The crypto industry may have fundamentally misunderstood the metaverse, according to Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu, who argues that the next phase of virtual economies would come not through VR headsets or immersive digital worlds, but through fleets of AI agents acting across blockchain networks behind the scenes.
Siu said the metaverse might come to us instead of being a place humans go to during his keynote at Consensus Miami 2026.
For Animoca, this marked a clear pivot from the pandemic-era vision of the metaverse it once championed, where users were expected to spend increasing amounts of their social and economic lives in immersive virtual worlds.
Siu now says the more consistent shift may be AI systems operating in the physical world on behalf of humans, handling transactions, bookings, coordination and trading in the background, while blockchain networks serve as the infrastructure connecting these agents.
Instead, Siu argued that the next phase of the Internet may revolve around AI systems working continuously in the background of everyday life, handling tasks such as bookings, 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 acting as the financial and identity infrastructure connecting these systems.
“I think the point is that it will be more agents than people,” Siu said, predicting that eventually there could be “50 to 100 billion agents basically roaming the Internet.”
That shift, he argued, could also solve one of crypto’s longest-standing problems: onboarding mainstream users.
While an estimated 700 to 800 million people globally now own some form of cryptocurrency, Siu noted that fewer than 70 million are actively using blockchain applications because crypto remains technically intimidating to mainstream consumers.
“My mom is not going to 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 act independently on the chain.
“Blockchain technology is the ideal financial system for machines,” Siu said. “We humans were basically the guinea pigs.”
The broader argument reflected 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 a burgeoning “agent economy.”
As part of this push, Animoca announced a $10 million investment initiative for developers building AI agent applications through its Animoca Minds platform.
If Sius’ vision comes to fruition, the next big wave of blockchain adoption may come not from millions of new human users learning to navigate crypto wallets, but from billions of AI agents autonomously trading with each other behind the scenes.
