Animoca Brands
Samsung investment arm considering spot-Bitcoin ETF in Hong Kong
Hot on the heels of its Bitcoin (BTC) futures exchange-traded fund (ETF) in Hong Kong, Samsung Asset Management has indicated it’s considering the launch of a spot Bitcoin ETF on the city’s exchange if policies allow for it. In an interview with Bloomberg published on Jan. 13, Hong Kong chief executive for Samsung Asset Management, Sam Park, said: “It really depends on how policy is going to be developed.” He added that the Hong Kong administrators are “clearly” interested in developing the city into a crypto hub. An ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, Rebecca Sin, noted that “Hong Kong is well positioned to become Asia’s crypto gateway,” and expects spot Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) products to be allowed there by the year’s end. A spot market refers to a market where the exchange of financ...
NFT games are ‘only scratching the surface’ of what’s possible — Animoca’s Yat Siu
Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu believes nonfungible token (NFT) games are only scratching the surface of what’s possible and predicts completely new models of gaming will be developed as a result of digital ownership. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Siu likened the potential growth of NFT gaming to mobile phone gaming, which started out relatively niche and clunky in its formative stages before rocketing to become the most popular method of gaming across the globe. “Mobile gaming brought a form factor of a type of game that we’ve never seen before, you know, one-hand play and that kind of stuff, and innovations around how you play with AI [artificial intelligence]. Because of the fact that you have this limited form factor, it became the most popular form factor in gaming,” he said. Si...
Nifty News: Yuga Labs launches BAYC council, Animoca backs Cool Cats and more
Yuga Labs has announced a new Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) community council to help the project “grow and thrive.” The team revealed seven council members in an Oct. 5 blog post, noting that they are all OGs who have been around since the early days of the BAYC. Yuga Labs said it assembled a new community council made up of “Apes with a proven track record of proactively and positively contributing to the club since the start.” The members include beijingdou, SeraStargirl, TheMiamiApe, OxEthanDG, OxWave, negithenagi, peterjfang. “This council was formed with the intention of representing the club at large and providing an avenue for new perspectives,” Yuga Labs wrote. Yuga Labs stated that they will engage with the community and gather feedback for the firm, working with Yuga on community-...
Fortnite developer supports Animoca subsidiary’s blockchain racing game
Australian indie game developer Grease Monkey Games, a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, has received received financial support from video-game giant Epic Games to develop a new blockchain-based motorsport game Torque Drift 2 Receiving an Epic MegaGrant from the Fortnite developers, the funding will be used to develop the motorsport title, which is based on drifting. The Unreal Engine is a 3D computer graphics game engine developed by Epic Games, which has been used in many industries after it was first showcased in the 1998 game Unreal. According to an Aug. 18 announcement from Animoca Brands, the Epic MegaGrant, which ranges from $5,000 to as much as $500,000, will be used to develop a realistic gaming experience that is on par with other triple-A games that also utilize the Unr...
Minecraft ban ‘hypocritical’ and NFTs are inclusive: Animoca’s Yat Siu
Yat Siu, the co-founder of crypto/NFT venture fund giant Animoca Brands, labeled the recent Minecraft NFT ban as “hypocritical” and emphasized that nonfungible tokens (NFT) can be inclusive, despite arguments to the contrary. As previously reported, Minecraft developers Mojang Studios announced a ban on all NFT integrations in the game on July 20. The firm stated that NFTs were against its values, as they foster price speculation, scarcity, exclusion and potential rug pulls. Speaking with Cointelegraph, Siu expressed his frustration at Mojang Studios given the context in which NFTs were being integrated with Minecraft before the ban. Projects such as NFT Worlds were utilizing Minecraft’s open source servers to host a metaverse platform that had crypto and NFT ecosystems built around it. Th...
Square Enix plans to issue tokens and invest heavily in Web3 gaming
Gaming giant Square Enix has revealed in its Q1 earnings report that it will expand nonfungible tokens (NFTs) into more game products as part of its medium-term business strategy in 2022. Square Enix (SE) is a Japanese game developer with $3 billion in assets under management, according to its latest earnings report. The firm owns the Final Fantasy property and sold the Tomb Raider franchise for $300 million on May 3. The report states that the firm piloted NFTs on the Shi-San-Sei Million Arthur game starting in February this year. The success of the pilot program will lead to the second season of the game’s NFTs and will ultimately see the firm pursue broader activities in the NFT and blockchain industries. Among the top priorities of its blockchain domain initiatives, SE plans on establi...
BAYC’s ApeCoin up 50% this week as its creator raises $450M in new funding
ApeCoin (APE) continued its rebound move Thursday as the firm behind it raised hundreds of millions of dollars in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. APE’s price surged 7.5% intraday to reach around $14.50 per piece. Notably, the token’s upside move came as a part of a retracement rally that started at the beginning of this week when it was changing hands for as low as $9.50. That pushed APE’s week-to-date profits up by 50%, making it one of the best-performing digital assets since March 21. APE/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView Big VC booster To recap, ApeCoin digital currency came to existence on March 17, via an “airdrop” backed by Yuga Labs, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a collection of nonfungible tokens (NFT) popul...
Animoca Brands targets social media giants in latest Web3 expansion plans
Animoca Brands co-founder and chairman Yat Siu stated that his firm will continue to “shepherd companies into Web3” to speed up the evolution of the internet into an open Metaverse. Siu has long advocated for the broader concept of an open Metaverse as opposed to a closed one that is dominated by large centralized Web2 companies. Central to Siu’s argument is that decentralized Web3 platforms and tech such as NFTs offer users a chance to maintain ownership rights over their data and content online, instead of it being controlled and utilized by firms such as Meta (formerly Facebook). Siu made his latest comments while speaking on day three of the Australian Blockchain Week event earlier today. During his discussion hosted by Caroline Bowler — the CEO of local crypto exchange BTC Markets — t...
Nifty News: Anime-ca Brands, Steve Aoki’s NFTs more profitable than decade of studio albums
Anime and Animoca Brands Blockchain gaming and Metaverse company Animoca Brands has launched a strategic subsidiary in Japan after raising $10 million in seed funding. The new subsidiary, named Animoca Brands KK, plans on expanding popular Japanese content into NFTs, the Metaverse, and fungible tokens through Web3 applications. The content includes anime such as My Hero Academia and Dragon Ball, games, art, sports, and others. Funds for this latest expansion were raised in a $10 million seed round led by Japanese investment firm MCP Asset Management’s MCP IPX One Fund. Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu told Cointelegraph that “this one is really big” because of the content being brought into the NFT space and the size of the firms now involved. Siu also said in the o...
Fan Controlled Football raises $40M to expand league with Bored Apes and Gutter Cats
Alternative sports organization Fan Controlled Football (FCF) has raised $40 million in Series A funding from crypto and blockchain gaming firms to support the league’s expansion plans, including four new teams and an NFT project. The FCF was founded in 2017 by Sohrob Farudi, Patrick Dees, Ray Austin and Grant Cohen and hosted its debut season inside a bubble environment in Atlanta amid the pandemic last year. The FCF features an indoor version of American football in a seven vs seven-player format, and the games are streamed live on Twitch. The unique feature of the league is that the teams are governed by their fans, who have voting rights on anything ranging from player acquisitions, in-game plays, branding and team selection. For the upcoming season, NFTs will play a key role in the vo...
Animoca Brands’ Lympo NFT platform hacked for $18.7 million
Sports NFT minting platform and Animoca Brands subsidiary Lympo suffered from a hot wallet security breach and lost 165.2 million LMT tokens worth $18.7 million at the time of the hack. A short Medium update from the Lympo team stated that on Jan. 10 hackers managed to gain access to Lympo’s operational hot wallet and “stole a total of approximately 165.2 million LMT from it.” According to the post, ten different project wallets were compromised in the attack. It appears that most of the stolen tokens were sent to a single address, swapped for Ether (ETH) on Uniswap and Sushiswap, then sent elsewhere. LMT price tumbled 92% to $0.0093 after hackers transferred then sold the loot from the project’s hot wallets. A subsequent Jan. 11 tweet from the team stated that they were “working on stabil...
