Animoca Brands founder Yat Siu aims to position his company as a way for investors to gain exposure to the broader cryptocurrency project and altcoin market as the company plans to go public through a reverse merger next year.
“We believe that altcoins will ultimately outperform Bitcoin overall in the largest areas,” Siu said in an interview with Cointelegraph on Wednesday.
Mr. Siu compared Bitcoin (BTC) to gold, saying that while there is no single company that exceeds the market capitalization of gold, the total market capitalization of all listed companies is “approximately five to six times that of gold.”
He said these companies may not have the same longevity as gold, but they can go through “overall ups and downs.”
“We’re not in cryptocurrencies because we want to hold Bitcoin, we just hold Bitcoin as a reserve asset, but I’m not going to use it, right?” He emphasized the utility of altcoins across industries, from Web3 gaming to gas fees to DeFi and DePIN.
Animoca wants to offer a cryptocurrency on par with early Amazon and Google
“All of these applications are actually altcoins in the classical definition. To a lesser extent, but perhaps in a more meaningful sense, memecoins used to be altcoins as well,” he said.
Mr. Siu compared Animoca’s investment approach to the kinds of opportunities that investors would have pursued in the early 2000s, namely investing in a broad group of “the biggest and most interesting” Internet companies such as Amazon, Google, eBay and Alibaba.
“We feel like we’re in a pretty good position for that,” Siu said, adding that unlike in the early days of the internet, there probably won’t be any “winner-takes-all” altcoins or projects in the crypto industry.
Animoca Brands plans to capture some of the crypto winners
He said Animoca’s investment portfolio will be large enough to capture some of these winners.
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The majority of Animoca Brands’ investment portfolio is gaming-related projects, with 230 of the 628 companies invested in. Investments in infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and decentralized finance (DeFi) are also on the rise.
Siu emphasized that Animoca is able to invest and access altcoins at a much lower level than external investors, and returns the profits to shareholders.
This comes just weeks after Cointelegraph reported that Animoca Brands plans to list on the Nasdaq next year through a reverse merger with publicly traded AI-focused fintech company Carenk Group.
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