Trump, Tariffs And Utility Tokens: Animoca’s Yat Siu Says Crypto...
Trump‑era tariffs, bruising rate realities and a burned‑out memecoin cycle are forcing crypto to shed its Peter Pan phase and build tokens with real utility, says Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu.
For Animoca Brands co‑founder Yat Siu, 2025 will be remembered as “the Trump year,” not because US President Donald Trump saved crypto, but because the industry bet too heavily on him and mispriced everything from tariffs to rate cuts.
Trump was supposed to be crypto’s cheat code in 2025. Instead, Bitcoin (BTC) is limping into the year’s end, facing its fourth annual decline in history. Memecoin liquidity has been sucked into political side quests, and one of the sector’s longest‑running builders thinks the market over‑trusted the new president.
“If I had to give it a grade, I would say B-/C+,” Siu said. Traders treated Trump as if crypto were his “first child,” he says, when in reality, “we’re probably his third, fourth or fifth child, maybe even an eighth child.”
Trump’s priorities (tariffs, trade wars, fights over the Federal Reserve) hit risk assets hard, and Siu pointed out 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 crypto’s “Trump trade” didn’t play 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 his bet that public investors want an “altcoin proxy” once US rules are clearer.
Related: March 2025 in charts: Trump trade war hits Bitcoin, $22M in DeFi hacks
If 2025 was Trump’s year, Animoca wants 2026 to be the year public markets finally get a liquid altcoin proxy. The company 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. “Technically, on paper they buy us,” he said, “although we control that.”
The pitch is straightforward: MicroStrategy has become a leveraged public vehicle for Bitcoin exposure, but there is no equivalent for the long tail of tokens. “If you’re an investor and you want to have exposure to crypto, you definitely will need to have your Bitcoin … and then you have the swath of altcoins, and how do you get exposure to that?”
Buying a base‑layer token like Ether (ETH) or Solana (SOL) gives only limited access, he argues. Animoca’s answer is to position itself as a listed, SoftBank-style aggregator of altcoin upside, providing public market investors with a way to own
Source: CoinTelegraph
