Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu has declared that the cryptocurrency industry must "grow up" after what he termed "the Trump year" of 2025 failed to deliver expected benefits. According to Siu, the market over-trusted President Donald Trump as crypto's "cheat code," mispricing everything from tariffs to rate cuts while Bitcoin faces its fourth annual decline in history.
Siu graded 2025's crypto performance as "B-/C+", noting that traders treated Trump as if crypto were his "first child" when in reality "we're probably his third, fourth or fifth child, maybe even an eighth child." He emphasized that Trump's priorities—tariffs, trade wars, and fights over the Federal Reserve—hit risk assets hard, with the president "not thinking about what's going to happen to the price of Bitcoin" when starting tariff wars.
The "memecoin madness" was particularly impacted, capped off by Trump and Melania Trump-branded tokens that saw dramatic declines: Official Trump (TRUMP) slid more than 75% from its peak and Melania Meme (MELANIA) dropped around 90% from its peak, leaving hundreds of thousands of small wallets with losses. Siu described this as "one heck of a vampire attack on the meme community" that sucked liquidity from the broader market.
Looking ahead, Siu believes 2026 will force the industry to focus on compliance and real use cases. Animoca plans to go public via a reverse merger with Currenc Group, a Nasdaq-listed fintech, on terms that would leave Animoca owning 95% of the combined entity. The company positions itself as a "SoftBank-style aggregator of altcoin upside," providing public market investors with diversified exposure to the altcoin and Web3 stack through its portfolio of more than 620 companies.
Siu sees key US legislation including the Clarity Act and GENIUS Act as catalytic rather than existential, using the phrase "Tokenize or die" to describe the coming shift. He expects established companies to launch tokens tied to their existing businesses once they have "legal certainty, which they didn't have before." Animoca has already started cutting real-world asset (RWA) partnerships, including a deal with Grow, a major Chinese asset manager.
Pantera Capital and Galaxy Digital's 2026 outlooks align with this utility-focused shift. Pantera researcher Jay Yu identified capital-efficient consumer credit as the next major frontier for DeFi, while Galaxy Digital projects U.S. spot crypto ETF inflows will reach a cumulative $50 billion in 2026—more than double the previous year's activity. Both firms anticipate the rise of agentic commerce where AI interface layers handle micropayments and wallet tracking automatically.
Galaxy Digital also forecasts that stablecoin transaction volumes will officially surpass those of the Automated Clearing House network in 2026, solidifying blockchain as the most efficient instrument for global money movement. Major fintech companies like Stripe and Klarna are increasingly using stablecoins for international settlements to reduce foreign exchange friction.
Siu concludes that "2026 will be the year of the utility token because everyone will launch a token that has a use case," marking a definitive shift from speculation to products that solve real problems for gamers, creators, and brands.
