Animoca’s AllScale Move Brings Stablecoin Rails to More Than 600 Firms

Animoca Brands has made an undisclosed strategic investment in stablecoin payments provider AllScale, the two companies confirmed this week. The pair plan to explore global payments, settlement, and treasury services across Animoca’s more than 600 portfolio companies, alongside agentic commerce built on regulated stablecoins. AllScale, which supports more than 1.5 million registered wallets, will also develop payment systems for AI agents to transact autonomously within predefined limits.

The investment extends Animoca’s regulated stablecoin push two months after its Anchorpoint joint venture with Standard Chartered Bank Hong Kong and HKT received a Hong Kong Monetary Authority stablecoin issuer licence on 10 April 2026. Animoca co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu said: “We firmly believe that regulated stablecoins are the ideal bridge between traditional and on chain financial systems, and are perfectly positioned to serve as core payment rails for emerging agentic commerce.” Neither AllScale nor Animoca disclosed the size of the investment.

Animoca Adds AllScale to Its Stablecoin Stack

AllScale announced on its website on 25 June that it had received the strategic investment from Animoca Brands, the same week Animoca’s own site confirmed the deal. AllScale positions itself as the first self-custody stablecoin neobank, a category it claims no competitor occupies. The startup’s payment stack combines checkout, payroll, invoicing, and deposit and withdrawal settlement, all built on stablecoins like USDC and USDT. Animoca will explore rolling those tools across its more than 600 portfolio companies for cross-border payments, treasury operations, and settlement, according to the Animoca’s announcement of the AllScale investment. The pair will also study agentic payments together.

AllScale, founded in Hong Kong, builds non-custodial tools wrapped around stablecoin rails. Users hold their own keys via Account Abstraction and Passkeys, a design the company pitches as the opposite of Stripe, PayPal, or any custodial card network. The pitch is aimed at microbusinesses, freelancers, DAOs, and Web3 projects that need to pay people and get paid without depending on traditional banking. AllScale says its infrastructure settles instantly, charges no interchange fees, and runs automated cross-chain bridging so merchants can accept whatever stablecoin the customer sends.

Animoca Brands is one of crypto’s most prolific investors, with a portfolio that spans gaming, metaverse projects, and digital asset infrastructure across more than 600 companies. The firm, co-founded by Siu in 2014, hit a roughly $5.9 billion valuation at the 2022 peak, per Forbes. The AllScale deal follows Animoca’s recent funding program targeting developers building AI agent platforms. Siu’s framing of stablecoins as “perfectly positioned to serve as core payment rails for emerging agentic commerce” is the clearest read on where the company sees the next wave of demand. The deal, terms undisclosed, is structured to capture that demand across Animoca’s gaming and metaverse portfolio.

By the numbers:

• 1.5 million+ registered AllScale wallets (across the company’s consumer and enterprise products)
• 600+ companies in Animoca Brands’ portfolio (per the deal announcement)
• ~$5.9 billion Animoca Brands’ 2022 peak valuation (per Forbes)
• $5 million AllScale seed round (late 2025, YZi Labs led)
• Undisclosed investment amount (neither side revealed terms)

How AllScale Built a Self-Custody Stack

The term self-custody in this context means users hold the keys to their own funds rather than parking money with a payments processor. AllScale leans on Account Abstraction and Passkeys, the cryptographic trick that swaps out seed phrases for the same kind of biometric login a phone already supports. That choice puts the company at the opposite end of the spectrum from Stripe and PayPal, which act as custodians until they choose to release a merchant’s funds. The product targets Web3-native microbusinesses, freelancers, DAOs, and projects that want to pay people and accept payment without opening a bank account. AllScale’s checkout settles in seconds on-chain, with no interchange fees and no chargeback exposure, since on-chain transactions are final. Automated know-your-transaction monitoring screens every payment, a feature the company says removes the manual review overhead typical of legacy processors. The stack runs on stablecoin rails, with USDC and USDT as the default settlement currencies.

AllScale’s payment systems have been integrated with BNB Chain, giving the company access to one of the more active Layer 1 ecosystems for everyday stablecoin transactions. In late 2025, the company closed a $5 million seed funding round led by YZi Labs, with participation from Informed Ventures and the Aptos Foundation, according to cryptobriefing.com. That round funded AllScale’s stated goal of building the first self-custody stablecoin neobank for Web3-native businesses. The Animoca investment is the next phase, scaling distribution and layering on AI-driven payment capabilities that AllScale had not yet shipped on its own. Animoca’s portfolio, with hundreds of consumer apps, games, and Web3 services, gives AllScale an immediate customer pipeline that a $5 million seed-stage startup could not build alone.

• Checkout: stablecoin payment checkout accepting USDC, USDT, and other stablecoins
• Payroll: cross-border team payments in stablecoins
• Invoicing: stablecoin-native billing and collections
• Deposit and withdrawal settlement: automated cross-chain bridging and swap

The Anchorpoint Licence Already Cleared a Path

Animoca already had skin in the regulated stablecoin game well before AllScale. On 10 April 2026, the company’s Anchorpoint joint venture with Standard Chartered Bank Hong Kong and HKT became one of two first recipients of a stablecoin issuer licence from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. The grant came under Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance, which took effect on 1 August 2025 and sets strict reserve, segregation, and disclosure rules for any fiat-referenced token offered to the public. Standard Chartered detailed the grant in Anchorpoint’s HKMA stablecoin licence grant on the same day.

Anchorpoint, a subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank Hong Kong, was established as a joint venture by SCBHK, HKT, and Animoca Brands in February 2025. The venture’s target is HKDAP, short for HKD At Par, a Hong Kong dollar-backed stablecoin designed for institutional and eventually retail use. Each HKDAP token will be backed 1:1 by high-quality, highly liquid HKD-denominated reserves, in line with Hong Kong’s rules for HKD-referenced tokens. Animoca’s group president Evan Auyang told the National Business Daily that a properly governed HKD stablecoin is “crucial for Hong Kong’s financial infrastructure” and a bridge for cross-border Web3 and trade. The licence cleared a phased rollout of HKDAP from the second quarter of 2026, with Anchorpoint adopting a business-to-business-to-consumer distribution model. Standard Chartered Group CEO Bill Winters called HKDAP “a powerful regulated medium of exchange” that would help “rewire” financial markets.

1. Early 2023: SCBHK, HKT, and Animoca Brands begin exploring stablecoins
2. 2024: Admitted to HKMA’s Stablecoin Issuer Sandbox
3. February 2025: Anchorpoint joint venture established
4. 1 August 2025: Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance took effect
5. 10 April 2026: Anchorpoint granted stablecoin issuer licence by HKMA
6. Q2 2026: Phased rollout of HKDAP begins

The AllScale deal extends the same logic Animoca has been building with Anchorpoint: regulated stablecoins as the bridge between traditional finance and on-chain settlement. With AllScale in the fold, Animoca can route payments, treasury operations, and settlement through its more than 600 portfolio companies without depending on the same banking rails its agent strategy is designed to bypass. Animoca’s recent activity has also touched equity tokenization, including a Republic’s tokenization of Animoca equity on Solana for retail buyers, one of the clearest signals that the company is positioning itself across both stablecoin and tokenization rails. The combination of Anchorpoint for licensed issuance, AllScale for payment distribution, and tokenized Animoca equity for capital markets is a much wider stablecoin footprint than the gaming-rooted brand typically gets credit for. For Siu’s larger bet on agentic commerce, having both a regulated issuer and a programmable payment stack is a meaningful operational step.

The investment terms remain undisclosed, leaving questions about Animoca’s stake, the valuation, and whether other investors joined the round. Animoca’s roughly $5.9 billion 2022 peak valuation, per Forbes, sits well above what most stablecoin-payments startups have commanded to date. AllScale had already raised a $5 million seed in late 2025 from YZi Labs, Informed Ventures, and the Aptos Foundation, giving the company real but modest capital before the Animoca investment.

Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance is one of the most prescriptive stablecoin frameworks globally, requiring 1:1 reserve backing, segregated assets, strict liquidity criteria, and ongoing disclosure. HSBC’s parallel issuer licence made Anchorpoint and the HSBC-linked entity the only first-batch recipients of HKD-referenced stablecoin licences. The HKMA had originally aimed to approve the first licences by March 2026 but missed that target, making the April authorisations a milestone. Singapore has pursued its own regime, while the EU has rolled out MiCA-style rules, leaving Hong Kong among the first to license a bank-linked stablecoin intended for broad use in payments, gaming, and finance.

Agentic Commerce Is the Bigger Prize

The consequential story underneath the AllScale deal is the one Siu keeps talking about: software, not people, will be the biggest future users of blockchain. In a Forbes interview published on 24 June 2026, Siu said he already runs 280 agents doing “all sorts of stuff,” including one that scans X for trending code repositories and checks whether they are real, and another that arbitrates grocery prices between supermarkets. He told the On The Margin podcast that some of his agents already trade on Hyperliquid and place bets on Polymarket. According to Yat Siu’s case for AI agents on blockchain, the limit is “your imagination.” Siu has bet, in interviews and on podcast, that the agent fleet will dwarf the human one.

you’re gonna have anywhere from 50 to 100 billion agents minimum

Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, offered the forecast on the On The Margin podcast in June 2026. “Count a few agents per person across the online world,” he said. That count of 50 to 100 billion agents is the operating assumption behind the AllScale investment. An AI agent cannot walk into a bank and open a checking account, so any autonomous commerce layer needs wallets, and stablecoins are the most direct way to give one piece of software money it can hold and spend. AllScale’s self-custody architecture, with predefined spending limits, fits that brief. Concordium chief growth officer Varun Kabra told the same podcast that “we’re probably six to twelve months away” before agent transactions overtake human ones, in his view. The wider payment industry is moving in the same direction, as shown by how AI shopping agents are reshaping payment wallet design.

Where Stablecoin Agent Payments Stand Today

Coinbase’s x402 protocol has the most measurable traction to date. It counted roughly 69,000 active AI agents and more than 165 million transactions as of April 2026, per Forbes, with Stripe, Visa, Circle, and Cloudflare among its backers. That scale puts x402 ahead of every other agent-payment rail now in public beta.

Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines, launched in June 2026, has signed up more than 30 partners including Coinbase and Adyen, an attempt to bring traditional card network muscle into the agent economy. Visa rolled out its Trusted Agent Protocol in late 2025, well before Mastercard’s product arrived. Skyfire, founded by former Ripple executives, raised $9.5 million from Coinbase Ventures and a16z to give agents USDC wallets, with no retail customer yet. The four players compared below are now the clearest picture of how agent-payment infrastructure is taking shape.

For corporate treasury teams, the broader stablecoin settlement trend is already reaching APAC. Xweave’s stablecoin settlement for APAC treasuries is one example, plugging Solana into cross-border settlement across five currencies and giving working finance teams the same kind of programmable money AllScale is pitching to AI agents. The race is no longer about whether regulated stablecoins can carry payments, since the rails are live. The open question is whether demand from agents, microbusinesses, and treasuries arrives fast enough to match the capital being deployed. Animoca’s bet is a clear vote that it will.

Siu’s 50 to 100 billion agent forecast, the figure he offers on the On The Margin podcast, anchors the bullish case for the deal. That number is a forecast, not a count, and there is no live measurement of agent populations today. Real-world demand for stablecoin bill payments, agent-to-merchant checkout, or autonomous treasury management remains thin. The investment is structured to be ready if and when those use cases arrive, with distribution in place but no guarantee the market shows up on the timeline Animoca is betting on.

Why Skeptics Still Doubt the Approach

Not everyone is convinced. Ron Shultz, who runs bill pay at ACI Worldwide, challenged the thesis directly on the On The Margin podcast. “I challenge you or anyone else, go find me 10 people who want to use a stablecoin to make a bill payment and explain to me why,” Shultz said. The Forbes write-up of the conversation frames his challenge as the central unresolved question: demand for agent-to-business stablecoin payments is still unproven. Siu’s reply, that opting out “is no different than saying I don’t want to be on the internet,” does not settle the immediate self-custody execution risk. The bet is large, the timeline is short, and the underlying agent population is forecast rather than counted.

Execution risk is the second-order problem. Building non-custodial payment tools that match the user experience of Stripe, PayPal, or any consumer fintech is genuinely hard engineering, as cryptobriefing.com noted when the Animoca deal was first reported. Regulatory uncertainty around stablecoins, particularly in the US and EU, adds another layer of complexity, since the same Animoca strategy has to satisfy regimes with very different reserve, disclosure, and licensing rules. The undisclosed investment amount also leaves AllScale’s runway and Animoca’s strategic commitment to the project opaque. None of that invalidates the wager, but it sets the terms under which the next stretch of execution will be judged. The risk is that the agent economy arrives on a longer timeline than the capital deployed into these rails.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Stablecoin and crypto investments carry significant risk, including regulatory uncertainty and the potential for total loss of capital. Consult a qualified financial professional before making investment decisions. Figures and statements are accurate as of publication.