Animoca’s Public Market Ambition Aims at Providing Crypto Access to ‘Billions’

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

Cheer up announced his intention to list on the Nasdaq through a reverse merger with the Currenc Group on Monday morning, committing 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.

Institution-ready altcoins currently account for a quarter of the global crypto market, said Yat Siu, Animoca’s co-founder and executive chairman. 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, you’re 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 you do this?’ “And instead of trying to pick the winners, which is almost impossible, you can choose Animoca. That’s how we think.”

By altcoins, Siu isn’t 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 on Monday afternoon in Midtown Manhattan.

“The other tokens are where there is, arguably, more volatility, but much more potential for growth,” he said. “They are those tokens that people use and adopt … and it will be very difficult for an investor who wants to have some exposure to the space, to participate fundamentally in altcoins, because how do you know what to choose?”

Animoca aims to answer this question through its portfolio of investments. It is invested in more than 600 different companies that develop tokens that touch a number of different fields, Siu said. According to a snapshot of 100 tokens that Animoca has invested CoinMarketCapThey range from Web3 gaming to decentralized identity to tokenization of real-world assets, among other areas.

There is still a way before Animoca can get there. The company has announced an acquisition proposal with Currenc, but first the companies need to finalize their documentation, work out the composition of the board, confirm their merger ratio, obtain shareholder approval and secure regulatory approval. The companies said in their press release that they aimed for a debut at the end of 2026, a timeline Siu repeated on Monday: “This whole process, in our estimation, will take about nine to 12 months.”

If everything happens as planned, Siu said, it will “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 are still, relatively speaking, in the minority, as hundreds of millions of people own crypto, but there are billions who do not. Those billions have access to the stock market, or at least ways in which you can participate in that field. And for me, we need to have a vehicle to have access to the initial development of companies that, frankly, have great potential.”