Evan Auyang would like to talk about buses.
The president of Animoca Brands has an odd resume for someone leading one of Hong Kong’s most prominent Web 3.0 startups: Finance, consulting and, importantly, a stint as the deputy managing director of the Kowloon Motor Bus Company, one of the city’s bus operators.
“A bus lowers the cost for every single person going to the right destination,” Auyang excitedly told Fortune during an interview in mid-August. “It’s the most powerful thing that’s been created in transportation. You can deploy a bus anywhere. And you don’t have to have every single bus route be profitable.”
Auyang’s time as a bus executive explains much of why he joined a cryptocurrency company, why he pushed Animoca into a stablecoin venture, and his views on why the industry’s future looks more like the regulated and useful public transit sector.
‘Not the next Tether’
On the same morning of Fortune’s conversation with Auyang, Anchorpoint—a joint venture between Standard Chartered, HKT, and Animoca—had begun the phased rollout of its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, and added that retail use could start by the end of the year.
“We’re not trying to be the next Tether,” Auyang said. “We’re trying to be one that says: we want to be the regulated rails, be there first, to enable this region of Greater China and the capital markets here to be on-chain.”
Animoca, Standard Chartered, and HKT announced Anchorpoint in February 2025; the joint venture was one of the first companies to apply for a stablecoin when the city opened up applications for its stablecoin licensing regime in August of that year. The regime is strict: Issuers must hold at least 25 million Hong Kong dollars ($3.2 million) in paid-up capital—money shareholders have actually put in—and back every coin, at all times, with reserves of safe, easy-to-sell assets like bonds that are held separately from the company’s own funds.
In April, the HKMA cleared just two of 36 applicants: Anchorpoint and HSBC, the city’s largest bank.
Experts have been skeptical of whether any non-U.S. dollar stablecoin will be able to get traction among consumers and businesses, but a Hong Kong dollar-denominated stablecoin has a distinct advantage. The city’s currency has been pegged to the U.S. dollar since 1983—meaning an HKD stablecoin will maintain a stable value, yet sitting outside U.S. regulatory control.
Auyang stressed that Anchorpoint was an independent entity, and so declined to speak for the venture itself. Yet he still explained why Animoca needed to work with established companies like Standard Chartered and HKT.
“You guys understand regulation, you can work with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and you understand how to get something like this approved and done,” he said. “We need adults in the room. So we built a team of adults.”
He argued the value of a stablecoin comes from its ability to connect unbanked individuals—1.3 billion globally, according to the World Bank—to the financial system. “If you don’t have a purpose for it, if there’s no use for it, there’s no business model,” Auyang said.
Banks, he said, don’t tell people “you are too expensive to be served. They just don’t serve you. Somebody with 10 Hong Kong dollars [$1.30] ought to be able to invest.”
Auyang had to convince his colleagues to shift to stablecoins. “It’s not in our moat,” Auyang said. “The reason is that it creates an obligation.”
Extension, not pivot
This posture is quite the turn for a company that made its fortune in crypto’s wild years. Founded in 2014, Animoca became Web3’s most prolific investor. It was an early backer of Sky Mavis, the studio behind Axie Infinity, and the owner of The Sandbox, the virtual world once pitched as the metaverse’s centerpiece.
In mid-2022 Animoca was valued as high as $5.9 billion; established investors like SoftBank took part in The Sandbox’s $93 million round the previous November. Yet the crypto winter ate into both Animoca’s valuation and its business: Bookings fell by 30% between 2022 and 2023.
Animoca is pivoting to new opportunities in AI. In May, Animoca launched a service, “Minds by Animoca Brands” that lets non-technical users deploy persistent, always-on AI agents with their own identity, memory, and cognition, reachable over email and Telegram.
Personal AI agents are having a moment; Meta released its Muse assistant this month. Auyang’s own agent is called Jarvis, a reference to Iron Man’s famous assistant.
Auyang resisted calling the shift to AI a pivot. “From Yat’s and my perspective, it’s an extension of capability,” he said. Still, he admitted that the original model behind Animoca has been slow to pay off. “In 2021, I was a gamer,” he said, adding that he believed ownership of digital assets would free people and change the internet. “It didn’t pan out at the speed we wanted it to.”
Nor does he see Animoca competing with the AI giants. “There will be winners in LLMs. It’s not going to be Animoca. We’re not that kind of company,” he said.
Auyang’s route to crypto was convoluted. He started at Bankers Trust and Citigroup, before joining McKinsey. He then jumped to Kowloon Motor Bus in 2009; the company’s 4000 buses carry about 2.5 million passengers a day. “It’s public service that is for profit, and that power is absolutely amazing,” he said.
KMB humbled the former banker and consultant. He struggled with the operational reality of managing a bus company, such as how “an engine placed this way versus that way” would change how a bus ran. Then, there was politics, as tweaking an unprofitable route required negotiating with local politicians, officials and heavyweights.
“I could tell you some of them had triad backgrounds,” he said with a smile. “It’s all about the relationship, the respect.”
It was during his KMB tenure that he met Yat Siu, Animoca’s co-founder and executive chairman. When Auyang was leaving the expert network GLG—his job after KMB—Siu opened a conversation with him, initially asking him whether he’d consider joining Animoca’s board.
“I said, I’m not a tech guy. Let me take a look at what you have,” Auyang recalled saying to Siu. “The number-one thing I saw was: hey, you don’t really have a team. It’s really you.”
That’s led to a strange pairing at the head of Animoca. Siu is more flamboyant, consistently playing up crypto and blockchain’s revolutionary potential at Web 3.0 conferences and to the cryptocurrency press. Auyang, who also chairs the Civic Exchange policy think tank, takes a more sober view, seeing blockchain “like buses”: A public platform that, he argues, creates “a greater obligation to serve the public.”
A listing, on hold
For much of 2026, Animoca was pursuing a listing on the Nasdaq through a reverse merger with Currenc Group. At the time, Auyang defended the plan by arguing that the listing would help give Animoca discipline, as well as access to capital.
Yet on Sept. 22, after Fortune’s conversation with Auyang, Animoca announced it was suspending its merger talks, following “a review of the projected closing timelines and evolving market conditions.” It maintained that it was “fully committed to relisting on a major public exchange.” (Animoca declined to comment beyond the statement)
The Australian Securities Exchange delisted Animoca in 2020, alleging breaches of listing rules. (Animoca disputed some of ASX’s allegations) Animoca is now working through a document backlog: It released audited accounts for 2023 in July, and is still working on 2024.
The crypto market is in a broader chill. Prices surged in 2021 on stimulus-fueled retail euphoria, which collapsed after a series of high-profile blow-ups and interest rate hikes. Currencies rallied again in 2025 due to the Trump administration’s perceived crypto-friendly stance. They’ve since slid again, compounded by the CLARITY Act’s stalling in the U.S. Senate last week. Much of the venture capital that once chased token launches has decamped for AI.
Auyang doesn’t spare his own industry, which he blamed for getting distracted by easy rewards. “The for-profit motive is extremely strong. But there needs to be a reward-obligation balance,” he said. Listing a token meant founders got “rewarded with capital that you’re not supposed to do anything with, to buy Ferraris with.”
In his view, the cryptocurrency sector was hit by “too much speculation, too much capital.”
“I feel that the generation right now has gone to a place where the culture of gambling has become very, very real,” he said.
That critique puts him at odds with crypto’s hottest product. Prediction markets, which allow users to bet on everything from World Cup winners to mentions in Trump speeches, are the sector’s breakout hit.
When asked for his view on prediction markets, Auyang doubled down: “It’s very much gambling,” he said, and added it reminded him of working in derivative markets during his brief time in finance. “We were like: Oh my God, this stuff can really do a lot of damage.”
In Fortune’s “Asia Agenda” column, released at least twice a month, we speak with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they’ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore all of our profiles here.
The post Animoca’s Evan Auyang worked in finance and public transit before crypto—Why he thinks the blockchain should be more like a bus appeared first on Fortune.
