Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu is confident that a number of investments and partnerships could prove fruitful in 2024 as mainstream institutional interest in Bitcoin (BTC) gains momentum.
Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph at the Next Block Expo event in Berlin, the chairman of the gaming venture capital firm highlighted around 70 investments made in 2023 that are expected to deliver results next year.
Related: Animoca Looks to the SportFi Ecosystem and Becomes a Chiliz Chain Validator
Chief among these is a high-profile partnership with The Open Network (TON) blockchain, which was announced on November 28. Siu confirmed that the investment involved the purchase of an undisclosed amount of Toncoin, which was then deployed as part of the validator. agreement:
“We actually think this is a tool for mass onboarding with the TON wallet. There are 800 million users on Telegram who use TON. What’s not to be excited about?”
Siu also said Animoca’s acquisition of social casual gaming platform Gamee in July 2020 will benefit from its growing gaming platform presence on Telegram. He adds that the acquisition was hampered by the inability to monetize games through the messaging application.
“There were no ads and in-app purchases, and until recently nothing was allowed in Telegram with the TON integration. So now they are commercially viable,” Siu explains.
While Gamee is not yet fully integrated into Telegram, the valuation of its native GMEE token is a strong indicator of “GameFi excitement and its potential on Telegram.”
Animoca also has a vested interest in the broader performance of metaverse projects and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Siu says the NFT market is recovering thanks to long-term holders who valued the respective projects and the fundamentals that support them:
“A lot of the classic speculators are gone, or there aren’t as many of them because they thought they couldn’t make much money and they all declared NFTs dead.”
He adds that the number of NFTs from various high-profile collections for sale on the market “is now typically in the single digits.” This is in stark contrast to the 2021 bull market, where more than half of a given collection was for sale on NFT marketplaces.
Related: Web3 gaming investors are ‘pickier’ in crypto winter – Animoca’s Robby Yung
Macro factors also give Siu reason to be optimistic as 2024 looms on the horizon. He points to growing anticipation around Bitcoin spot exchange traded funds in the US, the end of Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial and Binance’s $4.3 billion settlement with US authorities as key reasons for positive sentiment in the entering the new year:
“Honestly, even the Binance chapter was a wonderful ending for me. In a sense, we now have clarity for 2024.”
The possible approval of several spot Bitcoin ETFs in early 2024 adds to the strong fundamentals, according to Siu. The recent liquidation of $60 million in BTC short positions is also easing downward pressure on the markets.
