Amy Wu heads FTX’s $2 billion venture operation. He shares their big bets for a cross-chain future and explains why GameFi altcoin projects will become a niche category for crypto whales.
End male domination in crypto!
Earlier this year, venture capitalist Amy Wu took a bold step into the male-dominated crypto world. This was not his first step into a region with few women in its ranks. “I have worked in male-dominated industries in tech for a lifetime, but also in media and sports when I was at Discovery, and then of course gaming and now crypto,” Wu says.
“I feel lucky every day to work with a CEO like Sam Bankman-Fried who believes in my ability to lead a $2 billion fund for him,” says Amy Wu, CEOs like Sam are more committed to crypto. It really helps bring gender equality. Sam Bankman-Fried is one of the leading lights in the crypto world. As we have mentioned in the news of Kriptokoin.com, he founded FTX just three years ago, at the age of 27, and became the youngest billionaire in the world. A man with a low boredom threshold who takes on too many tasks.
What is the meaning of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in Blockchain?
Amy Wu says gaming is one of the areas of crypto where women can have a much greater impact. It’s also an area he focused on in his previous role at Lightspeed Ventures. According to Wu, women have been the biggest contributors to the growth of the gaming industry over the past five years, because mobile gaming is actually predominantly made up of women. And today mobile games make up 60% of the entire gaming industry and are the fastest growing.
Female creators are often better represented in the NFT world than the broader crypto ecosystem. Wu attributes this to the fact that women often have cultural tastes. “NFTs are the mainstream audience’s biggest appeal to crypto,” Wu said. This is not a coincidence,” she says.
Wu emphasizes that GameFi is only a subset of crypto games. She notes that such games are aimed at crypto native users and crypto whales. Wu notes that the target audience for these games is actually very small, but they provide high lifetime value (LTV).
The other side of crypto integration into the game is games that will integrate NFTs and tokenized currencies into the game to further incentivize players. “Most of the players probably don’t care,” Wu says, adding:
They don’t even realize they’re holding NFTs in the event of a great future game with Blockchain elements being successful.
Wu says one company that has achieved this is Com2uS, one of the largest publicly traded companies in Korea. The company is making ‘Summoners’ War’, one of the biggest multiplayer online games boasting over 50 million downloads.
Promising altcoin projects
However, not all investments focus on gaming and consumer projects. FTX invests heavily in the infrastructure side of digital assets, particularly in tier one and tier two projects. Wu says that last year FTX became closely associated with the Solana network, but the company’s work has gone beyond just a blockchain.
The startup team invests in many primitive protocols and provides liquidity. Wu notes the importance of interoperability and cross-chain capabilities, and the opportunities for investors are not lost. Noting that it is difficult to develop a blockchain directly, Wu says that innovators helping to solve this problem with team and data solutions are one of the most exciting areas to invest in.
Wu highlights the recent launch of LayerZero on Stargate as an interesting example. The technology can enable users to exchange and purchase tokens between different Blockchains. But in addition to that, LayerZero is also launching the infrastructure to help development teams build cross-chain applications.
Wu states that wormhole, a bridge between different Blockchains created by Solana, is also another infrastructure bet where a lot of innovation is occurring, and he says that this is a very diverse and nuanced category in which we spend most of our time.
Wu explains that in terms of current altcoin projects, the startup team has established close relationships with NEAR (NEAR), Avalanche (AVAX), and Polygon (MATIC). According to Wu, in the second tier, which is scaling solutions for existing altcoin projects, the focus is on two key players Arbitrum and StarkWare.
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