Moca Network – Building the World’s Biggest Identity Network

Why you should listen

Moca Network starts from a claim that sounds provocative until you sit with it: the most valuable digital asset in the world is your personal data, and you do not own any of it. Meta, Google and Apple do. Shek’s argument is that this is not merely unfair but structurally limiting, if you cannot prove who you are to a party of your choosing, you cannot capture the value of being that person. Moca’s answer is AIR, an account, identity and reputation layer that Animoca sells to enterprises B2B2C, white-labeled into their own apps with a small “powered by AIR” mark at the bottom. Shek says Animoca’s portfolio now exceeds 600 companies, which gives Moca an unusual cold-start advantage: an ecosystem to seed before selling outward to telecoms, entertainment groups and ticketing platforms with user bases in the tens and hundreds of millions. He describes the resulting structure as hub-and-spoke, where each spoke that plugs in to verify and acquire users eventually becomes a hub of its own.

The sharpest part of the conversation is about what breaks when agents start transacting. Agentic commerce is arriving fast, but Shek argues the identity layer is not keeping pace, and the gap shows up in ordinary situations. When you log into Cathay Pacific or Marriott Bonvoy yourself, the airline and the hotel know your loyalty tier and price accordingly. Delegate that same booking to an agent reading your calendar and the merchant sees only bot traffic, no status, no history, no preferential rate. Ask an agent to open a bank account or apply for a card and it fails outright, because the agent carries no KYC data and the bank has no way to verify it if it did. Moca’s proposal is delegated verification: you prove your identity once, then grant your agent time-bound authority to prove things on your behalf, with the merchant side able to check that the proof is real. Shek says the company is working with Visa, Mastercard and regional point-of-sale operators, and building toward both the casual consumer form factor and the regulated one required by eIDAS 2.0, Europe’s digital identity regulation, which obliges member states to offer citizens a digital identity wallet by late 2026.

Underneath all of this sits a trade-off Shek. Data sharing is what makes ecosystems grow, the reason open data initiatives exist at all, and privacy is the constraint on it, not a virtue that can simply be maximized. Push privacy to its limit and you have shut down the sharing that creates value; push sharing to its limit and you have built the walled garden again with extra steps. His resolution is control rather than concealment: users decide what to share, with whom, and retain the ability to revoke it, which is also the mechanism that keeps a delegated agent from spraying your personal information across the internet. He also makes the case that first-party issuance is already happening — a hotel issuing a stay record back to the guest, who then presents it at a retail outlet or a beach club to unlock an offer — and that this matters more now that cookie consent has gone opt-in, with something like 70 percent of cross-site traffic arriving anonymous by his estimate. The episode closes on AI more broadly, where Shek lands firmly on the excited side: he expects the vertical knowledge premium to collapse and problem framing, reasoning and first-principles thinking to become the scarce skills, and says the platform of agents he built to run his own company has multiplied his output as a CEO several times over.

Supporting links

Stabull Finance

Moca Network

Moca Network on X

Kenneth Shek on X

Andy on X

Brave New Coin on X

Brave New Coin

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