The founder of a crypto powerhouse says that Meta and Microsoft are “digital dictatorships” and wants to break their dominance in the online world
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The founder of a major crypto firm described the likes of Meta and Microsoft as “digital dictatorships”.
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Yat Siu of Animoca Brands told Bloomberg that his and Web3’s goal is to remove power from Big Tech.
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It is a core part of Web3: decentralizing technology and returning ownership to the user.
Major tech critics have long singled out the industry as having too much power, and the co-founder of a powerful crypto giant just weighed in on the matter.
Yat Sui, who heads Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands — which backs a number of major crypto projects and owns The Sandbox — told Bloomberg in a report published Wednesday that his company has invested in more than 340 firms spanning finance, gaming and blockchain.
The goal, he told Bloomberg, is to tear down tech giants’ dominance of the industry and return online ownership of one’s digital identities and properties back to users. He called the likes of Meta, Facebook’s new parent company, and Microsoft “digital dictatorships” without saying more in the interview.
Siu did not immediately respond to Insider’s request to elaborate.
Web3 is in theory the future of the internet that will live on the blockchain, the same backbone that supports cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. It will not be controlled by entities such as Google or Twitter.
It has been a central part of Web3’s argument that a decentralized web can remove power from the technical monopolies of Web2, namely Meta, Google, Apple and others. The idea is that since people’s data would theoretically be decentralized—that is, living on the blockchain instead of servers owned by tech conglomerates like Amazon—it would weaken our dependence on the big companies that currently dominate the space.
Web3, as it stands right now, is still just a thought, despite Mark Zuckerberg screaming from the rooftops that the metaverse is the future—and spending $10 billion to make it so.
However, Siu and Animoca Brands have been in the Web3 sphere since before the term became a buzzword.
Founded in 2014, the company has poured money into a number of significant crypto projects – it bought a stake in Dapper Labs, the parent company of Cryptokitties, in 2018 and owns The Sandbox, one of the more concrete metaverses where rapper Snoop Dogg “lives”.
Animoca has also backed Axie Infinity, a hot crypto game, and OpenSea, the world’s largest online NFT marketplace.
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