Animoca Brands to provide liquidity for investors courtesy of ‘trading hub’ with PrimaryMarkets

Unlisted blockchain game developer Animoca Brands has unveiled plans that will soon allow investors to trade its issued securities, one month since leaving the ASX.

The company said it has signed a “private trading hub mandate letter” with Australian company PrimaryMarkets, an independent marketplace that transacts secondary trading of existing securities and investments.

Currently, PrimaryMarkets operates as a corporate authorised representative of Sydney-based Helmsec Global Capital and, as a result of this latest agreement, will soon facilitate the sale and purchase of Animoca Brands’ shares through an online facility for existing shareholders and new investors.

In a statement to the market, Animoca Brands revealed it plans to launch the new trading hub in the second quarter of this year to provide liquidity to investors who bought shares while the company was listed on the ASX.

As things stand, investors can only sell their shares through off-market private transactions via authorised brokers, which means there is no active market for Animoca Brands’ shares.

The company said the trading hub is set to provide a “secure, controlled private trading hub to enable shareholders to list and trade shares of Animoca Brands transparently, independently, and confidentially..

Just last month, Animoca Brands announced its subsidiary The Sandbox had secured investment from leading game titan Square Enix as well as B Cryptos, Mindfulness Venture Fund I, Mindfulness Capita and TGV over the past 12 months.

The Sandbox is a a highly anticipated blockchain-based ecosystem in which players create decentralised virtual experiences.

The news was quickly followed by the revelation that gaming giant Atari had also become a partner and participant in The Sandbox ecosystem.

Animoca Brands said details regarding the applicable trading rules investors will be asked to agree to will be published on the trading hub and will also be sent to existing shareholders.

The company’s longer term plan is to re-list, presumably on an exchange that welcomes innovative blockchain technology business models.

Bouncing back

In early March, Animoca Brands’ shares were removed from Australia’s exchange, with the ASX citing governance issues and the company’s involvement with blockchain technology and cryptocurrency – a largely unregulated type of assets that several nations have struggled to harness given its decentralised nature and ability to undermine the existing status-quo in banking and finance.

“These are still early days for true digital ownership delivered through blockchain. While we have seen great results from our NFT pre-sales in our products such as The Sandbox and F1 Delta Time, we believe the best is yet to come,” Animoca Brands stated at the time.

According to the company, coming up next is a series of “virtual worlds built on crypto assets and blockchain technology” that foster appeal across all generations including generation X, Z and millennials alike.

In March, Animoca Brands unveiled plans to weave together a “deeply immersive metaverse” in which virtual worlds and games will be created collaboratively inside The Sandbox and without a central authority.

Players will be able to create and offer their own gaming experiences, and purchase, use and resell digital assets in the form of non-fungible tokens that correspond to ownable in-game characters, customisation items and digital real estate.

The rationale behind the digital extravaganza is that as the popularity of various virtual worlds grows, so do the valuations of each asset and the limited amount of real estate within each game.

As part of the rollout of The Sandbox, one of Animoca Brands’ flagship projects, the company has conducted multiple pre-sale rounds of digital content enabling participants to purchase virtual real estate.

The overarching idea is for game makers, gamers and third-party companies to engage with each other through virtual experiences in The Sandbox, thereby making future games more collaborative, immersive and memorable than ever before.

In the latest pre-sale round for The Sandbox, Animoca Brands sold out a batch of 12,384 unique LAND parcels “within five hours” and generated a total of 3,400 ETH tokens, equivalent to around $740,000.

“We want to make The Sandbox a fun and creative virtual world where players can express, own and trade their creativity, and we’re greatly looking forward to unveiling more partners in our gaming platform,” The Sandbox chief operating officer and co-founder Sebastien Borget said.