NEW YORK – Animoca Brands wants to become institutional investors’ proxy for 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, promising to create a conglomerate that will give institutional and retail investors access to what will essentially be an altcoin index vehicle, similar to Strategy (MSTR) or Sharplink (SBET) — but for a basket of tokens.
Institutional-ready altcoins currently account for a quarter of the total crypto market, said Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca. The company was founded in 2011 but only entered the crypto world in 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 think, ‘How do I do this?’ And instead of trying to pick winners, which is almost impossible, you can pick Animoca. That’s how we think.”
By altcoins, Siu is not 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’s arguably more volatility, but a lot more growth potential,” he said. “These are the 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 to basically participate in altcoins, because how is it going to know what to pick?”
Animoca aims to answer this question through its portfolio of investments. It is invested in over 600 different companies developing tokens that touch a variety of fields, Siu said. According to a snapshot of 100 tokens Animoca has invested in on CoinMarketCap, they range from Web3 games to decentralized identity to real-world asset tokenization.
There is still a long way to go before Animoca can get there. The company announced a proposed acquisition with Currenc, but first the companies must complete their documentation, prepare board composition, confirm their merger relationship, obtain shareholder approval and secure regulatory approval. The companies said in their press release that they were aiming for a debut in late 2026, a timeline that Siu reiterated on Monday: “This whole process, in our estimation, will take about nine to 12 months.”
Should all of this go as planned, Siu said, it will enable “democratization of 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’re still, relatively speaking, in the minority as hundreds of millions of people own crypto, but there are billions who don’t. Those billions have access to the stock market, or at least ways that you can participate in that field. And to me, we need to have a vehicle to get them to access the early stages of development of the companies that frankly have potentially greater growth potential.”
