Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu storms Disrupt with tips for thriving in a crypto winter • TechCrunch
If anyone knows how to weather a crypto winter, it’s probably Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands – the Hong Kong-based web3 conglomerate and investment powerhouse.
While implosions like the $40 billion Terra ecosystem collapse and the 97% plunge in NFT trading volume send an icy wind across the cryptoverse, the forecast for Animoca seems positive. The Web3 giant recently raised $110 million, is currently valued just south of $6 billion and may be preparing for an IPO.
How do they do it? We’re thrilled to ask that question—and many others—when Yat Siu joins us on stage for a fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt 18-20. October in San Francisco.
In the aptly named “How to Thrive Under a Crypto Winter” session, Siu will sit down with TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet for a conversation sure to be as wide-ranging as Animoca’s products and investments. The company has hundreds of active investments in popular web3 companies such as OpenSea, Dapper Labs and Axie Infinity, as well as its own pay-to-earn gaming platforms such as The Sandbox and the Revv Motorsport ecosystem.
We want to learn more about Animoca’s strategy for web3 gaming given the amount of NFT feedback coming from the gaming community. We also want Sius’ take on the current NFT trading situation, along with his thoughts on the state of the metaverse.
We’ll also touch on crypto’s environmental impact and the effect Ethereum’s infrastructure upgrade – which cuts energy consumption by 99.95% – could have on Bitcoin.
But here’s the $64,000 crypto token question: How has Animoca Brands managed to raise so much money while crypto assets have gone through such a rough year? Don’t miss what is sure to be a fascinating and worthwhile session.
A seasoned technology entrepreneur and investor, Yat Siu is the co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, a global leader in blockchain and gaming. Its mission: deliver digital property rights to global players and internet users to create a new asset class, games to serve economies and a fairer digital framework to build the open metaverse.
Siu has been an early advocate for the use of blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFT) in the gaming industry. In 2018, with a vision of the potential of decentralized apps and assets, he steered Animoca Brands, already an established game developer and publisher, to focus on blockchain technology and NFTs.
The company has launched a series of NFT-centric products and invested in more than 100 blockchain-related companies, developing one of the largest blockchain portfolios in the world.
Before founding Animoca Brands, Siu set up the Dalton Learning Lab, an after-school digital lab for skills not emphasized by most education systems, including divergent thinking and design thinking. He is the founder of ThinkBlaze, the research arm of Outblaze (a pioneer in multilingual white label web services) that investigates socially significant issues in technology.
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