(Bloomberg) — Animoca Brands Corp., backer of some of the most popular nonfungible token and web3 gaming projects, has increased its total digital assets by almost half in seven months, defying a broader cryptocurrency meltdown.
The Sequoia-backed venture held roughly $5 billion in crypto holdings — which include Bitcoin, Tether and its own SAND tokens — at the end of April, it said in a statement Monday, up from $3.5 billion in September last year.
During the same period, the Hong Kong startup almost doubled the mainstream coins it held, and its cash balance surged 173% to $98 million.
Animoca has cast a wide net across the worlds of gaming and crypto by capturing slices of promising startups — from NFT malls with OpenSea to metaverse games with The Sandbox and bored-ape avatars with Yuga Labs.
In all, Animoca has a portfolio of more than 340 investments, with its stakes valued at $1.5 billion as of April. The firm itself was valued at $5 billion in its latest funding round in January that included George Soros and the Winklevoss twins among the investors.
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Bookings — which include token sales and secondary NFT transactions — came in at $148 million for the December quarter, according to the statement, slightly more than the $140 million it generated in the first nine months of 2021.
Crypto prices have plunged in recent weeks following the implosion of the TerraUSD stablecoin.
Bitcoin has bounced around the $30,000 mark, roughly half its all-time in November. Some venture capitalists have seen deals collapse and valuations have been slashed during the market downturn. From November to April, Animoca’s off-balance-sheet crypto reserves — including tokens from its games like The Sandbox and Revv Racing — plunged more than 70% to $4.2 billion, reflecting the broader market sentiment.
Founded in 2014 by tech entrepreneur Yat Siu, Animoca started off as a mobile game publisher churning out hyper-casual titles.
In 2018, the company ventured into blockchain gaming through a publishing deal with the hit collection CryptoKitties, and by adapting that same strategy to other intellectual property, it has introduced The Walking Dead and The Smurfs characters into its web3 gaming portfolio.
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