Animoca's Nasdaq deal offered Currenc holders 13.8% of their own value

Animoca Brands has suspended reverse merger talks with Currenc Group, the deal that would have put the Hong Kong digital asset investor on Nasdaq without an IPO. The companies said the timeframe did not align with their goals. The numbers underneath the deal say something more specific, and they were public the whole time.

The terms, as announced:

• Animoca holders would have owned 95% of the merged company; Currenc holders 5%.
• The deal targeted a valuation near $1bn, which puts $50m on that 5%.
• Currenc closed at $3.23 on about 112.28 million shares, a market value of $362.7m.

Those three lines do not reconcile. A 5% stake worth $50m under the deal belonged to shareholders whose stock the market was pricing at $362.7m, so the stock market valued the Currenc side at 7.25 times what the deal implied for it. Put the other way, Currenc holders were being asked to accept 13.8% of their own market value in the combined company. A gap that size does not get closed by a scheduling change.

The market never priced it

The market reaction is the second tell. News that a merger handing away 95% had collapsed moved Currenc shares 0.93% lower after hours, following a 1.25% gain during the session. A deal genuinely priced into a stock does not leave on a rounding error. It had not been priced in, which is consistent with a market that had already looked at the same arithmetic.

“Continue to pursue optimal routes.”

— Yat Siu, Animoca Brands, quoted by CoinDesk

Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, on the listing plan

Timing frames the rest. Talks opened in early November 2025 and ran 323 days. The parties had targeted a close in the third quarter of 2026, which ends in eight days, with a long stop at the end of December that could be extended a further six months. Suspending with the target quarter almost over and the backstop still ten months away is a choice, not a deadline.

Access is not the constraint

A reverse merger is the purchase of a listing, not of a business, and the 95/5 split states that openly. What makes this one worth recording is that both companies kept the structure public for a year while the shell's share count grew 61.08%. Animoca, whose portfolio spans DeFi, AI and NFTs, says it remains committed to a major listing venue, and the routes available to it have widened this month: the SEC opened a path for tokenized stocks, and X now routes retail orders from a timeline. Access is not the constraint.

Price is. US equity funds shed $31.44bn in a single week this month, and the money leaving them did not arrive anywhere visible. A company seeking a public valuation near $1bn is asking that market for a number at a moment when it is not handing them out. Waiting is defensible. Calling it a timetable problem is the part worth noting.

Informational material, not investment advice. Deal terms are as announced by the companies and reported by CoinDesk; the valuation ratios are our own calculations from the reported share count and closing price.