Quick take:
- Animoca Brands is planning to expand its NFTs and gaming ecosystem to include educational products.
- Animoca’s Yat Siu said the education product will provide tools to users so they can expand their knowledge in the metaverse.
- The Hong Kong-based blockchain investment company was recently valued at $5 billion after raising $359 million in a funding round.
Animoca Brands plans to add an education vertical to its NFTs and gaming business. The Hong Kong-based blockchain investment company is one of the companies leading the campaign for digital property rights via NFTs and gaming in order to build the open metaverse.
Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu, has stressed the importance of expanding the company’s ecosystem beyond NFTs and gaming in a bid to realise its goals.
In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Siu said: “We’re really an operator, building games, products and metaverse projects centred around true digital property rights, which is NFTs to us.”
“We invest in everything and we hope we can expand and grow the network effects of NFTs beyond games because that’s the tip of the spear and what brings adoption now,” he added.
Animoca Brands has become one of the leading investors in the Web3 space, which covers among other segments, the metaverse, gaming and NFTs.
The company owns a majority stake in the popular metaverse gaming platform The Sandbox and has partnered with a flurry of NFTs and blockchain-focused projects in a bid to onboard millions to the open metaverse.
In January, the popular Web3 VC raised $359 million in a funding round backed by some of the largest players in the industry, including SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
Commenting on the fundraising, which also valued Animoca at about $5 billion in January, Siu said that besides developing products internally, the company was going to scale its team, and invest in acquisitions and ink partnership deals, whose goals align with Animoca Brands’ long-term vision.
It has since expanded its gaming ecosystem tapping onto the eSports gaming ecosystem, arcade gaming, as well as, motor racing and NFT avatars.
Animoca has also teamed with Asian based entertainment companies like Square Enix and Cube Entertainment to tap on the experiential products segment of the metaverse, which includes among other events, virtual concerts and festivals.
Now, Animoca is targeting the lucrative education sector, which several analysts have predicted could become a major pillar of the metaverse market. Animoca is not looking to offer lessons about crypto, but rather, a more generalised tooling product where users can learn about multiple subjects.
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