If you haven't heard of Animoca Brands in recent years, then you probably didn't follow the industry closely (and probably didn't follow at all back then). With a long (and, importantly, growing) list of digital entertainment, blockchain and gaming projects they have invested in, the 600-year-old Hong Kong company with 3 employees has steadily become one of the most active players in this market in the world, which should be the next iteration of the Internet according to many shareholders (we are talking about WebXNUMX).
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A little dive into history
Animoca Brands started out developing mobile games, until in 2017, the founder of the company, Yat Siu, encountered blockchain technologies. During this time, Animocas were buying Fuel Powered, which shared an office with venture capital studio Axiom Zen, and Siu was intrigued by a blockchain game the Axiom team was working on called “CryptoKitties.”
He learned about it from the co-founder of Fuel Powered (Mikhael Naayem), who advised the founder of Axiom (Roham Gharegozlou). Shortly thereafter, in early 2018, Animoca made a deal with Axiom Zen to exclusively distribute CryptoKitties. This collaboration later culminated in the two companies teaming up to form Dapper Labs, best known for NBA's Top Shot.
Impressive numbers
Since then, Animoca Brands has been on an impressive rise. As both publishers and buyers of various blockchain assets, they have amassed a fairly large portfolio, including projects such as Sky Mavis (developers of the popular Axie Infinity, which raised around $150M in October and has an estimated value of $3B) for the entire project. and Sandbox (a metaverse where players can create and monetize game assets), which received $93 million in B-stage funding in November.
Animoca was also one of the first to get a stake in the OpenSea NFT marketplace, now valued at a staggering $13,3 billion, and most recently teamed up with one of last year's breakthrough projects, Bored Apes Yacht Club, to create a game based on this NFT collection. .
According to the company's September 2021 unaudited financial statement, Animoca has $140 million in reserves and holds over $500 million in BTC, ETH, BNB, AXF, FLOW, and other tokens. According to CoinMarketCap, the company's digital asset reserves were $2,9 billion (end of September 2021) and $15.9 billion at the end of November 2021. These assets include SAND, REVV, TOWER, GMEE, and LMT tokens. The company itself was valued at $2,2 billion in a funding round involving Sequoia Capital China.
Interestingly, Sequoia and the rest of the group bought the publicly traded shares. As Siu explains, Animoca, which previously traded on the Australian Securities Exchange, was delisted in March 2020 because “they didn’t like the fact that we were dealing with crypto,” he says. Now they operate as an unregistered public company. This means that they can communicate with shareholders through their own website and mailing list, and that their 2500 shareholders can sell their shares privately to others. (You only need to know who they belong to.)
Latest news
On January 18, it was announced that Animoca Brands had completed a $358,888,888 capital raise, at a preliminary valuation of over $5bn. The share price was 4.5 Australian dollars. Thus, 111,173,515 new shares were issued, and now there are 1,794,128,323 shares of the company in circulation.
The money will be used to continue funding strategic acquisitions and to develop new products. Now Animoca Brands is working on creating an open metaverse using blockchain technologies and NFTs.
company Plans
Animoca's success was not without adversity. Not too long ago, Animoca's subsidiary, which issues sports NFTs, experienced a security breach that caused users to lose $18,7 million worth of tokens and caused the price of the subsidiary's tokens to drop by 92%.
However, Siu, who is now the executive chairman and managing director of the Animoca group, clearly believes in the success of Web3 and, unsurprisingly, does not attach much importance to recent criticisms, including the practicality of creating completely decentralized projects.
For example, Box CEO Aaron Levie asked on Twitter how decentralized organizations that rely on the input of their communities can compete if they are always busy seeking consensus.
Harder: with web3 ideals, we've likely added governance and tokenomics into the mix, which adds a new negotiation vector. Not all parties may believe the same thing as you, and now you're essentially debating feature releases with *shareholders* that may bail. Slow!
— Aaron Levie (@levie) December 31, 2021
In response to this question, Siu stated that "People will know what is best for them when they have something to compare it to."
Animocas are much more focused on investments and partnerships that could emerge in 2022, he said. In that vein, Siu said the company continues to acquire game studios to “transfer them to the blockchain and give end users, essentially, true digital property rights.”
In terms of investment, Animoca Brands believes in DeFi, lending, L1 and L2 blockchains, with a focus on multi-chain solutions that will create even more growth opportunities for many of their projects.
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