Crypto firms poach Big Tech talent to overhaul the internet

26 Feb, 2022 16:11 / Updated 3 years ago
Facebook and Amazon are now less attractive than Web3 and blockchain

High-profile staff members are leaving Big Tech giants to join the crypto world and develop the next “big thing” in tech — Web3, CNBC has reported, saying that IT giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are losing their executives and developers to blockchain platforms such as Polygon and Circle.

Crypto companies have been working to overhaul the World Wide Web and introduce what’s been dubbed Web3 – a new iteration of the internet, which would be based on blockchain technology instead of centralized platforms run by a small group of companies sometimes referred to as ‘Big Tech’.

We are unquestionably seeing some of the best and brightest of Silicon Valley, or tech, move over to crypto,” Scott Fletcher, the co-founder of Intersection Growth Partners, a firm that has pulled several “very senior folks” out from Amazon, Meta, and Google, told Insider.

Last month, the chief marketing officer of Meta’s digital wallet project, Novi, moved to the blockchain payments company Circle; the former general manager of Amazon’s AWS Edge Services became the chief technology officer of the crypto exchange Gemini, and Uber’s ex-director of corporate development joined the NFT marketplace OpenSea.

It’s the rapid growth of blockchain technology that attracts tech executives, CNBC quotes recruiters as saying. US gaming executive Ryan Wyatt, who launched YouTube Gaming in 2014 and joined Polygon Technology as CEO last month, described the current stage of blockchain development as “early” and “exciting.” Polygon Technology is a decentralized Ethereum scaling platform that “believes in Web3 for all.”

Many are seeing crypto and Web3 as the future of the tech industry, Alex Bouaziz from payroll software firm Deel told CNBC, adding that the new technology is attractive “in the same way that Facebook and Amazon were attractive in the past.”

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