Animoca Brands Founder Yat Siu Highlights On-Chain Student Loans at Consensus 2025
Animoca Brands founder Yat Siu pointed out at the Consensus 2025 conference that the next wave in DeFi will be on-chain student loans, where young people will bring positive learning behaviors and demonstration cases to cryptocurrency inclusive finance.
(Background: Animoca Brands is set to go public in the United States, with founder Yat Siu stating that crypto payment games will soon explode.)
(Supplementary Background: Animoca Brands’ new base in Hong Kong is “as large as 10 tennis courts,” creating a dazzling Web3 hub.)
At the Consensus 2025 conference held in Toronto, Canada, “student loans” were mentioned as a key conceptual focus for the next growth cycle in decentralized finance (DeFi). Animoca Brands co-founder and executive Yat Siu emphasized that introducing a portion of the massive global student loan market into blockchain technology could significantly enhance the total locked value (TVL) of the DeFi ecosystem and is expected to become an important catalyst for the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency, especially for the currently underserved younger generation.
Student Loans: An Untapped Blue Ocean in DeFi
In his speech, Siu elaborated on the enormous potential of the student loan market for the DeFi realm. He pointed out that the total value of the global student loan market is estimated to reach $3 trillion. In contrast, the total locked value (TVL) of the entire DeFi ecosystem—an indicator measuring the total amount of assets deposited in DeFi protocols—still has tremendous room for growth. He believes that even transferring just 10% of the global student loan market onto the blockchain for management and operation would be sufficient to result in several-fold growth of DeFi’s overall TVL. Siu clearly stated:
“Essentially, you will increase the total locked value of the entire DeFi by more than four times.”
Bringing real-world assets (RWA) like student loans on-chain not only broadens the asset classes of DeFi but also injects stronger liquidity and market depth.
Students: A Role in Promoting Inclusive Finance
Siu further explained how Web3 financial tools, particularly through the model of on-chain student loans, can function in the education sector and subsequently promote the popularization of cryptocurrency. He believes that moving traditional student loan application, approval, disbursement, and repayment processes onto the blockchain can provide a more regulated, efficient, and cost-effective financial service channel for young people, especially those who have yet to be included in traditional banking services. He likened this potential to how digital payment tools like PayPal and Venmo successfully served underbanked populations early on. Siu emphasized:
“The primary group of ‘unbanked’ individuals is actually young people.”
In this regard, Animoca Brands has strategically invested in a startup called Pencil Finance. This company focuses on providing native student loan services based on cryptocurrency technology and has already begun initial operations in emerging markets such as the Philippines and Indonesia, with plans to gradually expand into the U.S. market. According to an announcement from Animoca Brands, Pencil Finance completed a $10 million student loan financing plan at the end of April this year, aiming to utilize blockchain technology to offer more convenient financing solutions for students. This move not only showcases market interest in such innovative financial services but also provides concrete cases for the application of DeFi in the education sector.
Valuing Educational Learning Behaviors
Siu further emphasized that education itself is an extremely natural application scenario for Web3 technology. He mentioned:
“Education is fundamentally what we have always been doing.”
He used platforms like YouTube and TikTok as examples to illustrate how informal learning and knowledge acquisition have seamlessly integrated into the daily lives of modern individuals. Under the framework of Web3, financial infrastructure can be more deeply integrated with educational experiences. Through the decentralized characteristics of blockchain, smart contracts, and tokenization mechanisms, the participation of learning communities, individual learning achievements, and accumulated academic reputations all have the potential to be transformed into verifiable and transferable digital assets.
These assets can not only represent individual knowledge capital but also potentially become the cornerstone for constructing a new decentralized financial ecosystem. Emerging Web3 education platform models like “Learn-to-Earn,” which incentivize users’ learning behaviors through token distribution, not only enhance the fun and engagement of learning but also naturally become one of the effective ways to promote the adoption and popularization of cryptocurrency, as discussed in related reports from Binance Square.
Challenges and Opportunities of On-Chain Student Loans
Despite the forward-looking nature of bringing student loans into DeFi, numerous challenges remain. The severe delinquency rate (over 90 days past due) in the traditional student loan market rose to 8% in the first quarter of 2025. This data not only highlights the real challenges but also contrasts with the potential opportunities that DeFi solutions could provide in improving repayment efficiency and reducing default risk, such as through more transparent lending terms, automated repayment mechanisms, or innovative credit assessment models.
Siu believes that for the cryptocurrency industry to achieve broader mainstream acceptance, there is an urgent need for more use cases like on-chain student loans that “everyone can immediately understand” to demonstrate the practical value of blockchain technology and promote its positive development.
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