Animoca's Abu Dhabi Arm Clears ADGM to Run a Collective Fund

Animoca Asset Management (AD) Limited holds a Financial Services Permission from the regulator of Abu Dhabi Global Market, the emirate's financial free zone, and may now manage a collective investment fund in or from it. The subsidiary of Animoca Brands announced the permission on Monday. Two outlets date it to 13 October, reading the public register. No fund name, target size, investor base or launch date has been disclosed. The company put no number on the business the permission opens.

A year between the two approvals

Cointelegraph and Blockhead both report an in-principle approval in November 2025, carrying conditions Animoca had to meet before it could run funds. Animoca's own release mentions none of that, so the reading of Monday's news as the final step is the outlets' and not the company's. Blockhead gives the permission number as 250097, alone among the three accounts read here. Bitcoin Suisse took a comparable route when it won full ADGM authorisation earlier in the year.

The accounts also part on who the fund may serve. Cointelegraph says the permission covers non-retail clients, meaning money pooled from professional investors instead of the general public, and quotes the announcement as describing approval to manage funds for non-retail clients. The release read at this desk carries no such phrase and states the regulated activity with no client qualifier. Neither version confirms the other.

What the company said, and what it did not

Minh Do, senior executive officer and director of the Abu Dhabi subsidiary, framed the permission as a step in a regional build-out.

"Securing the Financial Services Permission from ADGM's FSRA is a critical milestone for our operations in the Middle East," Do said.

Blockhead renders the same line with "Animoca's operations" in place of "our". The primary wording is used here. Arvind Ramamurthy, ADGM's chief market development officer, said the expansion into fund management "strengthens the connections between institutional capital and digital assets". The release lists four ambitions around it: institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure, links between banks and decentralised networks, tokenized assets, and agentic AI inside Web3 environments. None carries a date or a figure.

The gap where a fund should be

A permission is not a product. What Animoca has is the right to manage a collective investment fund, and the company has named no fund. On the group's scale it says only that its portfolio runs to more than 600 companies and digital assets. Cointelegraph adds a line from a September investor update about moving "from a digital asset and Web3 operator into a regulated financial services institution", a document this desk did not open.

Blockhead supplies the only numbers for the zone itself, and they are the zone's and not Animoca's: assets under management up 54% year on year in the first half of 2026, with 190 fund and asset managers and 276 funds. That stands on one account. Nothing published on Monday sizes the Abu Dhabi business at all.

Licences in hand, a listing still not

Abu Dhabi is the second Gulf permission. Animoca took a VARA licence in Dubai in February, described by Blockhead as broker-dealer and investment services and by Cointelegraph as brokerage and investment management for institutional and qualified investors. The wordings differ. No licence number is attached by either. In Hong Kong the group is a shareholder in Anchorpoint, a joint venture with Standard Chartered and HKT pursuing a stablecoin licence, on Blockhead's single account.

The public listing is the piece that has not moved. Animoca and Currenc Group suspended their reverse merger on 22 September, citing the closing timeline and market conditions, with audited accounts still to finish; executive chairman Yat Siu said the company would keep looking for a route to the public market. Monday's announcement says nothing about any of that, which Blockhead notes. What the permission is worth will be readable only when a fund is named.