With the crypto market recovering from last week’s sell-off, a bunch of Aussies running a venture builder fund in Vietnam are hoping their token will be the next to “moon”.

RedFOX Labs has an RFOX token on the Ethereum network that will be used to power an ecosystem of digital services. There’s a tournament-based videogame that’s in beta testing, a marketplace non-fungible gaming tokens, a soon-to-launch livestreaming app that earns users cash back, and planned “virtual land” that can be purchased with the RFOX token.

The company also recently bought MY Media Digital, Myanmar’s largest digital marketing platform, whose pages have a combined 35 million Facebook followers and whose advertisers include heavyweights such as Samsung, Huawei, Nestle and Lenovo.

Chief executive and co-founder Ben Fairbank, an Adelaide native, says there are 14 core team members working on the head venture plus 33 or 34 contractors, and more acquisitions could follow.

“We moved to Vietnam, focused on the four fastest-growing sectors of the internet economy, which here are e-commerce, e-media, e-travel and ride-hailing, and logistics,” he said.

“People are starting to work out that we’re clicking together an ecosystem that’s interoperable and self-supporting,” he said.

At first, the venture builder was “all talk, design and concept, now people have seen the products coming out for the last six or eight months  and it’s starting to click together, so it’s a pretty exciting journey at the moment.”

Why Vietnam?

The company chose to locate in Vietnam because it’s one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia, but it actually has one of the lowest rates of adoption for digital services. And while it has a number of engineers coming out of universities, the country isn’t known as being particularly business-friendly.

“What we did was we sort of went down the path of saying, well, hang on, let’s do what other people are not doing,” Fairbank said. “Everyone else is basically in Singapore or somewhere that is a lot more business-friendly.”

RedFOX sees itself as getting in early to Vietnam, which is poised for explosive growth, and will be there before “the crowds come,” Fairbank said.

Vietnam doesn’t allow businesses to replace the local currency with anything else to purchase goods or services, Fairbank said, so RedFOX sees a system where users pay in fiat but the RFOX token is used at an underlying level.

“Our ultimate goal is to move towards an environment where end-users don’t even know they’re interacting with blockchain or crypto, but yet everything is coursing through RFox,” he said.

RFOX Token

On Tuesday afternoon, RFOX was listed as the 158th valuable crypto-asset on Coingecko, with a market capitalisation of $US189 million ($243 million).

RFOX was trading for US14.5017c, up 561 per cent in the past 30 days, after changing hands at around 2.5c apiece from October to early February.

Among the fans of the project is Tasmanian cryptoinfluencer Alex Saunders, host of the popular YouTube channel Nugget’s News.

He told Stockhead he sees RFOX as “the next $1b top 20 project” that’s “building a number of world 1sts”.

“Now that they’re a multifaceted, multi-venture business, every little venture that ties in the token and integrates it in some way gives it a new and different form of utility and creates network effect, which is all good,” he said.

Elsewhere in the crypto-sphere

Meanwhile, crypto markets had been trending up for the past 24 hours, as of 3.24pm AEDT on Tuesday.

Cryptomarkets
Coin360

Bitcoin was trading at around $US48,900 ($63,000), up 5.8 per cent in the past 24 hours, while Ethereum was up 9.2 per cent to just under $US1,600 ($2,000).

Only five of the top 100 coins on Coingecko had lost ground over the past 24 hours — and two of those, Cardano (ADA) and Polygon (MATIC), were taking a breather after recently setting all-time highs.

XDC Network, xSushi, Leo Token, Sushi, Enjin Coin and Flow were also top 100 assets that had set all-time highs in the 13 hours to 3.30pm, according to Coingecko.

Flow, a blockchain platform by Dapper Labs, the company that created Cryptokitties, is also the best-performing coin in the top 100 in the past 24 hours, according to Coingecko. It was up 36.8 per cent to $US29.46 at 3.35pm.

Update, July 23, 2021: The headline on this story has been changed.