Blockchain Investor Presents Crypto Recovery Master Plan
One of Asia’s biggest investors in blockchain technologies is assembling a huge portfolio of financial, gaming and social media companies as a challenge to more established empires.
According to the head of Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands, Yat Siu, the goal is to give people ownership over their virtual properties and break up the likes of Meta Platforms and Microsoft, which he describes as “digital dictatorships.”
Sius’ strategy came about in light of the 2018 crypto crash, when he turned his small video game studio into a crypto investor. The startup bought a stake in the owner of CryptoKitties, a Pokémon-similar game with virtual cats that can be bought and sold with digital money. Spurred on by his success, he continued to buy.
Four years later, Animoca has become one of crypto’s biggest players, and counts Sequoia Capital and George Soros as investors. Animoca’s flagship supporter is in Vietnamese gaming company Sky Mavis, which produces the blockchain video game Axie Infinity.
“If people say this is a crypto winter, then 2018 was the crypto ice age,” says Siu. “Now is the time to deploy more capital, not less.”
According to a Bloomberg report, the gaming economy has grown rapidly, in part due to the popularity of digital collectibles.
This in turn has attracted rich players to the platform. But the crypto crash hit Axie Infinity hard, with daily users plunging to 250,000 from a peak of more than two million last year.
The path to becoming blockchain unicorns
A study by KPMG and HSBC identified a handful of Web3 firms in Asia Pacific that could become unicorns in the next 10 years.
A recent study showed that there are over 6,000 tech startups in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region alone, with many of them focusing on non-fungible tokens (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi).
The reports stated that despite the tough conditions in the crypto market, some firms have the capacity to become unicorns.
According to KPMG and HSBC, Stader Laboratories, a Singaporean DeFi platform, Catheon Gaming and Hex Trust could be valued at $1 billion as the crypto winter begins to thaw.
And markets in the Asia-Pacific region with China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and Australia will lead the pack.
Animoca’s portfolio is growingpp
The latest fundraising round has attracted a range of opinions from all sides of the crypto sector. Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu said the firm is “deeply pleased” by investors’ faith in the face of the crypto winter.
The Animoca platform has expanded its reach across the crypto ecosystem. The company’s portfolio includes over 150 NFT-related projects, some of which include OpenSea, Axie Infinity, Sandbox and Dapper Labs.
Animoca has expressed a desire to go public within the next two to three years. However, it will depend on what form a crypto recovery will take, and how quickly.
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