Animoca Brands brought its digital money thesis to one of the world’s most influential policy stages. Group President Evan Auyang spoke at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, China, during a session titled “Digital Money in a Divided World.”

The core argument: central bank digital currencies, stablecoins, and tokenized deposits aren’t rivals. They’re complements, each carving out its own lane depending on the use case.

Three flavors of digital money

Auyang laid out a framework that sorts the future of money into three buckets. CBDCs, which are issued and backed by central banks. Tokenized deposits, which are essentially bank deposits moved onto blockchain rails. And stablecoins, the privately issued tokens pegged to fiat currencies that have already gained massive traction in crypto markets.

Sharing the stage was Mu Changchun from the People’s Bank of China, whose institution has been one of the most aggressive central banks in the world when it comes to CBDC development.

The session also zeroed in on financial inclusion. Billions of people worldwide remain unbanked or underbanked. Digital money, in theory, offers a path to reach them without requiring traditional banking infrastructure. Whether that theory translates to practice depends entirely on interoperability, meaning whether these different systems can actually talk to each other.

Animoca’s stablecoin play

In August 2025, Animoca formed a joint venture called Anchorpoint Financial Limited, specifically targeting a stablecoin issuer license in Hong Kong.

Stablecoin transaction volumes hit $33 trillion in 2025, a number that dwarfs the GDP of most countries and puts stablecoins firmly in the category of serious financial infrastructure rather than niche crypto tools.

What this means for investors

The WEF meeting in Dalian, themed “Innovating at Scale” and attended by over 1,800 leaders, is the kind of venue where policy direction gets shaped before it becomes official.

The coexistence framework Auyang described is worth paying attention to. If governments adopt the view that stablecoins complement rather than threaten CBDCs, the regulatory path for stablecoin issuers becomes significantly smoother. That’s good news for companies like Circle, Tether, and now Animoca’s Anchorpoint venture.

The $33 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume from 2025 creates its own gravitational pull. Regulators globally are now in a position where they need to build frameworks around an existing reality rather than shaping something from scratch.