For Animoc Brands co-founder Yat Siu, 2025 will be remembered as “the year of Trump,” not because US President Donald Trump saved crypto, but because the industry bet too much on it and misjudged everything from tariffs to rate cuts.
Trump was supposed to be the cryptocurrency cheat code of 2025. Instead, Bitcoin (BTC) limps through the rest of the year, facing its fourth annual decline in history. The liquidity of memecoin has been sucked into political pursuits, and one of the longest-serving builders in the sector believes that the market has overly trusted the new president.
“If I had to give him a grade, I’d say B-/C+,” Siu said. Traders treated Trump like cryptocurrency was his “first child,” he says, when in reality “we’re probably his third, fourth, or fifth child, maybe even his eighth child.”
Trump’s priorities (tariffs, trade wars, fights over the Federal Reserve) are hitting risk assets hard, and Siu noted that when the president starts a tariff war, he’s “not thinking about what’s going to happen to the price of Bitcoin.”
He said that the crypto “Trump trade” has not played out in 2025 and that 2026 will force the industry to focus on compliance and real use cases. Animoca’s planned reverse merger listing is its bet that public investors want a “proxy altcoin” once US rules are clearer.
Related: March 2025 Charts: Trump’s Trade War Hits Bitcoin, $22M in DeFi Hack
Animoca IPO as proxy altcoin
If 2025 was the year of Trump, Animoca wants 2026 to be the year 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 organization, under terms that would see Animoca own 95% of the combined entity. “Technically, on paper they are buying us,” he said, “even though we control it.”
The point is clear: MicroStrategy has become a public leveraged vehicle for Bitcoin exposure, but there is no equivalent for the token’s long tail. “If you’re an investor and you want to be exposed to a cryptocurrency, you’re definitely going to need to have your Bitcoin… and then you have a bunch of altcoins, and how are you going to get exposure to that?”
Buying a base-layer token like Ether (ETH) or Solana (SOL) gives only limited access, he claims. Animoca’s response is to position itself as a SoftBank-style listed aggregator of altcoin growth, providing public market investors with a way to own a diverse portion of the altcoin and Web3 stack.
The firm has more than 620 portfolio companies and invested in roughly 100 new projects last year alone, Siu said, all of which are off its balance sheet. In the financial year 2024, Animoca reported unaudited bookings of 314 million dollarsand the company has been EBITDA-positive (profitable in its core business, before loans and taxes) for four consecutive years.
Over time, Siu expects Animoca itself to be fully tokenized, turning the company into a bridge between traditional capital markets and on-chain ownership.
Related: Animoca is betting on altcoin growth to attract investors as it plans an IPO
Clarity, GENIUS and a “tokenize or die” moment.
Siu’s bet on an altcoin-proxy initial public offering (IPO) makes sense if the regulatory framework solidifies, and he sees key US laws, including the Clarity Act and the GENIUS Act, as catalytic rather than existential.
“A phrase we like to use is ‘Tokenize or die,'” he said. Once companies have a clear framework for issuing, trading and monitoring tokens, he expects a flood of leading companies to enter the market. “Crypto companies like to skate on the edge… but if you’re an established company, whether you’re public or private, why take the risk?”
He points to the way big brands responded when stablecoin rules took hold in Washington, and suddenly, after years of hand-wringing, “everybody’s doing stablecoins.” And he expects the same pattern after the Clarity Act formalizes token classification and market structure rules next year.
Established issuers will launch tokens tied to their existing businesses because they finally have “legal certainty, which they didn’t have before.”
Here, real-world assets (RWA) and tokenized securities serve as a bridge, an industry expected to grow into the trillions by 2030. Animoca has already begun to cut RWA partnerships, including a deal with Grow, a large Chinese asset manager, to work on tokenization and access to token markets for traditional clients.
Related: Animoca Considers Stablecoins, AI, DePIN as Expands Focus in 2026: Exec
2026: The Year of the Utility Token
Siu believes the next thematic shift is already in place. “The theme of institutionalizing cryptocurrency will continue,” he said, but 2026 will be about the entry of “new retail” under clearer rules and with products built around use, not just speculation.
Until now, he said — a trend that peaked during memecoin season — so much has been focused on existing crypto traders and token and memecoin launches with platforms like Pump.fun.
In that environment, builders could launch a token and not worry about where the customer will come from, focusing on the narrative instead of the product, but now market conditions are forcing a reset.
The “memecoin frenzy” was interrupted by Trump and Melania Trump branded tokens earlier this year, as official Trump (TRUMP) fell more than 75% from its peak and Melania Meme (MELANIA) fell about 90% from its peak, with hundreds of thousands of small wallets left in the red.
It was, according to Siu, “one vampire attack on the meme community,” leaving a lot of retail burned and draining liquidity from the rest of the market.
As capital turns away from pure speculation, the next wave will depend on products that solve real problems for gamers, creators and brands, attracting users who never thought of themselves as “crypto people”.
With the Clarity and GENIUS Acts paving the way for regulatory issuance, he claims that “2026 will be the year of the utility token because everyone will launch a token that has a use case and we can talk about it.”
So basically, crypto companies are growing?
“They have to, they have to… We’re not the only company going for an IPO.”
About the Author
