Animoca Brands has made a strategic investment in AVAX and entered a partnership with Ava Labs to accelerate the Avalanche ecosystem's growth across Asia and the Middle East, the companies announced Thursday in a statement, without disclosing the size or terms of the investment.
The partnership combines capital deployment with hands-on advisory and business development support for projects building on Avalanche, with an initial focus on real-world asset tokenization, digital identity, and entertainment.
Animoca will contribute access to its institutional relationships and regional infrastructure — built across years of investment activity in Asia and, more recently, the Middle East, where it received a VASP licence from Dubai's VARA regulator in February — to help Avalanche-based projects reach commercial deployment faster.
The strategic logic for Ava Labs is straightforward. Avalanche has solid technology but has struggled to match the ecosystem scale of its main competitors. The total value of tokenized assets on Avalanche currently stands at approximately $1.3 billion, compared with roughly $15.7 billion on Ethereum, while its DeFi total value locked sits at around $1.9 billion — well below Ethereum's $136 billion and Solana's $18 billion. AVAX is currently ranked the 26th-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of around $4.1 billion, trading near $9.50 at the time of the announcement. The token is down sharply from its cycle highs.
What Animoca brings is distribution. With a portfolio spanning hundreds of Web3 companies and deep relationships with institutional and government counterparties across Asia, it offers Avalanche something that raw technology cannot buy: pathways to real-world deployment.
Animoca head of global strategic partnerships Omar Elassar pointed specifically to Avalanche's subnet architecture and EVM compatibility as making it "particularly well suited for sovereign and institutional deployments" — a deliberate pitch toward government-level and regulated enterprise use cases where Animoca has been increasingly active.
Ava Labs has already announced plans to open offices in Dubai and Singapore as regional operational hubs, giving the Animoca partnership an on-the-ground infrastructure to work alongside. The collaboration will also extend to Animoca's broader portfolio of companies, which Avalanche-based projects can tap for partnerships and distribution.
The deal reflects a broader pattern of layer-1 blockchains leaning on established Web3 operators to drive regional adoption rather than attempting to build local presence from scratch. For Animoca, adding an AVAX position continues a strategy of taking token stakes in ecosystems it actively supports — aligning financial incentives with advisory work in a way that has become a defining feature of its investment model.
