All My Apes Gone

I must have jinxed crypto, because since my tokenization post Bitcoin has fallen roughly 24%. Should you keep buying the dip?1 I don't care - nothing matters, we are all entropic pinballs bouncing around a holographic universe, victims of a cataclysmic Demiurge intent on blendering all of our bodies into exotic human cheeses for the interdimensional androids that live in the center of Saturn's hexagon.2

Now that I got that out of my system, let's pivot to our topic for today: Animoca Brands. Unless you have my particular flavor of brainrot you will have never heard of this company. However, chances are you are at least tangentially aware of some entities it owns a stake in: Yuga Labs, creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club; OpenSea, the NFT marketplace; and Colossal Biosciences, the lunatics trying to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.3

Animoca announced last November that it was going public in a reverse merger with CURRENC Group Inc. After that announcement the stock, trading under the $CURR ticker, went parabolic as speculators and algos rode the wave:

At the end of market close this Friday it was valued at $110M USD, which according to the proposed term sheet puts the resulting entity at roughly a $2.2B USD market cap. Is that a fair valuation? I'm personally skeptical but I think it's worth investigating why, if only for an exercise in futility (we are all just entropic pinballs after all). If $MSTR and $BMNR are anything to go by, these pseudo-ETFs ought to be valued somewhere close to NAV - or "MNAV" as is hip to do in this space - so it behooves us to scrutinize their assets, and whether we'd like exposure to them.

Real World Asset Marketplace

The slide deck (PDF) for Animoca's 2025 AGM tells a compelling story of what the company intends to be. I want to talk about a couple choice slides. The full deck is worth perusing over your morning coffee, but ultimately (at least in my opinion) talks a big game but lacks substance. Most interesting to me is the RWA (real world asset) marketplace NUVA:

Unfortunately it doesn't tell us much. Let's go to NUVA's website for a slightly better explanation:

That's a little clearer. You deposit USDC (cash) into their "vault" and receive their token in return. Your shares - the nvAsset token - generate some APY, similar to the interest you receive on a deposit at a bank, although in this case much higher (presumably with the concomitant risk). With the power of blockchain, there is some level of transparency into the underlying asset that provides said yield; unlike at a bank, where I'm not privileged to peek into what investments the bank is making with my deposit. Lastly, since it's ERC-20, you can use the nvAsset token elsewhere on-chain, such as collateral for a loan. This is no different from other securities-backed loans.

Currently they only offer a yield-bearing stablecoin, but intend to launch one based on HELOCs, plus I imagine countless others. I'm salivating just thinking about it - I love the financialization of everything!

But What About the Assets?

Pivoting back to Animoca, let's see a bird's-eye view of the assets on their balance sheet:

Over a third of their $1.6B USD in assets is composed of three shitcoins (sorry, altcoins): MOCA, SAND, and EDU. MOCA, a token for decentralized identity; SAND, a token for a metaverse game that doesn't have many real players; and EDU, a token for "a new financial layer for education." That last one sounds like a virtuous goal, but gamifying education ain't it chief. Keep in mind, too, that this was reported in Q3 of 2025 - since then MOCA has fallen roughly 80% and SAND roughly 70%...

It's easy to poke fun at Animoca because altcoins are crap, and after doing so is no longer enlightening. As detailed in the AGM slide deck, they also have an extensive portfolio of investments across the Web3 "value chain" and so if you're bullish on Web3 they're worth a deep dive on. Personally, I'd rather just own Bitcoin4 than expose myself to this side of crypto. However, we live in a K-shaped casino so I wouldn't be surprised if both the stock price and the Web3 ecosystem see a resurgence alongside the growth of tokenization. Yat Siu, the chairman, would agree I think:

"we as a business could essentially become an index for investors to participate, basically, in this next growth era"

So I may have a dim view of altcoins and the Web3 ecosystem at large but I do think tokenization is the future, and I will close out this post with a few words on the topic.

Tokenization as Securitization Accelerationism

Securitization has been revolutionary for increasing the velocity of capital. Assets previously left out of the market are able to be folded into its ever-expanding reach; much like the enclosure of the commons this is one of the major revolutions of capitalism and a shining example of its mammonite nature. Economists and financial professionals would tell you that securitization's benefit is to expand liquidity, lubricate the system of capital allocation, and efficiently manage and price risk. This is of course demonstrably true, but belies a deeper and more fundamental character of the Market; as above, so below.

The Market is ceaselessly expansionary, always and forever in search of new frontiers to colonize. It is no coincidence that the Manifest Destiny of America's past so closely mirrors this phenomena.5 It should therefore come as no surprise that tokenization is the next logical step in the evolution of the Market, building upon the innovation of securitization that preceded it.

Like all new things, tokenization means a great many things to many different people, and also has no comprehensive legal understanding in the same way that securitization does in the American common law system. It can be best summarized as the creation of a digital representation - the token - that maps to some other asset, whatever that may be. This can take the banal form of, say, an NFT where some digital image is "pointed to" by that token on a blockchain. NFTs were rightly mocked because they could be made by anybody and had no legal basis for the ownership of the image itself. Holding a random NFT of the Mona Lisa in your crypto wallet gave you no claim to ownership of the painting. However, just because NFTs are a joke doesn't mean tokenization is without merit (in the evolution of markets sense I articulated earlier). A liberal democracy is more than capable of assimilating such a technology into its legal apparatus and, at least in the case of the United States, I believe it's an inevitability.

The question, then, is how to reconcile those securities - because that's what tokens are - with a claim on the underlying asset. Why hold tokenized gold instead of shares in the SPDR Gold Trust if my token doesn't allow me to redeem it for the physical commodity?6 This is exemplary of the Hard Problem that tokenization is trying to solve. My shares of $GLD mean I have partial ownership of the Trust and by proxy a claim on its assets - but it does not mean I have the right to redemption of those shares for literal gold bars.