Odaily News: This acquisition will enhance Bookit's ability to provide crypto institutions with native travel and experience booking platform access services, and strengthen the tokenization capabilities of on-chain points and interoperable rewards. As part of the acquisition of Spree.Finance, Animoca Brands will become a strategic investor and shareholder of Superlogic, and its Chief Operating Officer Minh Do will join the Superlogic advisory board. Following the completion of the acquisition, the Bookit ecosystem will add 27 white-label partners including Kraken, MetaMask, and EtherFi, and open a travel, retail, and VIP experience network covering over 2 million merchants to partners and end users.

Odaily News: Animoca Brands and Nasdaq-listed Currenc Group have mutually paused negotiations over a proposed reverse merger that was originally intended to take Animoca public. The merger plan was initially announced in November 2025. Animoca stated that it remains committed to relisting on a major exchange; its Chairman Yat Siu said that "corporate flexibility" is currently a higher priority than the merger.

Odaily News: Decentralized lending protocol Pencil Finance has completed the fundraising, disbursement, repayment tracking, and fund return of a $1 million student loan portfolio entirely on-chain, constituting a full financing and repayment cycle. Animoca Brands, Open Campus, and NewCampus provided funding for this portfolio in July 2025.Education financing company ErudiFi disbursed the majority of funds through student loans and tuition financing in Southeast Asia, covering markets such as Indonesia and the Philippines. The portfolio ran for 12 months, supporting more than 6,600 students across 118 schools and universities, with approximately 1,050 students receiving funding directly attributable to Pencil Finance.Investors were split into senior and subordinated tranches — the former receiving fixed returns with priority repayment rights, while the latter earned variable returns and bore the first losses from defaults. Pencil Finance claims this is the first fully on-chain student loan cycle, but did not disclose interest rates, investor yields, default rates, or blockchain transaction records. (Decrypt)

Odaily News Student loan real-world asset (RWA) protocol Pencil Finance has completed its first fully on-chain student loan cycle, deploying $1 million in capital to provide financing for approximately 6,600 students across Southeast Asia. After borrowers repay their funds, capital providers receive both principal and returns.The financing portfolio was funded in July 2025 by Animoca Brands, Open Campus, and New Campus, and is structured into senior tranches with fixed returns, as well as junior tranches that carry floating yields and bear first-loss risk. The loans cover 118 schools and universities across Southeast Asia, with approximately 1,050 students receiving direct funding. Among borrowers, women account for 50%, and 93% come from low-income families. (Cointelegraph)

Odaily News: Anchorpoint, a subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank, officially launched the first phase of its HKD stablecoin HKDAP issuance on Wednesday, opening test access to institutional distributors and professional investors. Anchorpoint, a joint venture established by Standard Chartered Bank with HKT and Animoca Brands, was granted a stablecoin issuance license by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority in April this year, making it one of the first institutions to receive such a license.

Odaily News: Dow Protocol has announced the completion of a $10.5 million seed funding round, co-led by MH Ventures and Mapleblock Capital, with participation from Animoca Brands, Arcane Group, Hashkey Chain, Essentia Partners, Quartet Group, and others. The project primarily serves merchants on leading global e-commerce platforms, offering working capital advances based on sales accounts receivable and real operational data, while settling via stablecoins and leveraging on-chain programmable terms to serve the broader e-commerce PayFi RWA advance scenario.

Odaily News: Vangrid has announced the completion of a $9 million seed funding round, with participation from HashKey, Borderless, Crypto.com Capital, Animoca Brands, Gate Labs, and Mapleblock Capital. The project primarily focuses on collecting spatial data—users earn rewards by collecting geolocation data via their smartphones. The data is then processed through 3D modeling and on-chain verification before being sold to Physical AI developers, including builders of robots, autonomous agents, and digital models. Vangrid stated that its network is built on Base and uses Ethereum Attestation Service to verify data batches. Its public explorer shows that nearly 100,000 verified collections and over 1,300 batch attestations have been completed.

Odaily reported that despite the continued downturn in the crypto market, Coinbase Ventures led the venture capital rankings in the first half of 2026 by completing 30 investments.Animoca Brands followed closely with 19 investments, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) completed 18 investments, and stablecoin issuer Tether participated in 15 deals.Over the past 12 months, Coinbase Ventures has completed 75 investments, continuing to lead the industry. Animoca Brands, YZi Labs, GSR, and a16z have completed 40, 39, 31, and 30 investments, respectively.However, the overall crypto fundraising market remains in a bear market cycle. In June, the total amount raised by crypto companies fell to $1.4 billion, a 63% decrease from $3.8 billion in April. The number of funding rounds also decreased from 89 in May to 61. In comparison, fundraising in April this year was only $698 million, hitting a new low in nearly two years.So far in July, the crypto industry has completed 12 financing rounds, totaling approximately $456 million.In terms of investment focus, Coinbase Ventures has primarily invested in payment protocols, DeFi, and infrastructure over the past six months. This includes participation in seven funding rounds for payment projects, four rounds for DeFi, and three rounds for infrastructure and Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization projects.By sector, the areas that attracted the most capital over the past year were DeFi, payments, and AI. DeFi projects completed 216 funding rounds, the payment sector completed 131 rounds, AI and crypto combination projects completed 128 rounds, and infrastructure projects secured 110 rounds.It is worth noting that while top institutions remain active, the overall number of market participants is decreasing. The number of independent investment institutions in June dropped to 242, nearly halved from 452 in October 2025, reflecting a concentration of capital in the bear market environment. (Cointelegraph)

Odaily reported that Animoca Brands has announced a strategic investment in AllScale, a stablecoin payment infrastructure company. The specific investment amount has not been disclosed yet. The partnership will explore the application of stablecoin payment solutions across Animoca Brands' portfolio of over 600 companies, and advance autonomous payment scenarios for AI Agents.

Odaily reported that AIPayWithCrypto has announced the completion of a $10 million first round of strategic financing, led by Animoca Brands, with participation from institutions including Titans Ventures, Castrum Capital, Adaverse, and M2M Capital.This funding round aims to realize the potential of integrating AI with payments, as well as to improve infrastructure to serve global users and AI economic entities.