastructure connecting these agents.
Instead, Siu argued that the next phase of the Internet could revolve around AI systems operating constantly in the background of daily life, handling tasks such as reservations, payments, scheduling and online transactions on behalf of users.
He said consumers could eventually rely on dozens or even hundreds of AI agents to coordinate their digital activities, with blockchain networks serving as the financial and identity infrastructure linking these systems.
“I think the fact is there will be more agents than humans,” Siu said, predicting that there could eventually be “50 to 100 billion agents basically roaming the Internet.”
This change, he argued, could also solve one of crypto’s oldest problems: onboarding ordinary users.
While an estimated 700 to 800 million people worldwide now own some form of cryptocurrency, Siu noted that fewer than 70 million actively use blockchain applications, as crypto remains technically intimidating to mainstream consumers.
“My mom won’t use MetaMask,” he said. “It’s hard for her.”
However, AI agents can interact naturally with wallets, smart contracts and decentralized financial systems because they operate directly through code, he argued.
Unlike humans, agents would not need traditional banking infrastructure and could transact autonomously on-chain.
“Blockchain technology is the ideal financial system for machines,” Siu said. “We humans were basically guinea pigs.”
The broader argument reflects a growing narrative within parts of the crypto industry that the most scalable users of blockchain may ultimately be autonomous software agents rather than humans.
In this framework, wallets, tokens, decentralized identity systems, and on-chain payments become machine infrastructure that powers an emerging “agent economy.”
As part of this initiative, Animoca announced a $10 million investment initiative for developers creating AI agent applications through its Animoca Minds platform.
If Siu’s vision comes to fruition, the next big 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 each other behind the scenes.
