2026 will be the year of the utility token.
For Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, 2025 will be remembered as “the year of Trump”, not because US President Donald Trump saved crypto, but because the industry has been heavily gamed and misled everything from tariffs to deregulation.
Trump in 2016 It was supposed to be a crypto cheat code in 2025. Instead, Bitcoin (BTC) is reeling into the end of the year, experiencing its fourth annual decline in history. Memecoin's liquidity has been mired in political side missions, and one of the sector's longest-running developers thinks the market has trusted the new president.
“If I had to give a grade, I'd say B-/C+,” Siu said. Businessmen treated Trump as his first child, as he said, in fact, we are probably his third, fourth or fifth child, maybe his eighth child.
Trump's priorities (tariffs, trade wars, fights over the Federal Reserve) have taken a heavy toll on risk assets, and Siu pointed out that the president “didn't think about what would happen to the price of Bitcoin” when he started a tariff war.
He said that crypto's “Trump business” has not played out in 2025 and that 2026 will force the industry to focus on compliance and real use cases. Animoca's proposed reverse-merger listing is a bet that public investors will want an “altcoin proxy” once US rules become clearer.
Related: March 2025 in Charts: Trump's Trade War Hits Bitcoin, $22M in DeFi Hacks
Animoka IPO as an altcoin proxy
If 2025 is the year of Trump, Animoca wants 2026 to be when the public markets finally get a liquid altcoin proxy. The company plans to go public through a reverse merger with Currenc Group, a Nasdaq-listed fintech, in which Animoca will become a 95% joint legal owner. “Technically, on paper, they're buying us, even though we're in control,” he said.
The buzz is straightforward: Microstrategy has become a public vehicle used for Bitcoin exposure, but no match for the long tail of tokens. If you're an investor and you want exposure to crypto, you definitely need to get your bitcoins… and then you have altcoins, and how do you get exposure to that?”
He argued that buying a base-layer token like Ether (ETH) or Solana (SOL) would only provide limited access. Animoca's answer is to list itself as a SoftBank-style aggregator of altcoin upside, giving public market investors a way to own a different piece of the altcoin and Web3 stack.
The firm has more than 620 portfolio companies and invested in nearly 100 new projects last year alone, according to Siu, all off its own scale. In the year For the 2024 fiscal year, Animoca reported unaudited bookings of $314 million, and the company has been EBITDA-positive (profit before debt and taxes in its core businesses) for four consecutive years.
Over time, Siu expects Animoca itself to become fully publicized, turning the company into a bridge between traditional equity markets and onchain ownership.
RELATED: Animoca Tackling Altcoin To Attract Investors As It Plans IPO
Clarity, GENIUS and the “tokenize or die” moment
CU's bet on altcoin-proxy initial public offerings (IPOs) makes sense if regulation tightens, and key US laws, including the Clarity Act and the GENIUS Act, see them as stimulating rather than existential.
“A phrase we like to use is ‘Tokenize or die,'” he said. Once companies have a clear framework for issuing, trading and managing tokens, expect a flood of existing ones to enter the market. “Crypto companies are happy to skate on the fringes… but if you're an established company, you're private, why take a chance?”
He points to the way big brands responded when stablecoin rules were tightened in Washington, and suddenly, after years of hand-wringing, “everyone is doing stablecoins. And the Clarity Act will expect the same pattern next year after it approves token allocation and market structure rules.”
Established issuers will eventually launch tokens tied to their existing businesses because they have “legal certainty that they didn't have before.”
As an industry expected to grow to trillions by 2030, real-world assets (RWAs) and tokenized securities serve as a bridge. Animoca has already started cutting RWA partnerships, including a deal with China's major asset manager Growth to acquire and access token markets for traditional clients.
Related: Animoca eyes stablecoins, AI, DePIN as DePIN expands focus to 2026: Exec
2026: The year of the consumer token
Siu believes the next thematic shift is already in place. “The theme of crypto institutionalization will continue,” he said, but 2026 will be about “new retail” with clearer regulations and access to products built on utility, not just speculation.
Until now – the trend that peaked during memecoin – was to focus on existing crypto traders and launch tokens and memecoins on platforms like Pump.fun.
In that environment, builders could launch a token and not worry about where the customer is coming from, focus on narrative rather than product, but now market conditions are forcing a reset.
The “memecoin craze” was canceled earlier this year by popular symbols of Trump and Melania Trump, as the official Trump (TRUMP) slipped more than 75% from the peak and Melania Meme (Melania) fell 90% from the peak, hundreds of thousands of small wallets were sitting on the loss.
That, Siu says, was “one heck of a vampire attack on the meme community,” burning many retailers and draining them of the rest of the market.
As capital moves away from pure speculation, the next wave will rely on products that solve real problems for players, creators and brands, attracting users who never thought of themselves as “crypto people” in the first place.
Paving the way for compliance with the Clarity and GENIUS actions, he said, “2026 will be the year of the utility token because everyone will launch a token that has a use case and we can talk about it.
So, basically, are crypto companies growing?
“They should, they should… We're not the only ones going to IPO.”
