Yat Siu and Animoca Brands: From ASX Exit to $6 Billion

In March 2020 the Australian stock exchange removed Animoca Brands from its list. Two years later it was valued at $6 billion and owned pieces of almost every big name in web3. Its Nasdaq comeback was suspended in September 2026. The story of Yat Siu, the cellist who bet a company on digital property.

On 9 March 2020, a small Hong Kong mobile-games company was removed from the official list of the Australian Securities Exchange. It had been listed for five years. The exchange had raised concerns about its growing crypto activities, and the company chose to leave rather than give them up.

Two and a half years later, in August 2022, that company raised $110 million from investors including Singapore's Temasek at a valuation of about $6 billion. It held stakes in Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Dapper Labs and Yuga Labs, owned The Sandbox, and had become the single most important investor in blockchain gaming.

The company is Animoca Brands, and the man behind it is its co-founder and executive chairman, Yat Siu. His story is one of the strangest and most consequential money stories in this section.

A musician who joined Atari

Yat Siu was born in 1973 in Vienna, to a mother from Taiwan who conducted orchestras and a father from Hong Kong who started as a musician and became a businessman. He trained in cello, flute and piano at a music and arts university in Vienna.

His first job, while still a schoolboy, was at Atari Germany. He went on to work for the US company Lexicor and in AT&T's systems-integration business, then moved to Hong Kong. In 1996, he founded Cybercity, later renamed Freenation, an early internet and email provider, and then built Outblaze, which made web and messaging services. In 2009, he sold part of that business to IBM, which used it to open its first cloud computing lab in Hong Kong.

From mobile licences to blockchain

Animoca began as a mobile-games business inside Outblaze. It raised a Series A in November 2011 led by Intel Capital and IDG-Accel. Animoca Brands, co-founded by Siu and David Kim, was spun out of it, listed on the ASX on 23 January 2015, and made its name with licensed mobile games: Garfield, Doraemon, Power Rangers and many more.

In 2018, Siu turned the company towards blockchain games and NFTs. The moves came quickly:

August 2018: bought Pixowl, maker of The Sandbox, for $4.875 million.
2019: bought the collectibles marketplace Quidd for $8 million and the Power Rangers developer nWay for $7.69 million.
May 2019: ran the first official Formula 1 NFT auction for its game F1 Delta Time, where one car sold for 415.9 ETH, the most expensive NFT of 2019 (the record sales).

It also started investing in other people's projects, often very early. That portfolio, rather than any single game, became the source of its fortune.

The 2021 money machine

When the NFT boom arrived, Animoca was already holding stakes in many of its biggest names. Its valuation climbed round after round:

May and July 2021: raises of $88,888,888 and $50 million, at about $1 billion.
October 2021: $65 million from investors including Ubisoft and Sequoia Capital, at $2.2 billion.
November 2021: SoftBank led a $93 million investment in its subsidiary The Sandbox.
2022: a reported valuation of $5.9 billion, then the August round led by Temasek and GGV Capital at about $6 billion, described as making the company "pre-IPO ready".

The list of holdings read like a who's who of web3: Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Dapper Labs, Yuga Labs, CryptoKitties and many more, alongside licences from Formula E, MotoGP, Manchester City and Snoop Dogg. Siu became web3's most tireless public advocate, arguing that NFTs gave players real property rights over their digital lives.

The model was simple and, in a rising market, enormously profitable. Animoca took early stakes in projects, often paid partly in their tokens, and helped them with its licences, games and network. When those projects boomed, the value of Animoca's holdings rose with them, which in turn pushed up the price investors would pay for Animoca's own shares. In December 2021, it even joined a $200 million programme with Binance to back more blockchain games. The flip side was that the company's value rose and fell with the whole crypto market, not just with its own games.

What Siu's personal share of that value is worth has not been published by Forbes or Bloomberg. His fortune, like the company's, is tied mostly to private shares and token holdings.

The cracks

The boom left plenty of damage too.

In March 2022, Animoca shut F1 Delta Time after sales had flat-lined for two years, the game that had produced 2019's most expensive NFT.
On 21 June 2022, the company was convicted in Australia for failing to lodge annual and half-yearly financial reports with regulators, and fined. It did not publish an audited report for 2023 until July 2026.
In October 2022, a report that The Sandbox had only about 500 daily on-chain users forced Siu to argue publicly that the game had around 200,000 monthly users.
In August 2025, Animoca laid off more than half of The Sandbox's staff, moved its founders out of executive roles and made its own CEO, Robby Yung, The Sandbox's CEO. Reporting at the time said Animoca had spent about $300 million on The Sandbox over eight years (the founders' side).

The comeback that stalled

Animoca's goal for years was to return to a stock market. In May 2025, it said it planned to list in New York, and on 2 November 2025 it signed a term sheet for a reverse merger with Currenc Group, a fintech company already on Nasdaq. The deal valued Animoca at about $2.4 billion, far below its 2022 peak, and would have given Animoca shareholders about 95% of the combined company. Because Currenc's own share price rose, the deal at one point implied a nominal value of around $8.7 billion.

It did not close. In September 2026, the two companies suspended the talks, saying the time needed to finish no longer fitted their short- and medium-term goals amid changing market conditions. Siu said corporate agility now took precedence. Animoca says it remains committed to relisting on a major exchange and is finishing the audits needed to get there.

By the numbers

1973: Yat Siu born in Vienna
2009: part of Outblaze sold to IBM
2011: Animoca's Series A, led by Intel Capital
9 March 2020: removed from the ASX
$88,888,888: the first tranche raised in May 2021
$4.875 million: price paid for The Sandbox's maker in 2018
$6 billion: valuation in August 2022
$300 million: reported Animoca spending on The Sandbox over eight years
$2.4 billion: valuation in the November 2025 Currenc deal
September 2026: Nasdaq merger talks suspended

What to watch

Yat Siu built Animoca's fortune by being early to almost everything in web3, and by holding pieces of other people's successes. That strategy produced a $6 billion company on paper. The next test is whether Animoca can complete its audits and list on a major exchange, which would, for the first time since 2020, put a public price on what that portfolio is really worth. In the meantime, the company has added AI to its pitch and picked up a Dubai licence for virtual assets, a sign that even blockchain gaming's biggest backer is hedging its bets.

Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.