For Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, 2025 will likely be remembered as a “Trump yr” not because US President Donald Trump bailed out crypto, but since the industry bet too heavily on him and mispriced every little thing from tariffs to rate of interest cuts.
Trump ought to be the cheat code for cryptocurrencies in 2025. Instead, Bitcoin (BTC) is limping toward the top of the yr, facing its fourth annual decline in history. Memecoin liquidity has been sucked into political sidelines, and considered one of the sector's longest-running developers believes the market has trusted the brand new president an excessive amount of.
Bitcoin's performance in 2025. Source: CoinMarketCap
“If I had to provide it a grade, I’d say B-/C+,” Siu said. Traders treated Trump as if crypto was his “first child,” when in point of fact we’re “probably his third, fourth or fifth child, perhaps even an eighth child.”
Trump's priorities (tariffs, trade wars, fights over the Federal Reserve) are hitting risk assets hard, and Siu identified that if the president starts a tariff war, he's “not fascinated by what's going to occur to the worth of Bitcoin.”
He said crypto's “Trump trade” didn't occur in 2025 and that 2026 will force the industry to deal with compliance and real-world use cases. Animoca’s planned reverse merger listing is its bet that public investors will want an “altcoin proxy” once U.S. rules are clearer.
Animoca's IPO as an altcoin proxy
If 2025 was the yr of Trump, Animoca wants 2026 to be the yr that public markets finally get a liquid altcoin proxy. The company plans to go public through a reverse merger with Currenc Group, a Nasdaq-listed fintech company. On terms that may lead to Animoca owning 95% of the combined company. “Technically, they’re buying us on paper,” he said, “although we control it.”
The idea is obvious: MicroStrategy has emerged as a leveraged public vehicle for Bitcoin exposure, but there isn’t any equivalent for the token's long tail. “If you're an investor and you desire to put money into crypto, you certainly need your Bitcoin… after which you’ve loads of altcoins, and the way do you get access to them?”
Buying a base layer token like Ether (ETH) or Solana (SOL) only allows limited access, he argues. Animoca's answer is to position itself as a SoftBank-style publicly traded altcoin aggregator, giving public market investors the chance to own a diversified portion of the altcoin and Web3 stack.
The company has greater than 620 portfolio corporations and invested in around 100 recent projects last yr alone, all of that are off its balance sheet, said Siu. In fiscal yr 2024, Animoca reported $314 million in unaudited bookings and the corporate achieved 4 consecutive years of positive EBITDA (profitable at core, before loans and taxes).
Animoca Brands investment thesis. Source: Animoca Brands
Siu expects Animoca itself to grow to be fully tokenized over time, and the corporate to grow to be a bridge between traditional stock markets and on-chain ownership.
Clarity, GENIUS and the “tokenize or die” moment
Siu's bet on an altcoin proxy initial public offering (IPO) is smart because the regulatory foundation solidifies, and he sees key US laws, including the Clarity Act and the GENIUS Act, as more of a catalyst than existential.
“The phrase we prefer to use is 'tokenize or die,'” he said. Once corporations have a transparent framework for issuing, trading and monitoring tokens, he expects a flood of incumbents to enter the market. “Crypto corporations prefer to be on the leading edge… but for those who’re a longtime company, whether public or private, why take the chance?”
He points to the way in which big brands reacted when stablecoin rules tightened in Washington and suddenly, after years of hand-wringing, “everyone seems to be doing stablecoins.” And he expects the identical pattern when the Clarity Act formalizes token classification and market structure rules next yr.
Established issuers will launch tokens tied to their existing operations because they finally have “legal certainty they didn’t have before.”
This is where real-world assets (RWAs) and tokenized securities function a bridge, as an industry expected to grow to trillions by 2030. Animoca has already began cutting RWA partnerships, including an agreement with Grow, a serious Chinese asset manager, to work on tokenization and access to token markets for traditional clients.
2026: The yr of the utility token
Siu believes that the subsequent thematic shift has already occurred. “The issue of institutionalizing crypto will proceed,” he said, but 2026 will likely be about “recent retail” coming in under clearer rules and with products based on usage and not only speculation.
Until now, he said – a trend that peaked throughout the memecoin season – a lot focus has been on the present crypto trader and the introduction of tokens and memecoins with platforms like Pump.fun.
In this environment, builders could launch a token without worrying about where the shopper would come from and deal with the narrative fairly than the product, but now market conditions are forcing a reboot.
The “Memecoin madness” was capped by Trump and Melania Trump-branded tokens earlier this yr, because the official Trump price (TRUMP) slid greater than 75% from its peak and Melania Meme (MELANIA) fell about 90% from its peak, with lots of of 1000’s of small wallets suffering losses.
According to Siu, this was “a bloody vampire attack on the meme community” that bankrupted much of the retail sector and drained liquidity from the remainder of the market.
As capital moves away from pure speculation, the subsequent wave will rely upon products that solve real problems for gamers, developers and types and attract users who’ve never considered themselves “crypto people.”
With the Clarity and GENIUS laws providing a path for compliant issuance, he argues that “2026 will likely be the yr of the utility token because everyone will launch a token that has a use case and we are able to discuss it.”
So principally are crypto corporations coming of age?
“They must, they must… We’re not the one company going public.”
