Tokenomics: Animoca Brands takes a front seat for the blockchain tokenisation revolution

• Cryptocurrency industry now worth US$3.14 trillion globally as stablecoins account for US$200 billion or 2% of US Treasury bond demand
• Major institutions like Hong Kong Chartered Bank and JP Morgan are launching their own stablecoins or tokens
• Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu believes stablecoin adoption will soon be a necessity

Special Report: Animoca Brands has evolved drastically over the past four years, transforming from a gaming and metaverse pioneer to a giant of blockchain tokenisation.

Once primarily a web3 gaming company pioneering the metaverse, Animoca Brands has expanded to become a major blockchain industry player, with private investments worth an estimated US$564 million at the end of 2024.

Over the past four years, Animoca Brands has been on a journey of transformation, morphing from a DeFi entertainment company into a cornerstone of blockchain tokenisation and digital asset accumulation.

While the company still produces its own blockchain-based projects, it has evolved beyond development and now collaborates with major institutions, including through a joint venture with Standard Chartered Bank and HKT to launch a  stablecoin pegged to the Hong Kong dollar.

As the international market’s understanding of blockchain and cryptocurrency matures, so too has its comprehension of the technology’s inherent value and potential as a financial ecosystem.

As tokenisation promises to reshape the digital realm, enabling new forms of value creation, ownership, and economic opportunity, the financial world is finally starting to come to grips with this new frontier.

Teaching old dogs new tricks

One of the obstacles to pioneering new technologies – especially in the financial world – is that it can take a hot minute for regulation and its arbiters to catch up.

That was one of the hurdles Animoca Brands faced in bringing its digital tokenisation model to financial markets.

The company recently released an audited annual report for the 2021 financial year, produced by Hall Chadwick, one of the largest accounting groups in Australia.

“I want to dispel the idea that auditing crypto companies is hard,” Animoca Brands co-founder and executive chair Yat Siu told Stockhead.

“What’s difficult is finding an auditor who both understands crypto and isn’t afraid of dealing with it. Hall Chadwick is one of a very few, if not the only, auditors we encountered that owned any crypto.”

Part of the complication is that cryptocurrencies aren’t treated the same way as other assets on a balance sheet.

They’re likened to digital gaming marketplaces, where profits are considered delayed until on-platform purchases are considered fulfilled, which occurs over a longer period of time after a sale is made.

When digital worlds and financial audits meet

Siu points to highly successful online game platform and development firm Roblox as an example.

“Roblox is cashflow positive, it’s a massive company with a market cap of US$70 billion, but if you look at their accounts, they’ve been losing money since day one,” the Animoca Brands leader points out.

“The reason it appears that way is because they have the same deferred revenue structure as we do.”

The company’s platform has more than 380 million active monthly users, generating US$3.6 billion in revenue in 2024. It’s arguably the largest gaming ecosystem in the world.

It’s also losing money hand over fist if you take its financial statements at face value – Roblox hasn’t been net positive on the books a single operating year since its inception in 2006.

In 2024, the company accounts showed net losses of US$935.5 million for the year – but also revenues of US$3.6 billion and bookings of US$4.36 billion.

That’s because a large portion of Roblox’s income comes from its in-game marketplace.

Within the Roblox game ecosystem, users are able to purchase Robux, a virtual currency that can only be spent within the Roblox gaming platform.

The digital currency is then deposited into your digital in-game wallet, to be spent on cosmetic items and experiences for your in-game characters.

That step – between spending real cash on a digital currency and converting it into an in-game purchase – is the sticking point.

As far as the accountants are concerned, Roblox doesn’t make a profit when it takes your money to give you Robux.

Instead, it’s treated as a “deferred payment” or booking, a transaction that has been agreed upon and will produce a profit at a later date, but hasn’t occurred yet.

In accounting terms, that’s a liability, as the company has an obligation to fulfil a service that hasn’t been provided yet.

Digital currencies as deferred payments

Of course, there’s no refund or conversion system to turn Robux back into currency, so as far as the company is concerned, once you’ve made your initial purchase the money belongs to Roblox… but the accounts don’t necessarily reflect that.

Translating that into blockchain, if an individual purchases a token in Animoca Brands’ blockchain ecosystem, but holds it in a wallet or game account without purchasing anything with it, it counts as a deferred payment, just like Robux.

The payment has been made, but as far as the accounts are concerned, the service hasn’t yet been rendered and the profits therefore can’t be counted.

That’s especially true of tokens, which aren’t just a digital currency, but also come with attached rights and obligations.

The rights carried by tokens can be anything from access to platforms like decentralised applications and services like discounts, entry into competitions, or even equity in an asset or company.

Tokens are a financial tool that can quantify and validate pretty much anything using blockchain technology; they’re a verifiable method to trade or own both tangible and intangible assets.

Art, labour, reputation, access to services or events, ownership of physical or digital assets… the possible use cases are endless.

Back in 2021, tokenisation was still in its infancy as a concept, but it provided a core catalyst for the transformation of Animoca Brands.

It was a watershed moment for the company, with bookings surging from A$49 million the previous year to A$450 million in 2021, and net operating cash inflow from A$8 million to A$382 million.

Despite major and controversial collapses in the cryptocurrency space – the Terra Luna and FTX scandals come to mind – the market for cryptocurrencies of all types has since exploded to US$3.4 trillion.

Today half a billion people own some kind of tokenised asset, and with stablecoins rising in both relevancy and legitimacy, that number will only grow.

The future of tokenisation

Animoca Brands owns a slice of a lot of pies. Its flagship projects include:

• Moca Network, a chain-agnostic digital identifier infrastructure
• Open Campus, a community-led decentralised autonomous organisation building an on-chain education network
• The Sandbox, an immersive metaverse platform, and;
• GAMEE, a mobile Game-Fi platform focused on Web3 gaming.

The company has been investing in Web3 projects since 2018, and has over 570  investments in its portfolio with an unaudited – for now – value of more than half a billion dollars.

While Animoca Brands’ commitment to digital identity, consumer property rights and gaming accessibility remains unchanged, the company’s focus has shifted to a more institutional perspective on blockchain technology.

Animoca Brands provided Digital Asset Advisory (DAA) services to 21 successful projects in 2024, generating US$68 million in revenue and a further US$97 million from ongoing liquidity provisioning, treasury management, blockchain node operations, and yield-generating trading strategies.

The company’s DAA revenue has surged 116% year on year, and demand for the service shows no sign of lessening.

In February 2025, Animoca Brands created a joint venture with Standard Chartered and telecommunications company HKT with the goal to create a new stablecoin.

It’s one of various examples of the company’s rapidly expanding tokenisation projects.

Standard Chartered is one of only three commercial banks authorised to issue Hong Kong dollars, marking it as one of the largest and most important financial institutions in the city.

Together with Animoca Brands’ tokenisation and blockchain expertise and HKT’s mobile wallet platform, the partnership will create a Hong Kong dollar-pegged stablecoin under Hong Kong’s new Stablecoin Ordinance.

Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu believes stablecoin projects with major financial institutions are the future of blockchain.

“If you launch a stablecoin in a joint venture with one of our note-issuing banks in Hong Kong, with a licence from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), consumers can have high confidence that this is a legitimate project,” he said.

Stablecoins have already moved beyond a curiosity to a genuine financial instrument – about 80% of the stablecoin market is invested in either Treasury bills or repurchase agreements, representing about US$200 billion or 2% of the treasury market.

State Street Global Advisors CEO Yie-Hsin Hung reckons it won’t be long until demand from stablecoins outpaces Treasury supply.

With JP Morgan launching its own deposit token to institutional investors in June, the writing is on the wall – it won’t be long until major financial institutions are trading directly in blockchain tokens.

Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the Fnality International consortium – backed by global banks including Santander, HSBC, Barclays, and UBS – are all lining up to prepare their own tokenised offerings.

“If you’re a sovereign nation, you’ll need to have a sovereign stablecoin of some form, somewhere around the world,” Animoca Brands’ Siu cautioned.

“Otherwise, it’ll be like being cash-only in a digital society.”

This article was developed in collaboration with Animoca Brands, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.