- Amy Wu is taking the lead on FTX’s $2 billion venture operation, as well running the acquisitions and gaming divisions.
- She explains how the company is making bets on a cross blockchain future.
- And she talks about why gamers need to look beyond the niche area of play-to-earn games in crypto.
At the start of this year, venture capitalist Amy Wu made a bold move into the male-dominated crypto world. This wasn’t her first foray into an area that boasted few women among its ranks.
“I’ve had a lifetime of working in male-dominated industries in tech, but also in media and sports when I was at Discovery, and then of course, in gaming as well and now crypto,” Wu said in a recent interview with Insider.
Crypto is another industry that’s pretty far from gender parity, Wu said. It takes a lot of leadership to make that change, she added.
“I feel fortunate every day that I get to work with a CEO like Sam Bankman-Fried, who believes in my capability of leading a $2 billion-dollar fund for him,” Wu said. “I think that it takes more. I think CEOs like Sam to really help bring more gender parity into crypto.”
Bankman-Fried is one of the crypto world’s leading lights. He founded FTX just three years ago, aged 27, and became 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 a similar impact as she takes on the leadership role for FTX’s monster multi-stage $2 billion venture operation, as well as in running the firm’s gaming and M&A units.
Gaming is one of the areas in crypto where women could have a much bigger impact, Wu said. It’s also an area she focused on in her previous role at Lightspeed Ventures.
“Women were the biggest contributors to the growth of the gaming industry of the last five years because mobile gaming is actually predominantly women,” Wu said. “And mobile gaming today is 60% of the entire gaming industry and the fastest growing. It’s a $200+ billion revenue industry.”
Women creators are also often better represented in the NFT world than in the broader crypto ecosystem. Wu believes this down to the fact that women are often cultural tastemakers.
“NFTs [are] literally the biggest pull of [a] mainstream audience into crypto,” Wu said. “That is not a coincidence.”
Creating that same lure in mainstream gamers might be trickier. The gaming community has been resistant to the emergence of crypto-based games where the focus is often on spending and speculating over actual gameplay.
Wu highlights that GameFi is only one subset of crypto gaming. She said those types of games are geared towards crypto native users and crypto whales —individuals with more than $1 million of cryptocurrency in their wallet.
The target audience for those games is actually very small, but they bring high lifetime value (LTV), Wu said.
The other side of the integration of crypto into gaming is just games that will integrate NFTs and tokenized currencies into the gameplay to further incentivize players.
“Most of the players probably don’t care,” Wu said. ” They don’t even realize they’re holding NFTs in the success case of a great game made in the future with blockchain elements.”
One company pulling this off is Com2uS, one of the largest publicly traded companies in Korea, Wu said. The company makes “Summoners’ War”, one of the largest massively multi-player online games that boasts over 50 million downloads.
“They’re an example of a gaming company that is really thoughtful around deeply embedding what is a token, that they’ve launched with us, like into multiple games that they’re launching,” Wu said.
Infrastructure bets
The investments aren’t all focused on gaming and consumer projects, however.
FTX is heavily invested in the infrastructure side of digital assets, particularly layer one and layer two projects.
In the last year, FTX has become closely associated with the solana network, but the company’s work goes beyond just one blockchain, Wu said.
The ventures team is investing in and providing
liquidity
to many primitive protocols.
The importance and opportunities that interoperability and cross-chain capabilities offer is not lost on investors, Wu said.
Developing a blockchain directly is challenging. Innovators who are helping to solve this problem with tooling and data solutions are one the most exciting areas in which to invest, she said.
Wu highlights the recent launch of LayerZero on Stargate as an interesting example. The technology should enable users to swap and buy tokens across different blockchains.
But in addition to that LayerZero is also launching infrastructure to help development teams build applications across chains, Wu said.
Wormhole, a bridge between different blockchains, that was created by solana is also another infrastructure bet where a lot of innovation is occurring, Wu said.
“Infrastructure is a very diverse and nuanced category that we’re spending a lot of our time in,” Wu said.
In terms of existing blockchains, the ventures team are building close relationships with NEAR (NEAR), Avalanche (AVAX) and Polygon (MATIC), Wu said.
On the layer two side, which are scaling solutions for existing blockchains, the focus is on the two key players Arbitrum and Starkware, she added.