Animoca’s Arman Mamyan on Web3 Evolution, AI, and Digital Identity 

As blockchain moves beyond speculation into real-world applications, the focus is shifting toward usability, infrastructure, and scalable financial systems. From stablecoins enabling global payments to emerging developments in AI and digital identity, the industry is entering a more mature phase. CoinEdition spoke with Arman Mamyan, Integration Lead at Animoca Brands, to discuss Web3’s evolution, integration challenges, and how AI and digital identity may shape the industry’s next phase. 

1. You’ve worked in both Web2 and Web3 for quite some time. When you look at blockchain today, what feels genuinely different from when you first started working in the space?

The biggest difference is maturity. When I first entered the space, a lot of the excitement was driven by speculation, tokens, and the financial opportunity around crypto itself. Today, that is no longer enough. If you want to build a sustainable product, it actually has to solve a real problem for someone. 

What excites me is that we are now seeing builders use blockchain much more broadly, as financial infrastructure, identity infrastructure, payment rails, settlement layers, ownership systems, and so on. The conversation is slowly moving away from “How do we put this on blockchain?” toward “Does blockchain actually make this product better?” 

And I think that is a very healthy transition for the industry. 

2. Getting a blockchain product to work in the real world can be a lot harder than building the technology itself. What usually gets in the way when companies try to bring Web3 solutions into their existing systems? 

Usually, blockchain itself is not the hardest part. 

The complexity appears when blockchain has to interact with the real world: existing banking infrastructure, compliance, custody, identity, accounting, legacy systems, regulations, internal security policies, and user expectations. 

A company might technically be able to send a stablecoin transaction in a few lines of code, but turning that into a financial product is completely different. Now you have to think about KYC, transaction monitoring, reconciliation, wallet infrastructure, key management, recovery, permissions, fiat settlement, reporting, and sometimes five or ten different vendors. 

Another problem is that companies sometimes try to introduce Web3 as an entirely separate universe. I think the better approach is to integrate it into the systems and behaviors users already understand. 

The technology should adapt to the product, not force the product and the user to adapt to the technology. 

3. You’ve worked closely in areas like stablecoins, custody, crypto banking, and non-custodial products. Where do you think Web3 still has the biggest gap between what the technology can do and what users are actually ready for?

I think the biggest gap is still usability combined with responsibility. 

Technically, we can give people incredible amounts of financial control. They can own assets directly, move money globally, interact with financial protocols, hold multiple currencies, earn yield, and operate without depending entirely on a traditional financial institution. 

But with that control comes responsibility that most consumers simply do not want. 

Seed phrases are probably the most obvious example. Telling a normal user that twelve or twenty-four words are effectively their bank, and if they lose them, nobody can help them, is not a scalable consumer experience. 

The good news is that this is changing very quickly. Smart accounts, passkeys, embedded wallets, account abstraction, programmable permissions, session keys, social or institutional recovery, and better custody models are starting to give us Web2-level usability without completely sacrificing Web3 ownership. 

For me, the future is not about teaching billions of people how blockchain works. It is about building products where they receive the benefits of blockchain without needing to understand the infrastructure underneath. 

4. Blockchain can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. From an engineering and product perspective, how do you make the experience feel simple for users while still keeping the security and control that Web3 is supposed to offer? 

My general philosophy is that most blockchain complexity should never reach the user. 

A normal user should not have to think about gas, RPCs, networks, token approvals, bridges, seed phrases, or signing strange hexadecimal messages just to use a product. 

From an engineering perspective, we now have much better primitives to abstract those things away. Smart accounts can batch transactions. Applications can sponsor gas. Passkeys can replace complicated wallet onboarding. Permissions can be scoped so an application does not need unlimited access to a wallet. Recovery mechanisms can be designed without giving one centralized party complete control over the account. 

But abstraction has to be done carefully. 

Making something easier by secretly taking ownership away from the user defeats the point. The challenge is to hide complexity while preserving transparency, security, and an exit path. 

The best Web3 experience, in my opinion, will eventually feel almost indistinguishable from a good Web2 product. The difference will be underneath: the user actually owns the assets, can move them elsewhere, and is not permanently locked into one platform. 

5. There’s a lot happening right now across AI, stablecoins, tokenization, and blockchain infrastructure. What are you personally most excited about—and is there any area you think the industry is paying too little attention to? 

Stablecoins are probably the area I am most excited about because they are already proving that blockchain can solve very ordinary, very large problems. 

Cross-border payments, treasury management, settlement, remittances, merchant payments, and access to dollar-denominated assets are all becoming dramatically easier. And importantly, the end user does not necessarily need to know that blockchain is involved. 

I am also very interested in what happens when AI starts interacting directly with financial infrastructure. If AI agents eventually make purchases, manage subscriptions, negotiate services, move funds, or interact with other agents, they will need programmable financial rails. Blockchain and stablecoins are very natural infrastructure for that world because money becomes programmable and globally accessible through APIs. 

One area I think we still underestimate, though, is identity and trust infrastructure. 

If we are moving toward a world of AI agents, digital assets, tokenized ownership, and increasingly autonomous financial systems, the question of who or what is on the other side of a transaction becomes extremely important. 

Identity, credentials, permissions, reputation, compliance, and privacy-preserving verification may not sound as exciting as launching another chain or token, but I think they will become fundamental infrastructure for the next generation of digital products. 

Ultimately, the most interesting future for me is when all of these technologies start converging: AI provides intelligence, blockchain provides ownership and settlement, stablecoins provide the money layer, and digital identity provides the trust layer.