ヤット・シウが語るWeb4とエージェント型ウェブ

“We’re going to have tens of billions of agents in the world roaming around doing stuff.”

Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, said that on the Main Stage at Tech for Impact Summit 2026 in Tokyo on April 26. He was in conversation with Una Softić in a Strategy Dialogue titled Web4: The Autonomous Agentic Web. His position: Web3 was built for the AI moment, and Japan misread it.

“For us, Web3 was basically digital property rights — the web of ownership,” he told the audience. “In Japan, though, Web3 got narrowed down and became synonymous with crypto. So it’s completely shadowed everything else that it was supposed to.”

Web4, as Siu uses the term, is an internet where most economic activity is carried out by autonomous agents acting for humans, on top of the ownership infrastructure Web3 built.

How Many Agents

Siu opened with a numbers exercise. When he asks audiences how many AI agents they think they will run, the usual answer is three to five.

“I have 200, and I probably have a thousand by the end of the year,” he said. “But simply put, it’s going to be typically more than the number of people that are online. That means we’re going to have tens of billions of agents in the world.”

The first consequence he named was web traffic.

“Today, already, we no longer are browsing the web like we used to. If you’re using Google, you’re doing a search, you’re basically getting the summary. And you don’t know what to click through. So if you are a traditional media website, your traffic is down 80%. That’s the average number right now. So how do you make money from that? It completely reshapes it.”

Most digital media and online advertising forecasts still assume human attention. Siu’s 80% number does not.

Web3 Underneath Web4

Siu’s case for Web3 as the base layer of the agentic web started five thousand years back.

“Writing was invented for the ledger,” he said. “The ancient Sumerians invented writing five thousand years ago because you had to prove who’s house was it. If you couldn’t prove ownership, you couldn’t organize society. Society could never become larger than 100 or 200 people — Dunbar’s number was basically 150. When you started building actual cities and villages, you needed a way to prove that ownership.”

“And what is blockchain? It’s basically a machine ledger. It’s a distributed machine ledger that we can use to prove in a decentralized manner, but actually is the ledger for machines.”

For throughput, he compared two points a decade apart. “Nine years ago in CryptoKitties, a few million dollars of sales melted the blockchain. It could do no transactions. And today, because of stablecoins, because of Solana, Ethereum, scaling solutions, trillions of dollars with BlackRock, Fidelity, Standard Chartered — we can now basically do everything that banks can do on chain.”

AI agents cannot open bank accounts or pass KYC. They can hold and send stablecoins on a public ledger. Former Minister Masaaki Taira made the same point earlier that day in his keynote on Japan’s AI On-Chain Finance Initiative, and so did Sota Watanabe of Startale on the Japan Strikes Back Web3 panel. A politician, an infrastructure founder, and an investor, inside ninety minutes.

”Software as We Know It Is Dead”

Siu’s prediction for enterprise software got the longest silence of the session.

“Software as we know it is dead,” he said, “because we don’t need basically one company that’s running software for an entire nation or entire city or whatever. Instead, we’re all going to have customized pieces of software.”

His example was a restaurant. “Everyone of those guys who are being let go, they’re going to be able to sort of help five restaurants build a custom software for their customer applications.” One person, an agent, five restaurants, custom code for each.

He applied the same logic to programming as a profession. “Programming, in my view, is going to go the way of Instagram with photos. I grew up in the time in the 80s and 90s where being a photographer was a job for only a small percentage of people. And today, because of AI agents, everyone is a programmer.” The obstacle he sees is habit. Most people still say “no, I don’t program” when handed the capability, the way most people in the 1990s would not have called themselves photographers.

Provenance

Siu’s answer to what stays scarce when any agent can produce the same output: knowing where it came from.

“What we pay for isn’t the fact that it is looking good. What we pay for is that it’s coming from you. So the premium for authenticity, which has always been the premium for trust in relationships — that’s the role of blockchain, to verify that this is basically coming from outside.”

He named the tools: digital identity, soulbound NFTs, agent-to-agent introductions backed by verifiable credentials. His own example was restaurants again. When someone visits his home city of Hong Kong, he no longer sends a list of favorites. He introduces them to his agent. “The agent can basically just say, here’s a favorite restaurant, but it’s constantly updated. And what’s also interesting is feedback comes back. So even though I’m not communicating, I’m actually building a kind of parasocial relationship with everyone else who’s engaging through the agent in a more direct way.”

Two agents talk, each with a verified link back to its human. Soulbound credentials and on-chain identity are what supply that link, and without it nothing separates a legitimate agent from a hostile one.

Japan and Orchestration

Siu spent the closing third of the dialogue on Japan. He does not share the view that Japan has fallen behind in AI.

“The lead in agentic AI is not about the LLMs,” he said. “The LLMs — it’s basically about orchestration layers, about how you harness it together. And frankly, that race only started probably December, maybe January. So it’s a very, very early, early, early stage.”

Running 100 to 300 agents, in his description, looks more like running a factory than managing software. “Japan actually has some pretty good management in terms of orchestration,” he said. “In a way, it’s almost like running a factory when you’re actually managing agents.” Softić brought up Japanese manufacturing culture. Siu: “Kaizen culture kind of makes an assumption that humans are like robots. But actually, agents are actually robots. So in this sense, I think they’re more suited for that kind of mindset than human management.”

His second Japanese asset is the one Animoca’s business rests on: pop culture and intellectual property. “Gaming is really, if you think about it, not technology. It’s storytelling and harnessing other kinds of technology — be it Unreal or Unity or basically the platforms — but creating these incredible stories that bind communities together.” Anime, manga, games, and music, in his view, are the raw material for agentic experiences, and Japan has been producing them for fifty years.

What to Do on Monday Morning

Softić’s closing question: what should the audience actually do.

Siu gave two answers. First, use agents. “The only way you’ll know is if you actually use them. Most people, using agents is hard — they have to use Open Claude or a VPS or they don’t know what LLM to use. But just sign up with an email and start. Whether it’s Claude, whether it’s some other system, start using agentic AI.”

Second, give them names. “You really only get to the feeling of using agentic AI if you give them a name. You don’t call them calendar or robot. You give them an identity. You give them a personality. And that allows you to open up that next phase of thinking, because then you have essentially a coworker. Otherwise you only see it as a tool. It’s like the internet in the early days — when you talked to people about the internet, they saw it as a tool for e-commerce and for transactions. And now it became just lifestyle. That’s what agents will do as well.”

Web3 let software own and transact. Web4, in Siu’s reading, is what happens when that goes to entities with names, personalities, and goals, tens of billions of them.

Agent-to-agent payments, custom software per business, provenance, and Japan’s orchestration culture are on the agenda for next year’s Tech for Impact Summit. If you lead a company, a fund, or an institution that needs to be in those conversations, the membership program for T4IS 2027 is open.