Jeffrey Haas, former senior vice president of international strategy at DraftKings, has been appointed chief revenue officer (CRO) of blockchain technology and media company Pink.gg.
Pink.gg owns and operates the NFT marketplace AtomicHub.io, which describes itself as the largest NFT marketplace in the world by daily transaction volume, with more than 50k sales per day and more than $500m in NFTs sold to date.
As Pink.gg’s first CRO, Haas is tasked with growing the business through strategic initiatives and partnerships, and said he expects the role to be “a fun, fascinating and educational ride”.
Haas left DraftKings in June after seven years with the company.
He had joined DraftKings in August 2015 in the role of chief international officer and remained in the position until May 2020 when he was promoted to SVP overseeing DraftKings’ international strategy.
From March 2021 until May 2022, Haas also served as sector specialist in gaming and crypto for Drive by DraftKings, a Boston-based multi-stage venture capital firm investing in SportsTech and entertainment.
Writing on LinkedIn, Haas said that earlier this year he met Pink.gg founders Jona Wilmsmann and Fabian Emilius who impressed him with “their product and technology acumen, sincerity and vision.”
“Their story is a rare European take on the Silicon Valley founder origin myth: two friends who dropped out of the Technical University of Munich to build something cool, which grew and grew and grew,” he said.
“A few years ago, they set out to build a blockchain game, but first needed to build an EOSIO smart contract for NFT marketplaces – so they had a foundation to build upon.
Pink.gg CRO Jeffrey Haas: “Their story is a rare European take on the Silicon Valley founder origin myth: two friends who dropped out of the Technical University of Munich to build something cool, which grew and grew and grew.”
“They created AtomicAssets, an open source NFT standard, and then the AtomicMarket, a shared-liquidity NFT market smart contract.”
Since then, AtomicHub has processed more than $500m in NFT transactions.
This is the result of its focus on low-cost, high-volume game items, collectibles and creative arts – NFTs that are used, collected and traded every day around the world, according to Haas.
Commenting on the future of the NFT industry, he said: “We are still at the beginning of a movement that will fundamentally change how games are played online,” and highlighted that “it’s a contrarian perspective for me to jump into an industry where media headlines two weeks ago shouted that NFT trading is reportedly down 99% (!!!) since May.
“Except … the media headlines are wrong. Or at least wrong when it comes to our business.”
Haas said he has done his homework and invested tremendous time, energy and other resources into the NFT community over the last five years – “mostly for intellectual reasons, to keep up with the cultural zeitgeist, and nominally for financial speculation.
“I had some LOLs, wins and losses along the way, but my best pick so far was connecting with Pink.gg,” he added.
In addition to his role at DraftKings, Haas got involved with crypto exchange CoinSmart, initially as a strategic adviser, from January 2019 until November 2021, when he was elected as a board member, a role he still holds.
Before joining DraftKings, He spent more than six years in various roles at PokerStars and bwin.party digital entertainment.
Haas concluded: “I have spent the last month meeting stakeholders in our company and broader ecosystem. We are not just commiserating and toasting better days. We are speaking about vision, roadmap, underlying trends and actually looking at the data.”