Yat Siu, open metaverse pioneer and Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman was at Coinfest Asia on 24th of august. Recently, Yat was just appointed to the Task Force on Promoting Web3 Development newly established by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Yat believes that by contributing to this innovative initiative, it will serve as a model for other nations to adopt and use to solve many pain points across education, finance, trade, business operations, and even day-to-day life. This was a rare appearance by Yat Siu and Giorgio Scura, our editor-in-chief, had the honor of interviewing him.
Who is Yat Siu
Yat Siu established Hong Kong Cybercity in 1996, the first free web page and email provider in Asia. He later founded Outblaze in 1998, which developed pioneering web-based multilingual white-label communication services. Yat Siu’s leadership led Outblaze to become a global leader in white-label web services with over 75 million users, securing clients worldwide. In 2009, Outblaze’s messaging assets were acquired by IBM, showcasing Hong Kong’s IT competitiveness. Yat Siu received various awards and was recognized as a global leader. His specialties include internet, messaging, social media, and more.
The interview
What do you think about NFTs and gaming market in Europe?
Yat Siu: “so generally speaking I think they are rising but it is not as popular as in Asia but also not as negative as it is in Amercia, so in other words I think Europe is kind of middle ground, some hot spots where I think I think NFT gaming is much more populr than in other parts, for instance in France, maybe a litte bit in Italy, but in particular France and UK have really sort of left the way forward in terms of the interest, companies like Sandbox or Life Beyond for instance and so on; so I think that is basically the state in Europe but you know europeans are that’s sort of what we’ve what we have seen also on the crypto scenes as well have been actually quite sort of open towards it if you’re from the web 3 space”.
Nice. We work against scammers a lot also with the law enforcement, what do you think the industry can do against scammers?
Yat Siu: “I think one general education first, I mean broadly if you can help people about educating, about what is scam and what isn’t scam with the sources to go after, because unfortunately there is still a lot of anonymous projects with unknown boards, you don’t know the backgrounds and you see al those rug pulls is bad for the industry and we have to stop that, so I think education is the first step. But in the second thing, I think we as an industry need to be better at is we need to be able to tell, and we have to warn, so if we see something that we think it’s bad we should warn people, we shouldn’t just stay quietly and say we don’t know; if we know it is bad, we have to tell people because we have to show that there is actually a group of people in the industry that are not ok with some of the kind of the bad stuff that’s happening.”
Ok thank you, and talking about use cases, you use a lot NFTs, where are the industry that in your opinion will be affected more by the use of NFTs?
Yat Siu: “So first of all we think of NFTs as something that is universal to everything that relates to the property rights, obviously gaming is a big area that we still think will develop quickly because we’re still there early, but the other area that we’re very excited about is education, learning materials, additional frameworks courses and tutorials; you know we have been doing that with you know tinytap and open campus and edu for instance all right we think that is a big one because gaming is a 200 billion industry of which you know 3 billions plus people are playing videogames, but education is 5 trillion dollars industry and everyone does it and never stopsright , so we think again these are the kind of industries that go but of course other than that we’ve got sports, culture, arts, media, music as well but music we put under culture, I think this is one of the reasons music will be harder, it will be of course covered as well, it’s because music as a lot of modes so meaning there’s there is a lot of structures that are hard to change, whereas with gaming or education is decentralized, you know there’s not you can talk to this company that company that’s totally this studio but in music there’s not that many choices that’s why it’s a little harder but still it will change too”.
