Animoca bets on altcoin upside to lure investors as it plans for IPO

Animoca Brands founder Yat Siu aims to position his company as a vehicle for investors to gain exposure to broader crypto projects and the altcoin market, as the company plans to go public through a reverse merger next year.

“We believe that altcoins, ultimately, over the largest space, are going to outperform Bitcoin as a collective,” Siu said during an interview with Cointelegraph on Wednesday.

Siu compared Bitcoin (BTC) to gold, saying that while no single company is bigger than golds market capitalization, all public companies combined are “roughly five to six times gold.”

He said that while these companies may not have the longevity in the same way as gold, they can go “up and down as a whole.”

“We don‘t join crypto because we want to hold Bitcoin, only holding Bitcoin as a reserve asset, but I don’t use it, right？” he said, emphasizing altcoins utility across the industry, from Web3 games to gas fees to DeFi and DePIN.

Animoca wants to offer crypto equivalents to early Amazon, Google

“All of these applications are actually altcoins, right in the classical definition, even, you know, to a lesser extent, but perhaps even more meaningfully, before, memecoins are also altcoins,” he said.

Animoca Brands is eyeing a diversified altcoin treasury strategy. Source: Animoca Brands

Siu compared Animocas investment approach to the kind of opportunity investors would have pursued in the early 2000s, the chance to invest across a wide group of the “biggest and most interesting” internet companies, such as Amazon, Google, eBay, and Alibaba.

“We feel that we‘re pretty well positioned for that,” Siu said, adding that the crypto industry probably won’t have a “winner-takes-all” altcoin or project, unlike the early era of the internet.

Animoca Brands plans to capture some of the crypto winners

He said that Animocas portfolio of investments will be large enough to capture some of those winners.

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The majority of Animoca Brands investment portfolio is in gaming-related projects, with 230 of the 628 companies invested in. There is also a growing amount invested in Infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and decentralized finance (DeFi).

Siu emphasized that Animoca can invest and gain access to altcoins at much lower levels than outside investors, and they are “passing on that benefit” to shareholders.

It comes just weeks after Cointelegraph reported that Animoca Brands is planning a Nasdaq listing next year via reverse merger with the AI-focused public fintech company Currenc Group.

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