Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands: NFT will become a trend in the future and will become an important part

On October 27, the 7th Blockchain Global Summit 2021 hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs was held in Shanghai. Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, published "From Open Source to Open Assets, Why NFT will provide real digital property rights" keynote speech.

Yat Siu said in his speech that NFT will become a trend in the future and will become an important part because it can be connected to all aspects of our lives. In the metaverse, we need open assets for transactions. Through such an open platform, we can provide their services and at the same time obtain some services they need. This is what we call NFT.

The following is the full text of the speech:

I am very happy and honored to be here to give this speech. I am the founder of Animoca. The topic of my speech today is why there is an NFT and how important it is. Let me introduce the company first, established in Hong Kong, the business is to create games based on blockchain. Because of the blockchain, players can get a better gaming experience. We were established in 2017, and since then, we have made some investments in the NFT industry. As you can see, including Dax and other related applications, more than 50 projects have been invested. We help this ecosystem and increase its value. The first thing I would like to share with you is that the most valuable product or resource in the world is not land, but data. Data is the most valuable resource in the world. If you look at the current giant companies, they are mainly data companies. Whether it is Amazon, Google or Facebook, they are all supported and developed by data. All the data mixed together will become more powerful and have more and more influence. The more data, the greater the impact. We see more and more online services launched, and there is no way to separate them from the data. Looking at the source of data, we can see that it has scarcity, and it is precisely because of this scarcity that data can be traded as an asset. If it is some worthless data or data without scarcity, they are not worth discussing. No matter who we choose to marry, or what kind of business we start, data cannot be ignored. Data is information, and information together constitutes knowledge. Today we see a lot of data, scattered in various places. Take a look at Facebook, Tencent, and other social companies. What they do is to obtain user data and turn it into their knowledge. In this case, they are competing with each other for data. Through such data construction, they have established a data fortress. These big companies will not share their data with other companies, and we call it a data war. What we do is through the integration of data, so that these data can be shared together, and at the same time, their efficiency can be brought into play.

Next, share open data assets, open data assets, because it can give ownership of data. You can add different layers to the data. For example, on top of the data, you can create different layers, such as the story and value of the data, etc. We have also explored this in the past.

Code is a very important tool, you get code, others can add code to your code, and so on. Hundreds of people come together to code, and the code is shared by these people. This is where human creativity lies. For example, in the real world, the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter alternate with each other. In the digital world, we have no way to alternate. So we say that the whole world can be connected through code. All data is a mixture of codes, whether in the United States, Germany, China, or Australia, we can all work together through codes to create some very different results. Today, open source has become a very important tool and webpage, which can help us build different network software. On the other hand, small companies, if they only have five or ten people, can compete with large companies. Because they have the ability to get that data, that's the network effect, open source makes it possible. With open source code, the whole world becomes more fair and shared.

If we can make the code open source, people will be more and more willing to share, and through sharing, we can get better ideas. There is a problem here, the code is very complicated for many people, and there are still many people who can't write code. Although we try to popularize science, people still can't understand it. We need special people to understand the code, and this job can only be done by software engineers. For NFT, you don’t need to know any codes to use NFTs. You can be a gamer, a cryptographer, or an expert from all walks of life. You don’t need to know the codes. You only need to hold NFT to better integrate with the online world we are talking about. Only through an open blockchain can we achieve real innovation, which means how we combine Web3.0 with blockchain. In the era of Web1.0 and Web2.0, data can be copied and replicated. The types of data are text, pictures, videos, music and so on. But in the blockchain world, the ownership of the data has been transferred. If we want to transfer from the Facebook account to other platforms, the ownership can be transferred through the blockchain. Who ultimately controls or owns such data? This is the magic of the blockchain. We can see that NFT will become a future trend. Why do we say that NFT will become a very important and important part? Because it can be connected with every aspect of our life, such as art, life, sports and so on. So NFT can help us establish such an interpersonal relationship. Everyone needs money, but it doesn't mean we love money, because we love family, work and art. Sometimes people create art like this just because they want to make money. Of course, their human factors cannot be ruled out. Through NFT, such a creative meaning can be realized.

Through such a digital world, you can also realize your value. I just mentioned that through such a digital world, we can add more layers on top of digital assets. For example, a relationship layer, a token layer, and a metadata layer can be added, all of which can be realized through human imagination. Because we own this data, no other permission is required.

For example, in the real world, if you want to buy a car, you consider the entire ecosystem of the car, including highways, charging stations, gas stations, and so on. If you consider it from another aspect, you should focus on the value of the car itself. Would you buy an electric car if there were no charging facilities? So we need to take its practicality into consideration. Another example, when the car was first built, everyone started to have the idea of building a child seat. If children sit in this car, they need to be equipped with child seats, which appeared in 1932. With composability, you have digital assets, and based on digital assets, you can add other functions and features to it. We build these platforms based on our needs and imagination, and believe that NFT will replace many assets in the future, and you can use it in games or other scenarios. You can use it in Sandbox or other platforms, through which you can better create its value. How do we break through the traditional closed-loop model and create such a more open model. In the metaverse, we need open assets for transactions. Through such an open platform, we can provide their services and at the same time obtain some services they need. This is what we call NFT.

By bringing these assets to the chain, you can build your own games instead of just playing these games as players of the game. In the story of NFT, what we need is the ownership of the data. Once the ownership is determined, everything will become very easy.

Here is an example from Sandbox, where you can do some code work arbitrarily, and represent different things through different descriptions. All of these can override the Metaverse. Through them we can also create some new stories, and this can also help us create better communication channels. It can be seen that in the Sandbox game, they are also trying to bring people together to create an interactive game. All users can own an area in such a metaverse, and there has been a lot of news about NFTs recently, such as Beeple being sold at a high value, and other NFT projects. We are very concerned about the need to further promote NFT through an open source method.

People will say that if I put this bag in the Metaverse or the digital world, I have no way to touch it, no way to touch it. Think about it, why did you buy this bag? Buying this bag is actually buying a story, an asset, an idea, or an imagination. This is the original intention of buying this bag, and this is the value that the bag brings to you. In addition to the physical bag, you are also buying some deep, humanistic meaning and value.

If you are an environment-friendly person, we don’t want to buy some leather bags, because we want to protect the environment and realize the meaning of environmental protection. We can bridge or connect the real world with the virtual world very well. There are also some virtual game products we talked about, because people have no way to own a villa in the real world, but in the game scene, they can own a virtual villa, so that they can gain self-satisfaction.

Finally, I would like to talk to you about the metaverse. What is the metaverse like? It can be seen that there are 2.7 billion people active on the Internet in the world, and everyone comes out to play social media and applications. There are some well-known companies in Web2.0, such as Facebook, which announced that it will transform into a metaverse company. What Facebook builds is the metaverse. If the metaverse is not open source, we will not be able to obtain the ownership of the data.

Disney is a closed metaverse, and you can play games in a virtual Disneyland. Facebook hopes to transform into a metaverse company, but in reality it is still acquiring our data and controlling our data, which is not what the metaverse should be like. We should be open and in control of our data. The Metaverse is not a single product, but thousands of products, which are connected and connected to all people in the world. There is no doubt that open source will change the world. We should still be very optimistic, very interesting cases. We need to have such a very good, very open ecosystem. Different countries also have different cultures, and different cultures will bring some inspiration to the future system. It doesn't matter how we call such a metaverse, the most important thing is that we need to better understand and better connect with each other to build such a real metaverse. In many ways, China has done very well. Chinese food is very popular all over the world, and it is also very popular in the United States. I like Chinese food very much. We can have more interactive exchanges on the cultural level, which can enhance mutual understanding. Although I am not a Chinese, I still like China, Chinese objects and culture. We can learn about other cultures and gain such wisdom and digital experience.