Animoca Brands reaches $ 5.9 billion valuation as the crypto winter deepens
Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands.
Blockchain game maker and crypto investor Animoca Brands has secured $ 75 million in a round of financing that values the Hong Kong-based company at $ 5.9 billion.
Investors in the round include existing supporters Liberty City Ventures, Kingsway Capital and 10T Holdings, Animoca said on Tuesday. The round is a second tranche of the $ 358,888,888 fundraiser announced in January, which was extended for due diligence purposes. The proceeds will be used for acquisitions and investments, said Animoca, as well as product development and intellectual property licenses.
Animoca’s latest move to raise more capital comes as the crypto market continues its downturn in hibernation. The insolvency of the Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital has sent some of its counterparties into a race to recover assets and recover losses.
The market’s declining losses follow the meltdown of Terra stablecoin and the Fed’s interest rate hikes that drove investors to unload risky assets. The market value of all cryptocurrencies has fallen 70% from the peak of $ 3 trillion in November, according to tracker CoinGecko.
“There is no doubt that the fundraising environment has become more challenging, but at the same time, the current cryptocurrency climate has also made it possible for some users to gain a better entry point into the open meta-verse,” said Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca. in an email. “Of course we need to be a little more careful, but we have a long-term vision for this area and are both committed and patient.”
The Sandbox, a subsidiary of Animoca Brands.
Just last week, Animoca led a $ 32 million round of funding by blockchain game maker Planetarium Labs. It has also acquired Notre Game, headquartered in Prague, which is moving on to blockchain gaming. The sector has remained relatively robust in the midst of the market downturn. It recorded only a 5% drop in unique active wallets in the second quarter, compared to a 26% decline in the broader crypto industry, data from DappRader shows.
Yat believes that the broader industry will recover in the next one to two years. “Similar to how Covid has highlighted systemic problems in the physical world and driven more people to use online, the current economic circumstances will highlight opportunities in the open metaverse,” he said. “New businesses are emerging in the metaverse that are growing in line with the recent market trend, providing more employment and services that help drive the virtual economy.”
Animoca was established in 2014 to develop smartphone and tablet games. The company ventured into blockchain games around 2018, and created megahits such as sandbox, a decentralized virtual world. The company has also actively invested in crypto and blockchain startups. It has already built a portfolio of more than 340 investments, including the leading NFT marketplace OpenSea and Dapper Labs, the developer of the blockchain game CryptoKitties.
