“Tokenomics is an onion”: Animoca Brand’s Mohamed Ezeldin on incentives, ownership, and what comes next

We first noticed Mohamed Ezeldin at a Lisbon conference in 2024, where he unpacked the complexities of token economics design, shorten to “tokenomics” in the crypto world. Now Head of Tokenomics at Animoca Brands (a Hong Kong conglomerate with stakes in over 500 firms including Kraken, MetaMask, Ledger and OpenSea), he helps portfolio companies shape token launches. With a background in mathematics and teaching, he brings rare clarity to a crucial crypto discipline.

Mohamed Ezeldin’s interest in crypto didn’t come early. He first brushed against Bitcoin in 2013, in the half-accidental way many people did at the time: through friends, forums, and the internet’s early fascination with something that sounded too strange to be real. For a while it stayed in the background. Then, in 2017, a friend sent him something that flipped the switch. “A friend sent me the Bitcoin whitepaper. As a mathematician, I geeked out”, he explains. 

The fascination wasn’t so much financial as structural: Bitcoin’s solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem, a way for strangers to agree on truth without a central authority, felt like a clean, elegant proof made real. That moment drew him in as someone who wanted to understand why a network could coordinate humans at scale.

Like almost everyone who entered the space in that era, though, curiosity quickly collided with the frenzy of the ICO cycle. “I very quickly discovered ICOs and forgot about fundamentals and went a bit crazy.” He says it plainly, without pride or embarrassment. At the time, ICOs were the industry’s rite of passage: a period when narrative moved faster than reality, and tokens were treated less like pieces of an economy and more like lottery tickets. Dozens of startups raised between $40 million and $260 million, and some users made bank by betting on the right ones. Others never saw any return.

For Mohamed, it was also educational. After the mania fades, what remains is always the same thing: incentives. That’s where tokenomics enters. Ask him what tokenomics is, and he begins with the most basic layer: supply and demand. But there’s more. “Another way to think about it is thinking of it as an onion… the layers that are there.” A token economy might start with emission schedules, liquidity, and pricing mechanics. But those are only the outer skin. Inside are the people who make the system function: “holders, builders, users, traders, liquidity providers, governors, each with their own incentives, time horizons, and breaking points”. Tokenomics, in his view, is the work of designing a game in which “those personas can coexist long enough for the network to grow”.

Making financial education a priority

This perspective is part of why he fits naturally at Animoca Brands. The firm is often described as a venture heavyweight, but Mohamed describes it as something closer to an operating ecosystem. “Animoca Brands is fundamentally an ecosystem builder.” Yes, they invest, but they also advise, structure, and build. Tokenomics, market-making, strategy, marketing: the goal isn’t simply to pick winners, but to help engineer the conditions for networks to survive. The lens Animoca applies is digital property rights: the belief that ownership can be native to the internet, transferable by default, and programmable in a way traditional systems can’t match. As Animoca Brands founder Yat Siu once told CNBC, the aim is “a shared network that gives users digital property rights and creators equity”. Mohamed’s job is to translate that belief into functioning economies

His aim is education, financial education in particular because without it, users don’t understand what it means to “own” a token, an asset, or a piece of digital culture. “A lot of people do not understand what it means to own something,” he adds. He sees ownership as the cultural bridge into Web3: “Our data is one of the things that is always used against us and big corporations monetize it: for me, education around financial literacy, around ownership will pave the way for better users and better community members within the ecosystem.” If people grasp it, on-chain ecosystems could get bigger and value flows become less extractive, according to him. “I see everything being tokenised and being brought on-chain,” he continues. And Mohamed is not afraid to state strong convictions: “This is not financial advice (editor’s note: we emphasise this considering what follows), but don’t be afraid to invest in a token that’s down 99%. The reason I say that is that many tokens which launched two or three years ago did it at a time when tokenomics was still at a very early stage. They launched amid a lot of hype, were overvalued, and then saw a drawdown. But if the team is still building, there could be more ROI, based on the product being built and on product–market fit.” It comes from someone who willingly admits that “the majority of [his] portfolio is in crypto for better or worse”: “If you're looking to make money quickly, you're not an investor, you're a trader. I think it's very important to differentiate between both. If it's one, two years or longer, then investment is the right term”, he concludes.