Now that Animoca is one of the few organisations left investing, Siu’s chequebook is an even more powerful weapon – and one that could severely backfire if this downturn doesn’t play out like 2018’s. An investment from Animoca, like one from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz or Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX in the US, is seen as an imprimatur of legitimacy for a crypto startup in Asia, and its absence a sign of concern. If successful, Siu could become a gatekeeper of a different sort. “Now is the time to deploy more capital, not less.” “If people say this is a crypto winter, then 2018 was the crypto ice age,” Siu says.
Just four years later, Animoca is one of the crypto industry’s most influential investors, with backing from Sequoia Capital and George Soros.
The startup purchased a stake in the maker of CryptoKitties, a Pokémon-like game with virtual cats that can be bought and sold with digital money, and kept buying. Siu’s strategy was informed by the digital currency crash of 2018, when he turned his small video game studio into a crypto investor. The goal, says Siu, is to give people ownership over their virtual properties and break up the empires of Meta Platforms and Microsoft, which he describes as “digital dictatorships”.Īnimoca’s Yat Siu says now is the time to deploy more capital. But Yat Siu, the head of Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands, is on the offensive.Īnimoca, Asia’s biggest investor in blockchain projects, is assembling a vast portfolio of finance, gaming and social media companies, more than 340 in all. The so-called crypto winter has wiped out $US2 trillion in digital currency market value since November, and many investors have gone into hibernation.
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