Animoca Brands Invests in Catizen to Support Ecosystem Expansion

Animoca Brands has officially made a strategic investment in Telegram game Catizen to help the project achieve its expansion plans of creating an interconnected web3 gaming ecosystem.

Why Did Animoca Brands Invest in Catizen Now?

The leading web3 gaming investor is optimistic about Catizen’s ecosystem expansion plans revealed in a February 2025 roadmap, and coupled with the upcoming Bombie and Cattea airdrops, Animoca Brands believes there is potential growth here to make it a worthwhile project to invest in. Not only is the investment firm looking to support these plans financially, but also in consulting terms too by providing advice on important web3 and growth aspects such as ecosystem design, community management, and of course, tokenomics.

Director of Investments and Strategic Partnerships at Animoca Brands, David Ching, has revealed that the timing of their investment aligns with the game’s expansion, “including upcoming airdrops for Bombie and Cattea, and the 2025 roadmap unveiled in February,” in all of which they see “growth potential and accessibility, and that makes it a strategic fit for our portfolio.”

Explaining what makes Catizen a strategic fit for the company’s portfolio, Ching explains that the project’s uniqueness “lies in its focus on developer resources, a strong pipeline of mini-games, and an expanding ecosystem.” This is all said to help in expanding their reach to a wider audience while complementing their existing investments.

At one point, when there was way more hype over Telegram games, Catizen supposedly reached an impressive peak of 49 million players, but has since then dropped to sustaining more than 1 million monthly active users. Despite the massive drop off in numbers, that present player count is still an incredibly impressive number for any game, let alone for a web3-powered title that’s been up and running for more than a year since its March 2024 launch. By building an interconnected gaming ecosystem however, in which there is true interoperability that enables progress players make in one game to impact other titles in the ecosystem, Catizen could very well manage to solve retention issues and keep players continuously engaged in their blockchain gaming experiences, something other games on TON have failed to successfully achieve so far.

This backing is not the first time that the firm has invested into a Telegram game or ecosystem. Previously, we’ve seen Animoca acquire web3 gaming platform GAMEE, as well as support blockchain gaming projects such as Anichess, ENJOR, and more. Animoca has even published their own research TON’s blockchain boom last year. Overall, this new investment is part of the company’s wider strategy to support Telegram’s web3 gaming ecosystem, as they see long-term potential in TON (The Open Network) and its ability to integrate into the messaging app’s massive userbase, according to Ching:

“We see strong longevity in TON, given its integration with Telegram’s 1 billion users is still at an early stage and there is still a lot of potential to be realized. This positions TON as a major avenue for onboarding Web2 users into the Web3 ecosystem.”

What Is Catizen’s Bombie and Cattea Airdrops?

Bombie and Cattea are two new web3 games that have been integrated into Catizen’s ecosystem and rewards system. This means that players can now complete tasks for both games plus Catizen in the flagship title’s App Center. By doing so, players could earn more rewards as part of a second airdrop season, with the $BOMBIE airdrop scheduled for May 20th, the day of TGE. 

Bombie a post-apocalyptic 2D idle game in which you fight your way through various zombies and bosses while upgrading your character with better equipment and completing tasks to earn rewards. Cattea is a casual and interesting spin on Match 3 games in which you continuously attempt to match 3 of the same elements while preventing all your slots from filling up. You can play this for free 3 times a day and take on numerous tasks for potential token rewards. The exact date for the $CATTEA TGE is unknown at the time of writing.

Last month, GAMEE launched Moon Cards, a memecoin-powered TCG on Telegram. In November last year, we explored the Catizen craze in an interview with Mantle’s Head of Gaming and discussed an important question: are Telegram games the future of gaming?