Yat Siu | Co-Founder of Animoca Brands — Web3’s North Star is Digital Ownership

In this episode of BeaconLayer Podcast, Kenzi Morikawa speaks with Yat Siu about the idea that has guided Animoca Brands from the start: the “north star” of Web3 is digital ownership — not speculation, not hype, but the ability for people to truly own and control assets online.Yat’s path into tech started unusually early. Coming from a musician family, he was training to be a musician when he began writing software on an Atari ST in the 1980s to read music notation. His teachers didn’t exactly love it — but other people did, enough that they paid him for the software. That early signal pushed him deeper into building. He later worked for Atari, then moved through roles at Silicon Graphics and AT&T.His first major entrepreneurial chapter was launching Hong Kong Cybercity — one of Asia’s earliest free webpage and email providers, later renamed Freenation — long before “Web3” was even a phrase. So when NFTs arrived and made digital items ownable in a real way, the jump felt less like a pivot and more like destiny.In 2014, Yat co-founded Animoca Brands, which today builds across blockchain gaming and adjacent products (and increasingly AI-enabled experiences). In the conversation, he explains why NFTs unlocked something deeper than collectibles: property-like rights in digital spaces. That belief — that ownership creates powerful network effects as people build, remix, and compose on top of what they own — became the conviction that drove Animoca’s move toward blockchain, and the thesis they’ve been executing ever since.