Animoca Brands' Public Market Ambition Aims at Providing Crypto Access to 'Billions'

NEW YORK — Animoca Brands wants to become institutional investors' proxy to a growing altcoin market, its co-founder told CoinDesk Monday.

Animoca announced its intention to list on Nasdaq through a reverse merger with Currenc Group on Monday morning, pledging to create a conglomerate that will allow institutional and retail investors to access what will essentially become an altcoin index vehicle, similar to Strategy (MSTR) or Sharplink (SBET) — but for a basket of tokens.

Institutional-ready altcoins are currently a quarter of the overall crypto market, said Yat Siu, the co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca. The company was founded in 2011, but did not enter the crypto world until 2017.

"I think we're uniquely positioned for that," he said. "If you're an institution, you know you're going to buy bitcoin, going to buy Ethereum, you're going to buy solana, and then you have all these other altcoins, which is like a quarter of the market. You're like, 'How do I do this?' And instead of trying to pick winners, which is almost impossible, you can pick Animoca. That's kind of how we think."

By altcoins, Siu is not referring to any and all tokens outside of the biggest names right now, but rather, "institutionally ready altcoins," tokens with use cases, Siu told CoinDesk Monday afternoon in midtown Manhattan.

"The other tokens are where there's, no question, more volatility, but much more growth potential," he said. "It's those tokens that people are using and adopting … and it's going to be very difficult for an investor who wants to have some exposure to the space, to basically participate in altcoins, because how is it going to know what to pick?"

Animoca aims to answer that question through its portfolio of investments. It's invested in over 600 different companies developing tokens touching a number of different fields, Siu said. According to a snapshot of 100 tokens Animoca's invested in on CoinMarketCap, they range from Web3 gaming to decentralized identity to real-world asset tokenization, among other areas.

There's still a way before Animoca can get there. The company announced a proposed acquisition with Currenc, but first the companies need to finalize their documentation, work out board composition, confirm their merger ratio, get shareholder approval and secure regulatory approval. The companies said in their press release they were targeting a late 2026 debut, a timeline Siu reiterated on Monday: "This whole process, in our estimation, is going to take about nine to 12 months."

Should this all happen as planned, Siu said, it will enable "democratize access" to the broader cryptocurrency market.

"Most of the world still doesn't have crypto and understand crypto at the end of the day," he said. "We're still, relatively speaking, in the minority, as hundreds of millions of people own crypto, but there's billions who don't. Those billions do have access to the stock market, or at least ways in which you can participate in that field. And to me, we need to have a vehicle to have them have access to the early stage development of the businesses that, frankly, have potentially bigger growth potential."