FTX’s Amy Wu on Big Blockchain Bets, GameFi

Amy Wu is taking the lead on FTX’s $2 billion enterprise operation, as effectively working the acquisitions and gaming divisions.
She explains how the corporate is making bets on a cross blockchain future.
And he or she talks about why players have to look past the area of interest space of play-to-earn video games in crypto.

Firstly of this yr, enterprise capitalist Amy Wu made a daring transfer into the male-dominated crypto world. This wasn’t her first foray into an space that boasted few ladies amongst its ranks.

“I’ve had a lifetime of working in male-dominated industries in tech, but in addition in media and sports activities after I was at Discovery, after which after all, in gaming as effectively and now crypto,” Wu stated in a current interview with Insider.

Crypto is one other business that is fairly removed from gender parity, Wu stated. It takes lots of management to make that change, she added.

“I really feel lucky each day that I get to work with a CEO like Sam Bankman-Fried, who believes in my functionality of main a $2 billion-dollar fund for him,” Wu stated.  “I feel that it takes extra. I feel CEOs like Sam to essentially assist carry extra gender parity into crypto.”

Bankman-Fried is likely one of the crypto world’s main lights. He based FTX simply three years in the past, aged 27, and have become the world’s youngest billionaire. An inveterate multitasker with a low boredom threshold, he famously gets by on just four hours’ of sleep. 

Wu is hoping to make an analogous impression as she takes on the management position for FTX’s monster multi-stage $2 billion venture operation, in addition to in working the agency’s gaming and M&A models.

Gaming is likely one of the areas in crypto the place ladies might have a a lot greater impression, Wu stated. It is also an space she targeted on in her previous role at Lightspeed Ventures.

“Girls have been the most important contributors to the expansion of the gaming business of the final 5 years as a result of cellular gaming is definitely predominantly ladies,” Wu stated.  “And cellular gaming at this time is 60% of the entire gaming industry and the quickest rising. It is a $200+ billion income business.”

Girls creators are additionally typically higher represented within the NFT world than within the broader crypto ecosystem. Wu believes this all the way down to the truth that ladies are sometimes cultural tastemakers.

“NFTs [are] actually the most important pull of [a] mainstream viewers into crypto,” Wu stated. “That’s not a coincidence.”

Creating that very same lure in mainstream players is perhaps trickier. The gaming community has been resistant to the emergence of crypto-based games the place the main focus is usually on spending and speculating over precise gameplay.

Wu highlights that GameFi is just one subset of crypto gaming. She stated these forms of video games are geared in direction of crypto native customers and crypto whales —people with greater than $1 million of cryptocurrency of their pockets.

The target market for these video games is definitely very small, however they create excessive lifetime worth (LTV), Wu stated.

The opposite aspect of the combination of crypto into gaming is simply video games that may combine NFTs and tokenized currencies into the gameplay to additional incentivize gamers.

“Many of the gamers most likely do not care,” Wu stated. ” They do not even understand they’re holding NFTs within the success case of an important sport made sooner or later with blockchain parts.”

One firm pulling this off is Com2uS, one of many largest publicly traded corporations in Korea, Wu stated. The corporate makes “Summoners’ Conflict”, one of many largest massively multi-player on-line video games that boasts over 50 million downloads.

 “They’re an instance of a gaming firm that’s actually considerate round deeply embedding what’s a token, that they’ve launched with us, like into a number of video games that they are launching,” Wu stated.

Infrastructure bets

The investments aren’t all targeted on gaming and client initiatives, nonetheless.

FTX is closely invested within the infrastructure aspect of digital belongings, significantly layer one and layer two initiatives.

Within the final yr, FTX has develop into intently related to the solana community, however the firm’s work goes past only one blockchain, Wu stated.

The ventures workforce is investing in and offering

liquidity to many primitive protocols.

The significance and alternatives that interoperability and cross-chain capabilities provide will not be misplaced on buyers, Wu stated.

Growing a blockchain straight is difficult. Innovators who’re serving to to unravel this downside with tooling and knowledge options are one essentially the most thrilling areas during which to speculate, she stated.

Wu highlights the recent launch of LayerZero on Stargate as an attention-grabbing instance. The expertise ought to enable users to swap and buy tokens across different blockchains.

However along with that LayerZero can be launching infrastructure to assist growth groups construct purposes throughout chains, Wu stated.

Wormhole, a bridge between totally different blockchains, that was created by solana can be one other infrastructure wager the place lots of innovation is going on, Wu stated.

“Infrastructure is a really various and nuanced class that we’re spending lots of our time in,” Wu stated.

When it comes to present blockchains, the ventures workforce are constructing shut relationships with NEAR (NEAR), Avalanche (AVAX) and Polygon (MATIC), Wu stated.

On the layer two aspect, that are scaling options for present blockchains, the main focus is on the 2 key gamers Arbitrum and Starkware, she added.