NEW YORK – Animoca Brands wants to become the representative of institutional investors in a growing altcoin market, its co-founder told CoinDesk on 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.
Institution-ready altcoins currently make up a quarter of the overall crypto market, said Yat Siu, co-founder and CEO of Animoca. The company was founded in 2011, but did not enter the world of cryptocurrencies 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 are like a quarter of the market. You ask yourself, ‘How do I do this?’ And instead of trying to pick winners, which is almost impossible, you can choose Animoca. “That’s how we think.”
By altcoins, Siu doesn’t mean 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.
“In the other tokens there is, without a doubt, 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, basically participate in altcoins, because how are they going to know what to choose?”
Animoca aims to answer that question through its investment portfolio. It has invested in more than 600 different companies developing tokens spanning several different fields, Siu said. According to a snapshot of 100 tokens Animoca invested in on CoinMarketCap, they range from Web3 gaming to decentralized identities and tokenization of real-world assets, among other areas.
There is still a way before Animoca can get there. The company announced an acquisition proposal with Currenc, but first the companies need to finalize their documentation, work out the composition of the board of directors, confirm their merger ratio, obtain shareholder approval and secure regulatory approval. The companies said in their press release that they were targeting a debut in late 2026, a timeline Siu reiterated on Monday: “This entire process, in our estimate, will take between nine and 12 months.”
If all of this happens as planned, Siu said, it will allow for “democratizing access” to the broader cryptocurrency market.
“Most of the world still doesn’t have cryptocurrencies or understand them at the end of the day,” he said. “We are still, relatively speaking, in the minority, as hundreds of millions of people own cryptocurrencies, but there are billions who don’t. Those billions 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 for them to have access to the early stage of development of companies that, frankly, have potentially greater growth potential.”
