Samson Mow is the CEO of game development company Pixelmatic, founded in 2011 with peers from Activision Blizzard, Relic and Electronic Arts. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Samson Mow is Canadian-Chinese and an alumnus of Simon Fraser University, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
Pixelmatic’s development center is based in Shanghai with a support team in Vancouver. Mow is also the chief strategy officer of blockchain tech provider Blockstream, which provides a wide range of services to companies deploying new blockchain-based networks.
Mow was previously the chief operating officer of BTCC, one of the largest mining pools and Bitcoin exchanges globally. He was in charge of managing the exchange and mining pool business units and overseeing the company’s daily operations.
Mow also served as the director of production and executive producer at Ubisoft, leading the company’s expansion of web, social and mobile games into the Asian market. He spearheaded the development of the widely-successful social game, The Smurfs & Co., which reached over 10 million users organically.
Before Ubisoft, Mow worked as the head of business development and operations at Sitemasher, winner of the 2008 Blue Sky Innovation Excellence Award from Microsoft. The company was later acquired by Salesforce.com and renamed Site.com.
Early 2021 saw the game trailer release of Pixelmatic’s MMO strategy game, Infinite Fleet, which Mow created. The highly anticipated game is currently under development, led by a team of veteran game developers who have worked on other popular games. “The launch of our alpha is a big step in the development of Infinite Fleet,” Mow said. The game’s public fundraising round has raised $7.2 million as of April 2021.
In 2021, Samson Mow, alongside other prominent figures in the crypto space, led a $1.8 million Series A fundraiser for Monochrome to raise money to develop new Bitcoin products and other digital assets.
Mow has also been quite vocal on Twitter this year, mainly voicing his thoughts on Bitcoin and Blockstream. It’s a small wonder, as Blockstream has been on a roll with its security token offering for Bitcoin mining, raising a total of $36 million in October.
Earlier this year, Blockstream was also publicly backed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey with a bulk investment of $5 million. In August, it crossed the threshold of crypto unicorn status, reaching a $3.2 billion valuation after receiving another $210 million in investments from United Kingdom-based private equity firm Baillie Gifford and iFinex, the Hong Kong-based operator of Bitfinex.
Samson Mow is involved in El Salvador’s plans to build a “Bitcoin City” at the base of the Conchagua volcano. The plan is to use geothermal energy from the volcano to power Bitcoin mining in the city, and Bitcoin will be used to fund the said project.
El Salvador is the first country to use Bitcoin as legal tender. There are also plans to issue a Bitcoin bond in 2022, with Mow at the helm of the project. If successful, it will allow El Salvador to sell Bitcoin-backed bonds through blockchain without going through Wall Street banks and other international institutions.
Mow and Blockstream are official advisors on the bond’s design, and the bond will be issued with sidechain-based settlement network Liquid, also created by Blockstream. On the project, Mow said that “the overarching feeling was one of very strong cohesion and direction.” With the El Salvador Bitcoin Bond project, as well as Blockstream’s newfound crypto unicorn status, 2022 is expected to be another busy year for Mow.
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