If anyone knows how to weather a crypto winter, it’s probably Yat Siu, the co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands — the Hong Kong–based web3 conglomerate and investment powerhouse.
While implosions like the Terra ecosystem’s $40 billion collapse and the 97% plunge in NFT trading volume send a bone-chilling wind across the cryptoverse, the weather forecast for Animoca appears positively balmy. The web3 giant recently raised $110 million, is currently valued just south of $6 billion and may be gearing up for an IPO.
How do they do it? We’re thrilled we get to ask that question — and many others — when Yat Siu joins us onstage for a fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 18–20 in San Francisco.
In the aptly named session “How to Thrive During a Crypto Winter,” Siu will sit down with TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet for a conversation that’s 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 play-to-earn gaming platforms like The Sandbox and the Revv Motorsport ecosystem.
We want to learn more about Animoca’s strategy for web3 games given the amount of NFT backlash coming from the gaming community. We also want Siu’s 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 — reducing energy consumption by 99.95% — might 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’s sure to be a fascinating and valuable session.
A veteran 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 gamers and internet users to create a new asset class, play-to-earn economies and a more equitable digital framework for building the open metaverse.
Siu has been an early advocate for the use of blockchain and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) 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.
Prior to 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 of multilingual white label web services) investigating socially meaningful issues in technology.
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