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OAKLAND, California — When Sandy Carter stepped down this month as vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing unit, she announced in a LinkedIn post that she was joining a crypto technology company. Originally added a link for open positions.

He said that in two days, more than 350 people, mostly from the largest internet companies, had clicked the link to apply for jobs at Unstoppable Domains. Startup sells website addresses sitting on it blockchainThe distributed ledger system that underpins cryptocurrencies.

“This is a perfect storm,” said Miss Carter. “The momentum we’re seeing in this space is incredible.”

Ms. Carter is part of a wave of executives and engineers leaving their comfortable jobs at Google, Amazon, Apple, and other big tech companies—some of whom pay millions of dollars a year in compensation. – generation opportunity. They said the next big thing is crypto, a comprehensive definition that includes digital currencies like Bitcoin and products based on the blockchain, such as immutable tokens or NFTs.

Silicon Valley is now filled with stories of people who apparently ride Ridiculous crypto investments like Dogecoin, a digital coin based on a dog meme to life-changing wealth. Bitcoin has increased by about 60 percent this yearEther, the cryptocurrency linked to the Ethereum blockchain, has increased more than five times in value.

But beyond this speculative frenzy, a growing group of the tech industry’s best and brightest sees a moment of transformation that occurs every few decades and rewards those who spot seismic change before the rest of the world does. With crypto, they see historical parallels to how the personal computer and internet were once ridiculed, only to upset the status quo and create the next generation of billionaires.

Investors flocked, too. According to PitchBook, a firm that tracks private investments, they’ve spent more than $28 billion on global crypto and blockchain startups this year, four times more than in 2020. More than $3 billion gone to NFT companies alone.

“There’s a huge sucking noise coming from crypto,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of search engine startup Neeva and a former Google executive who competes with crypto companies for talent. “It’s a bit like the 1990s and the rebirth of the internet. So early, so chaotic and so full of opportunity.”

Skeptics said that the crypto, which has also been renamed the less prominent Web3, may not be any different from past speculative bubbles such as subprime mortgages or the tulip mania of the 17th century. Much of the craze, they said, was driven by the desire to get rich quickly by trading an underlying asset class. internet jokes.

But growing ranks of true believers said that crypto can change the world by creating it. a more decentralized internet is not controlled by a handful of companies. While such possibilities have existed since Bitcoin emerged in 2009, only crypto products such as NFTs went mainstream this year. This has accelerated the exit from Big Tech companies to the crypto world.

This month, Lyft CFO Brian Roberts, Leaves ride-hailing company to join OpenSea, a popular crypto startup. “I’ve seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be aware when something this big comes along,” he said in an email. “We’re on day one in terms of NFTs and their impact.”

(John Zimmer, co-founder of Lyft, Best wishes to Mr Roberts in his new attempt.)

Last month, Jack Dorsey Twitter’s CEO resigns to spend more time on cryptocurrency and Web3 efforts at his other company, Square. As a nod to blockchain, Mr. Dorsey also Renamed Block to Square. He highlighted the change by renewing the photo portraits of Block’s executives as block-headed avatars, and developed a software tool so others can create their own block-headed avatars.

And David Marcus, head of cryptocurrency efforts at Facebook’s parent company Meta, said: announced his departure until the end of the year to follow the “entrepreneur DNA”. Mr. Marcus, 48, plans to work on his own cryptocurrency project, two people with knowledge of his plans said.

As a Meta spokesperson did, Mr. Marcus declined to comment.

Crypto’s lure is so irresistible that some of the biggest tech companies are scrambling to retain their employees. At Google, concerns about retention, including not losing employees to crypto companies, have become so urgent that the issue has become part of the weekly executive agenda, discussed every Monday by the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, and his senior aides. knowledge of the discussions.

They said the company has also begun offering additional stock grants to employees in parts of the company that appear to be eligible for poaching. Google declined to comment.

Unlike Meta, which has embraced crypto, Google has been reluctant to take action. But Googlers saw crypto opportunities firsthand when vice president Surojit Chatterjee left the company last year to become chief product officer of Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

When Coinbase goes public In April, Mr. Chatterjee’s stake in the company rose more than $600 million worth. He worked there for only 14 months.

Such a large amount of crypto wealth has created a fear of loss, or FOMO, among many technologists, especially those whose friends bought Bitcoin a few years ago and are now very wealthy.

“In 2017 or so, people were mostly there for the investment opportunity,” said Evan Cheng, co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs, which focuses on building blockchain infrastructure projects. “Now people who actually want to build things.”

Mr. Cheng, 50, left the company formerly known as Facebook in September after six years and most recently worked on crypto startup Novi. About 80 percent of Mysten Labs’ roughly 20 employees, most of them scattered across San Francisco, London, New York and elsewhere, come from tech companies like Facebook, Google and Netflix.

Companies focusing on blockchain technologies have proliferated, including cryptocurrency exchanges like Bitpanda, Gemini, and CoinList; NFT and art collecting companies such as OpenSea and Dapper Labs; and infrastructure companies like Dfinity and Alchemy.

Some of the brain drain has also been spurred by concerns about the control and domination of the biggest tech companies by their own employees. Many joined Google, Facebook and others to create something new, but faced backlash from bureaucracy and working at giants.

Those who leave behind a Big Tech paycheck don’t have to wait for payouts in a crypto startup as much as those in traditional tech start-ups.

While employees often accept a smaller salary at tech start-ups in hopes that the company’s stock will one day skyrocket, workers in crypto start-ups are given “liquidity” or cash out much earlier. Often they can do this in the form of trading their company’s cryptocurrencies, according to Dan McCarthy, who works for investment firm Paradigm. written about the potential pros of crypto startups for tech workers.

In some cases, crypto start-ups offer compensation packages on par with the biggest tech firms for how easily their employees can cash out their company’s “tokens” – or the underlying cryptocurrency that supports the start-up.

“You don’t have to go and get a third of your big tech salary anymore because most of these companies are very well-capitalized,” Mr. Cheng said.

Former vice president of Amazon, Ms. Carter, said that people are interested in working at crypto companies for more than just money. Some were drawn to the values ​​of Web3 trying to decentralize power and decision making. An alternative to how Google and Facebook dominate the internet by sucking personal data from users to sell targeted ads.

Ms. Carter said there was a lot of interest in Web3 on Amazon, but she didn’t hire her former colleagues there because she agreed not to.

So, will the exit of technology workers to crypto continue?

“The answer is absolutely yes,” he said. “Time is perfect to jump on.”