NFT game developer Animoca Brands is claiming the status of crypto’s latest unicorn after raising almost $89 million at a $1 billion valuation.
NFT-focussed game developer, Animoca Brands, has announced the completion of an $88,888,888 capital raise based on a valuation of $1 billion.
The raise was announced on May 13, with participants including Kingsway Capital, Hashkey Fintech Investment fund, RIT Capital Partners, and Huobi. 93.4 million newly issued shares in Animoca Brands will be distributed to the investors at a subscription price of $0.85 each.
Animoca Brands’ co-founder and chairman, Yat Siu, noted that its strategic investors share the company’s “vision for NFTs redefining equity and property rights online.” Kingsway founder and CEO, Manuel Stotz, added:
“The emergence of digital property rights, whether via Bitcoin or NFTs, is perhaps the greatest opportunity for financial inclusion for the bottom three billion frontier and emerging market consumers, as well as an opportunity for a more decentralized and thus more equitable global Internet.”
To commemorate the raise, Animoca will issue a special nonfungible token to its investors and key partners.
The company says that funding will be used for product development, acquisitions, and securing licensing rights for its games. Animoca has released notable titles including The Sandbox, F1 Delta Time, and MotoGP Ignition, and has invested in leading teams in the NFT space including Dapper Labs, Opensea, and Axie Infinity.
Last month, Animoca was ranked among Statista’s list of the top 500 high growth companies in the Asia-Pacific region for 2021, in addition to being named one of Australia’s fastest-growing companies.
In February, Animoca announced that its entire REVV motorsports ecosystem would be deployed on Polygon’s layer-two sidechain to alleviate the high gas fees associated with using Ethereum’s mainnet, beginning with F1 Delta Time.
Tempers are running hot in the latest round of Bitcoin FUD, but a longer-term perspective reveals “business as usual” for BTC.
Bitcoin (BTC) dived 17% when Tesla CEO Elon Musk criticized its energy consumption — but it’s already bouncing back.
On May 13, fresh from its dip to $45,60, BTC/USD is trading above $51,000, having regained over half its lost ground.
With the drama still spreading, Cointelegraph considers why, on a fundamental level, Bitcoin is ultimately resilient to the actions of a single user — no matter how influential he or she is.
Proof-of-Work doesn’t care
Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm rewards both miners and investors over time because their years of work makes the network stronger.
The longer Bitcoin continues, the less likely it is to succumb to attack or see its participants leave the network for a different cryptocurrency.
This is precisely why Bitcoin continues to be the cryptocurrency of choice with competition — as many argue, no altcoin can “do Bitcoin” like Bitcoin.
When it comes to Musk, however, proof-of-work is signifcant for another reason. Just because one prominent investor changes his mind on Bitcoin’s merits and the price drops, miners have no added incentive to quit the network or cash out.
This aspect of “network effect” means that Musk ultimately provides Bitcoin with good, rather than bad publicity — as even price shows, his words and actions do not change what Bitcoin is or what it is capable of.
“Why is proof-of-work crucial for bitcoin? Because a valid hash (PoW) is how P2P nodes know that a block is valid, without needing a server or trusted third party,” PlanB, creator of the stock-to-flow family of Bitcoin price models, commented on the phenomenon.
“Bitcoin is dead without PoW!”
Bitcoin 7-day average hash rate 1-year chart. Source: Blockchain
Price trends don’t care
Despite its abrupt dive after Musk’s words, Bitcoin’s recent price action speaks more to its resilience to criticism than its susceptibility.
In the event, BTC/USD spent a mere two hours in decline before reversing and holding higher levels. Not just that, but the dip also fits with regular price behavior seen this year and did not even violate any longer-term price trends.
A particularly important level which has characterized the 2020-2021 bull run has been the 21-week exponential moving average (EMA). Analysts have said that this level would dictate the price floor during dips — it even held during the previous bull run peak in 2017.
This time, Musk likewise failed to topple the indicator, and the brief wick to $45,650 was extinguished when it met the 21EMA on the way down.
Once the dust settles on Musk’s individual energy criticism, the wider “debate” on how eco-friendly Bitcoin is will continue in his wake. Most of the common accusations, however, have been long debunked as short sighted and lacking evidence.
Just last week, Michael Saylor, CEO of major Bitcoin hodler MicroStrategy, gave a public interview in which he reinforced the lack of merit inhererent in claims that Bitcoin is “bad” for the environment.
Responding to Musk, he called Tesla’s decision to stop accepting Bitcoin for payments “ironic.”
“Ironic because no incremental energy is used in a bitcoin transaction,” he wrote on Twitter.
“The energy is used to secure the crypto-asset network, and the net impact on fossil fuel consumption over time will be negative, all things considered.”
Expanding one’s time horizon is thus essential to understanding why Bitcoin is worthwhile. As Saifedean Ammous, author of popular book, “The Bitcoin Standard,” often mentions, having a “low time preference” allows a BTC investor to understand that rejecting sound money for reasons such as the environment ends in more energy wasted on unsound alternatives.
This time, Ammous did not mince his words.
“Unless you’ve also switched your rockets and battery manufacturing to ‘more sustainable energy’ you’re going to look like a clueless big hypocrite here,” he tweeted, alluding to Musk’s other company, SpaceX.
“The world needs sound money far more than it needs your rockets & government-subsidized electric cars.”
Sotheby’s originally estimated Banksy’s “Love is in the Air” to sell for up to $5 million.
Major auction house Sotheby’s has completed its cryptocurrency-enabled auction offering Banksy’s iconic protest artwork “Love is in the Air.”
According to the auction results, Sotheby’s sold the physical artwork on Wednesday for $12.9 million, significantly up from from originally estimated of $3 million to $5 million. The physical artwork was offered at a Contemporary Art Evening Auction that also featured “Versus Medici” by Jean-Michel Basquiat selling for nearly $51 million.
Sotheby’s announced on Twitter that the auction involved a 14-minute bidding battle between four entities. The auction house emphasized that the sale marks the first time cryptocurrency was accepted as a payment option for a piece of physical artwork.
According to the auction lot page, the bidders were able to pay using two major cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) — through Sotheby’s partnership with Coinbase Commerce.
“The funds must be sent from an approved wallet or exchange, including: Coinbase, Coinbase Custody Trust, Fidelity Digital Assets Services, Gemini, or Paxos,” the auction house noted.
Source: Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s did not specify whether the winning bid or any participating bids in the auction have actually involved cryptocurrency. The company did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.
As previously reported, Sotheby’s officially announced its plans to accept cryptocurrency as part of Banksy’s artwork auction last week in a move to further explore cryptocurrency payments after debuting nonfungible tokens, or NFTs earlier this year. On May 6, Sotheby’s announced another NFT auction called “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale.” Scheduled to take place between June 3 and June 10, the sale will feature a digital object from iconic NFT collection CryptoPunks.
This comes shortly after New York-based auction house Christie’s sold nine CryptoPunks tokens for nearly $17 million combined. The company previously auctioned Mike Winkelmann’s digital artwork “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” in March, netting almost $70 million for the piece.
