Animoca Brands Raised $70M Despite The Current Crypto Winter

Animoca Brands, the Hong Kong-based blockchain gaming firm, famous for its virtual gaming world dubbed the Sandbox, has reportedly raised $75 million in a new financing round despite dwindling non-fungible token (NFT) sales amid the current crypto winter.

Animoca is set to use the new money to fund acquisitions, investments, and product development and acquire licenses for popular intellectual properties (IP) to further develop its in-house metaverse.

This funding round is Animoca’s fifth round of raising funds and the second tranche of the recent funding round in January, giving the firm a valuation of around $5.9 billion. The firm said in a statement that it will use the capital to expand its operations and get licenses for popular IP to thrive in its metaverse. Executive chairman and cofounder Yat Siu stated:

“Digital property rights represent a society-defining generational shift that impacts everyone online and will set the stage for the emergence of the open metaverse.”

Notably, Animoca continues to push for what it refers to as an “open metaverse”. According to Yat Siu, any form of dominance by tech giants like Tencent and Meta will hurt the development of the metaverse space since the principles of the metaverse will be interoperability and openness.

Launched in 2014, Animoca Brands focuses mainly on bringing digital property rights to video games using nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The company owns the renowned blockchain game Sandbox after it purchased the game developer Pixowl in 2018. Furthermore, it has developed several blockchain game projects like F1 Delta Time, Formula E: High Voltage, and REVV Racing.

NFT has considerably pushed the development of the metaverse since NFT collectibles are 3D avatars in the metaverse with asset ownership enabling new forms of income streams for the users.

Animoca Brands Has Made Several Strategic Investments

To grow its influence in the NFT space and achieve its goal to create a powerful metaverse ecosystem, Animoca Brands has already made over 200 investments in NFT-related platforms and firms, with the most notable case featuring the world’s biggest NFT marketplace OpenSea and the developer of trendy and hit Ethereum-based play-to-earn (P2E) blockchain game Axie Infinity and Dapper Labs, the owner of NBA Top Shot and Cryptokitties.

The firm is also a partner of Yuga Labs, the developer of the popular hit NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).

Citing industry research, Animoca also said that the global video game market is expected to reach a staggering $829 billion by 2028, a massive leap from $180.3 billion in 2021. A wide concept that integrates NFTs, games, and decentralized finance (DeFi), GameFi, has lots of room to grow since it will benefit much from the large growth of the global game market.

The investors backing Animoca Brands include Alpha Wave Ventures, 10T, Liberty City Ventures, Kingsway Capital, Cosmic Summit Investments Limited, Generation Highway Ltd, and SG Spring Limited Partnership Fund.

The latest fundraising comes at a time when the crypto market winter has wiped billions of dollars from the value of popular tokens. The tightening of monetary policies in most of the major Western economies contributed to a global sell-off in a range of risky assets.

NFT sales volumes on OpenSea dropped by over 70% in June from the previous month, as documented by Dune Analytics.