The crypto industry may have fundamentally misunderstood the metaverse, according to Animoca Brands president Yat Siu, who argues that the next phase of virtual economies would arrive not through virtual reality headsets or immersive digital worlds, but through fleets of artificial intelligence agents that transact over blockchain networks behind the scenes.
Siu said that the metaverse maybe coming to us instead of being a place where humans go, during his keynote speech at Consensus Miami 2026.
For Animoca, this marked a distinct turn from the pandemic-era vision of the metaverse it once championed, in which users were expected to spend increasing amounts of their social and economic lives in immersive virtual worlds.
Siu now says the biggest change may be for AI systems to operate in the physical world on behalf of humans, handling transactions, reservations, coordination and trading in the background, while blockchain networks serve as infrastructure connecting those agents.
Instead, Siu argued that the next phase of the Internet may revolve around artificial intelligence systems that run continuously in the background of everyday 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 artificial intelligence agents to coordinate their digital activities, with blockchain networks serving as financial and identity infrastructure connecting those systems.
“I think the point is that there will be more agents than humans,” Siu said, predicting that there could eventually be “between 50 and 100 billion agents essentially wandering around the Internet.”
That change, he argued, could also solve one of cryptocurrencies’ oldest problems: the onboarding of ordinary users.
While an estimated 700 to 800 million people worldwide own some form of cryptocurrency, Siu noted that fewer than 70 million actively use blockchain applications because cryptocurrencies remain technically intimidating to general consumers.
“My mom is not going to use MetaMask,” he said. “It’s hard for her.”
However, AI agents can naturally interact 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 autonomously transact 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 blockchain’s most scalable users may ultimately be autonomous software agents rather than humans.
In that framework, wallets, tokens, decentralized identity systems, and on-chain payments become machine infrastructure that powers an emerging “agent economy.”
As part of that push, Animoca announced a $10 million investment initiative for developers building 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 autonomously transacting with each other behind the scenes.
