Magazine: Animoca is a successful mobile gaming company with 10 million downloads and a top 10 app in the Apple App Store. Then you were abruptly kicked out of the store in 2012. How has this changed your perception of big tech?
Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca: The fact that platforms can become so powerful – the App Store, Google Play, Facebook, etc. – surprises many of us. Open source became the dominant form of coding, and it was kind of a wake-up call when Apple just decided to push the button and get rid of us.
We do not fully understand the exact reasons, but there was no discussion, no negotiations, no process. Hundreds of people could lose their jobs and millions of customers lose access to their favorite apps because the decisions of a few or a small group of people will never be held accountable. For us, it was basically a shock. It’s not that at the time we saw blockchain and decentralization as a solution — we just knew there was a problem.
Deplatforming users without any explanation seems very authoritarian, as if you had rulers but no courts and no firm laws.
Exactly. Blockchain is not only a technological solution, but also a political and socio-economic movement in many ways. That’s when people get into it. They won’t be in it because “oh look, it’s a decentralized ledger. I can get a copy of everything!” No, they are in it, because it means freedom. It means a kind of digital sovereignty that they crave because they lost it in the transition to a digital world.
It took us a year and a half, maybe two years to get back to the App Store. When we were kicked out, we were the leaders in this area, and it was then impossible to regain our position in the market, because by then, by the grace of Apple, the competition actually dominated this area.
My hobby is mining farms and trying dogecoin just because it’s fun and stupid. But because it’s a financial issue, I didn’t like it. We’re not from Wall Street, we don’t have that lens. But when NFTs appeared along with CryptoKitties, we realized that this is a culture.
It was 2017 so we were late. We haven’t seen the rise of Bitcoin, we’ve seen the rise of NFTs and what that means for virtual asset ownership. By the beginning or middle of 2018, we were completely immersed in the blockchain. At that time, we acquired The Sandbox and invested in OpenSea, Dapper Labs, WAX, Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity) and others.
Well, not so much then. You could say we made a crazy bet. But this is not a bet for us. Feels good, that’s the way.
I bought my first “virtual good” in 1990 or 1989 in a multiplayer dungeon. So this idea of paying for virtual goods has been normal for me for decades. But now that you have the ability to have it and have the all-important layout capability, it all blows our minds.
Thank you (surprise
Post time: Dec-23-2022