On March 19, 2026, Animoca Brands announced a collaboration with Ava Labs, the company dedicated to advancing the adoption and scalability of the Avalanche ecosystem. Animoca has made a direct investment in AVAX, the native token of the Avalanche blockchain, and entered a strategic partnership with Ava Labs to grow the ecosystem. An Animoca Brands spokesperson declined to disclose the size and other terms of the investment when asked. Silence on figures is not unusual for Animoca. The headline is the commitment, not the size.
The collaboration focuses on deploying capital, exploring product integrations, and providing strategic advisory support to high-potential projects building on Avalanche, with an initial focus on key verticals such as entertainment, real-world assets (RWA), and digital identity. This effort will initially concentrate on the Middle East and Asia, where Animoca Brands has established regional infrastructure and institutional relationships that Avalanche ecosystem projects will be able to draw on as they pursue commercial deployment. Those aren’t random markets. Animoca secured a VASP licence from Dubai’s VARA in February 2026, allowing it to provide broker-dealer and investment services for global institutional and qualified investors from Dubai. They built the geography before they announced the deal.
The partnership lands at an inflection point for Animoca’s own business model. Animoca’s Digital Assets Advisory unit generated $165 million in 2024, a 116% year-over-year increase that surpassed revenue from its traditional Web3 gaming and NFT business, which fell 40% to $110 million. The company that built its identity around gaming and the open metaverse is now, by the numbers, a financial services firm with gaming exposure. The Digital Asset Advisory business provides Web3 projects with token advisory, tokenomics, marketing, listing advisory, node operation, and trading services. These are functions banks used to own. The company drives value through an operational footprint that includes 16 incubated projects, 3 listed liquid tokens, more than 600 portfolio companies, 17 active market-making arrangements, and 21 token advisory deals completed in 2024. Six hundred companies. Seventeen market-making mandates. That is not a venture portfolio. That is an ecosystem in its own right.
This partnership fits into a larger pattern for Animoca Brands, which has been aggressively expanding its strategic footprint. The company is currently pursuing a Nasdaq listing through a reverse merger with Currenc Group, a deal expected to close in 2026. It has also formed RWA-focused partnerships with Fosun Wealth Holdings and FinChain in Asia, and announced a joint venture with Standard Chartered and Hong Kong Telecommunications to apply for a stablecoin issuer licence in Hong Kong. Ava Labs gets access to all of that. Avalanche gets a partner who has already done the institutional handshakes. That is the deal.
Now, to the part that isn’t in the press release.
Animoca operates a web of more than 600 active holdings, co-investments, and incubated projects across gaming, DeFi, AI, RWA, and blockchain infrastructure. None of that is readable onchain under any Animoca-owned namespace. While a .animoca-brands TLD exists as a top-level domain secured at the root layer — described as a bold bet on IP, interoperability, and identity in the open metaverse — it is an independently registered onchain asset, not controlled by Animoca Brands the company. It is an independently registered onchain TLD secured early as cultural and digital territory, now part of a third-party vault. Animoca Brands itself holds no registered .animoca TLD. Not on Freename. Not on Unstoppable Domains. Not on any public-facing onchain registry. The company building digital property rights for the internet does not own its own namespace.
To be precise about what exists: there are derivative namespaces registered by third parties that reference Animoca’s identity. What does not exist is a first-party, brand-controlled .animoca TLD that Animoca Brands itself minted, controls, and can resolve. The gap between what a company builds for others and what it secures for itself is often telling. Animoca has issued identity infrastructure through Moca Network, deployed Open Campus ID with over 850,000 holders, and is now directing advisory support toward digital identity verticals on Avalanche. Animoca has been building through Moca Network, and Avalanche could serve as the infrastructure layer in regions where Animoca already operates. All of this is identity infrastructure built outward. None of it resolves inward to a sovereign .animoca namespace.
Here is what that costs them, specifically.
Supported by a portfolio of more than 600 companies and over 70 new investments in 2024, value is realized through investment gains, treasury performance, and venture fund returns. That portfolio is currently disclosed through quarterly investor update PDFs, press releases, and curated web pages. There is no machine-readable endpoint. There is no cryptographically signed snapshot of active holdings. There is no SLD map. If a research agent, an LP, or a due-diligence system wants to know what Animoca currently holds, what the co-investment terms are, or which positions have exited — they scrape PDFs. That is the state of disclosure at the largest Web3 venture firm on the planet.
x402 is an HTTP-native payment protocol that revives the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code for instant blockchain payments. Developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare in 2025, it enables AI agents and applications to pay for web services automatically using stablecoins like USDC. Unlike traditional payment systems requiring account creation and API keys, x402 embeds payment instructions directly in HTTP headers, allowing 2-second settlements with zero protocol fees — only minimal blockchain gas costs. The protocol is not a future concept. Launched in May 2025 by Coinbase and Cloudflare, the protocol uses USDC and EIP-712 signatures. As of early 2026, it has processed over 115 million transactions. Google subsequently integrated x402 into the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and released the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2). This is live infrastructure.
A venture research agent operating today could, in theory, call portfolio.animoca via x402 and retrieve a verified, timestamped snapshot of Animoca’s active holdings, co-investment availability, and advisory pipeline — paying fractions of a cent per query in USDC, with no human gatekeeper, no email thread, no PDF. x402 enables AI agents to make autonomous payments without human intervention. When an agent requests a paid resource, it receives a 402 response with payment requirements — amount, currency, recipient address. The agent then signs a payment authorization using its wallet, retries the request with payment proof, and gains instant access. That is the model. An authenticated, pay-per-query endpoint resolving verified portfolio data. ERC-8004 and x402 form a complete autonomous transaction loop. ERC-8004 answers “who you are” and “how trustworthy you are” through onchain identity and reputation, while x402 handles “how agents pay each other” via HTTP-native micropayments. The identity layer and payment layer are both ready. The namespace is not.
The parallel to DNS is not accidental. The x402 Foundation treats x402 “not as a product, but as a foundational internet primitive, much like DNS or TLS.” DNS resolved the problem of human-readable addressing for the first web. Onchain TLDs extend that logic to sovereign, brand-controlled namespaces that agents can resolve without trusting a middleman. A portfolio.animoca SLD would be a subdomain of a brand-controlled TLD, resolvable by any compliant agent, with data integrity guaranteed by the chain, not by a PDF watermark. As one observer put it: “Payments are the ‘how’ of agentic commerce, but identity is the ‘who.’” By integrating identity with the x402 protocol, developers can have “a complete trust stack: a way for agents to pay for what they need and a way for platforms to verify there is a real human behind the wallet.” Portfolio.animoca is the institutional version of that trust stack. No SLD map currently resolves to it.
The firm invested in over 70 projects across 20 different sectors in 2024, from AI and decentralized finance sectors to infrastructure projects — including 0G Labs, Cookie 3, FLock.io, MyShell, and Talus. In 2024, the company devoted resources to the AI sector by investing in the liquid tokens of AI-themed projects and startups such as Virtuals, ai16z, Aixbt, Griffain, and HeyAnon. Many of these AI-native portfolio companies are themselves building or using autonomous agent infrastructure. Some are deploying x402-compatible systems. Their own backer does not have a verified onchain endpoint that an agent can query to confirm the relationship. The irony is structural, not incidental.
Animoca Brands’ most recent year-end financial report shows a shift in the company’s focus, with the Web3 giant reporting that its Digital Assets Advisory has edged out its traditional revenue source. That shift is already reflected in the Ava Labs deal: deploy capital, provide advisory, facilitate integrations. That is a financial services motion, not a gaming studio motion. Another signal to watch is whether Animoca begins directing its portfolio companies toward Avalanche. Until those signals appear, this is still more about positioning than proven outcomes. The same logic applies to the namespace. The intent to operate as an institutional-grade Web3 infrastructure firm is evident in the filings, the licensing, the Nasdaq merger, the Dubai office. What is not evident is a machine-readable layer that makes that intent queryable without a human in the loop.
Animoca Brands just aligned itself with one of the fastest-growing institutional blockchain networks on the planet. It has a $165M advisory business that is now its largest revenue segment. It is pursuing a public listing. It holds positions in over 600 companies. It has licensed operations in the UAE. And somewhere in the world, an AI agent is trying to figure out what Animoca actually owns today — and finding nothing at portfolio.animoca but silence.
The author holds onchain positions related to this topic. This post reflects independent editorial judgment.