David Angliss, an analyst with Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm, Apollo Capital, shares the fund’s weekly take on what’s happening in the fast-changing and volatile cryptocurrency space.

Other than layer 1 blockchains, Apollo Capital has largely been focused on decentralised finance, the segment of the crypto market with the most users, real-world use cases and practical applications.

But there are other sectors of the crypto space, including gaming, the “metaverse” and NFTs. Apollo is branching out, recently making its second investment in the space, following some November spot buys of gaming infrastructure project Immutable X.

The Melbourne crypto investment firm recently made an early-stage investment in Perion DAO, an Australian-founded gaming guild similar to Yield Guild Games and Crypto Gaming United.

For those unfamiliar, these groups exist to help equip gamers in developing countries with the expensive NFTs they need to make money from play-to-earn games such as Axie Infinity – in exchange for a cut of the profit.

“Perion’s mission is to create and distribute opportunity by harnessing the untapped potential of the Web3.0 gaming community and positioning them as the economic champions of tomorrow,” the DAO’s website reads. (A DAO is a decentralised autonomous organisation, a group run by its tokenholders.)

Angliss says Perion held an $8.6 million raise at a pre-money valuation of $60 million, which ended up being three times oversubscribed. Other venture capitalists taking part in the raise included Framework, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research, Spartan Group and Panterra Capital.

Perion already has one of the largest Axie Infinity communities on chat app Discord – 51,000 strong.

“And their Axie Infinity scholars have been achieving outsize returns, 3.84 times higher than the average Axie player,” Angliss says. “They’ve got some of the best scholars, the best gamers.”

One of the group’s founders, Melbourne-based Amos Whitewolf, was ranked as the No. 1 Axie player for several months last year on the global player-versus-player leaderboard.

“So he knows Axie inside out, he’s right across that,” Angliss said.

The group’s advisors include Apollo’s chief investment officer, Henrik Andersson; Jordan Momtazi, a core contributor Synthetix; NFT horseracing game Zed.Run‘s Sydney-based creator, Chris Laurent; Joshua Green, managing partner of Orthogonal Trading and Chloe White, managing director of Melbourne crypto regulation advisory Genesis Block.

Perion token sale

Perion will hold its public token sale later this month. It begins on Friday (January 21) and runs for a week, using the Tokemak platform.

“The whitelist is still open,” Angliss said.

“So anyone who wants to get involved … these guilds have been very popular of late, and we’re pretty confident that these guys are going to be good contenders against (rival gaming guilds) your CGUs, your Avocados, your YGGs.”

Perion has already partnered with nine different games, including Ember Sword, Zed.Run, Sipher and Syn City, acquiring NFT assets for players including the most expensive racehorse in Zed.Run.

Angliss says the Perion investment doesn’t mean Apollo is pivoting away from DeFi, which last year as a sector lagged the more speculative metaverse and gaming space.

“It’s just slightly decreasing the allocation to DeFi and making room for NFT infrastructure and metaverse,” he said.

The views, information, or opinions expressed in the interview in this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead.

Stockhead has not provided, endorsed or otherwise assumed responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.

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