Robbie Ferguson

As children the two brothers spent many hours on RuneScape and League of Legends, to their parents’ annoyance; his elder brother, James Ferguson, said that this opened them up to how digital the world would become. Robbie Ferguson has said that he was an avid gamer as a child who put thousands of hours into his favourite games. He recalled logging into the RuneScape account he shared with his brother, losing his brother’s red dragon armor in the wilderness and, feeling bad, buying gold from a gold farm to replace it; the following day the account was banned. Cointelegraph Magazine writes that the ban, and his frustration with the arbitrary way mainstream game companies governed in-game economies, motivated his later move into blockchain game development.⁠[1][2]

He finished top of his school and graduated from high school with a perfect ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank).⁠[1][3]

He went on to the University of Sydney for a double degree in computer science and law, and met his future co-founder Alex Connolly there. The university’s alumni news item of 2019 gives his degrees as a Bachelor of Advanced Science (Computer Science) and a Bachelor of Laws, without years; Forbes Australia wrote in 2022 that he had begun the double degree but not finished it; and Blockworks’ speaker biography states that he left the computer science and law degree at the University of Sydney to start Immutable.⁠[4][1][3]

An AirTree Ventures article states that as a teenager he started, with his brother James Ferguson, a platform for betting on League of Legends.⁠[5]

Before founding Immutable he built an automated capital gains tax platform at KPMG, which was licensed to Australia’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.⁠[3]

Cointelegraph Magazine describes him as a software developer who was introduced to BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry in 2014 and whose interest grew in 2015 with the arrival of EthereumEthereumEthereum is an open, general-purpose smart contract blockchain that launched in 2015, and its native asset is ether (ETH). The project was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and advanced jointly by eight co-founders; the network now uses proof of stake and centers on the EVM, the account model, a rollup scaling roadmap, and the open EIP process.Open the full entry. Forbes Australia writes that in 2015 the brothers saw the potential of Ethereum, a blockchain platform that supports smart contracts. The AirTree Ventures article states that the brothers had been in crypto since 2014 and had weathered four bear markets since then.⁠[2][1][5]

Forbes Australia writes that after CryptoPunks launched in 2017 the brothers were inspired to build Etherbots, which the article calls the first multiplayer competitive blockchain game; the team worked on it for months, and it earned about “$1 million” in its first week.⁠[1]

SmartCompany wrote in 2018 that Etherbots was a blockchain-based strategy game in which players build robots, fight them and trade and buy robot parts, and that it sold “$1 million” worth of robot parts within two weeks. He called Etherbots “mostly a proof-of-concept” and said that they “leveraged that success” to build up the game and acquire seed funding.⁠[6]

Cointelegraph Magazine writes that Etherbots was his and his co-founders’ first Ethereum-powered game and taught them what belongs on-chain and what belongs off-chain.⁠[2]

In early 2018 he co-founded, with his brother James Ferguson and Alex Connolly, Fuel Games, a developer and publisher of NFT-based games that later became Immutable. Blockworks’ speaker biography states that he was 21 when he co-founded the company.⁠[6][1][2][3]

He recalled that a month into the business he brought in Alex Connolly, whom he had met at university, as a co-founder; Alex Connolly became Immutable’s chief technology officer.⁠[5]

On July 9, 2018 Fuel Games launched the card game Gods Unchained, which James Ferguson called the world’s first eSport to integrate blockchain; players compete to win in-game items and assets that can be used in later games or sold to other players. BlockchainGamer.biz gave his title at the time as COO of Fuel Bros.⁠[6][2][7]

At the same time the company announced a seed round of “$2.4 million” led by Continue Capital and Nirvana Capital, with Sora Ventures and the US digital currency exchange CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry taking part. The brothers recalled that the round was oversubscribed within two days of their arriving in New York for Blockchain Week, and said that they had sought out Coinbase partly for legitimacy and to make onboarding easier.⁠[6][7]

SmartCompany wrote that the brothers were also building a platform, Apollo, as a scalable solution for running decentralised games, to be offered as a service to other game studios; they had recruited eight gaming experts for their Sydney team plus designers from around the world, and Justin Waldron, a co-founder of Zynga, was an adviser.⁠[6]

In 2019 Fuel Games was renamed Immutable. A 2020 profile page on the YPO website introduces him as co-founder and president of Immutable and describes the company, formerly known as Fuel Games, as an Australian-based company and market leader in blockchain gaming that is bringing transparency to the opaque world of in-game economies and providing gamers with true digital property rights.⁠[1][8]

He and his brother James Ferguson were named together to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list for 2019 for Fuel Games; SURG FM, the University of Sydney’s student radio station, writes that the brothers were on the Enterprise Technology list.⁠[4][9][1]

On August 26, 2019 the University of Sydney published an alumni news item on the brothers. In it he said that “most game publishers wield absolute authority over game economies,” and the item states that within its first year of operation the company had released its flagship game, Gods Unchained, raised “over $2 million” from investors and made “$5 million” in profits.⁠[4]

On December 30, 2020 the Thiel Foundation named the 24 members of the 2020 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, and he was one of them. The list gives his location as Sydney, Australia, and his project as Immutable, which it describes as developing “software that powers the world’s most popular blockchain games.” The announcement states that the two-year program gives each Fellow $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology founders, investors and scientists.⁠[10]

Blockworks’ speaker biography states that he was named a Thiel Fellow in 2020, and the speaker biography that CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry published for Consensus Hong Kong 2025 also introduces him as a Thiel Fellow.⁠[3][11]

In March 2022 Immutable closed a US$200 million Series C round at a valuation of US$2.5 billion; its backers included Temasek and Tencent, and Forbes Australia writes that it was Tencent’s first public Web 3.0 investment. In July of that year Immutable raised a further “$21.5 million” at the same valuation.⁠[1]

On September 22, 2022 Forbes Australia published a long feature, “The billion dollar brothers.” It states that James Ferguson, then 30, was chief executive of Immutable and that he, then 25, was its president; after Etherbots the company released Gods Unchained and Guild of Guardians and then Immutable X, a Layer 2 solution on Ethereum that uses a zero-knowledge rollup, later adding an NFT exchange platform; and that companies including TikTok, Disney and GameStop chose Immutable X for digital collectibles.⁠[1]

In the feature he said that all or most of the value in the world would be “under the hood, backed by blockchain technology,” and that “The vast majority of the world’s value is unique.” On the Merge, Ethereum’s move from proof of work to proof of stake, he argued that it reduced energy consumption but did not address scalability, leaving NFT trading at about five trades per second; combined with Immutable X, he said, “we are able to achieve more than 10,000 transactions per second,” and he claimed that Immutable’s uptime was “two to three orders of magnitude superior” to the next-best blockchain or Layer 2 solution.⁠[1]

On December 23, 2024 BlockchainGamer.biz published an interview with him, introducing him as co-founder and president of Immutable. He named the rise of Telegram games as the leading trend of 2024 and said that Immutable was introducing community-building tools for Telegram; drawing on figures from GAME7, he said that Immutable had recorded 71% year-over-year growth in game migrations, more than any other chain; and he described the company’s 2024 goal as building, around Passport, “the world’s most valuable network for games.”⁠[12]

He said that more than 225 new games had signed to build on Immutable in 2024 and that 35 titles had launched, a record year; his favourite blockchain game of the year was RavenQuest, which he said drew more than 1.2 million Twitch viewers during a nine-day early access period and more than 74,000 unique players in the first ten days of its second early access phase. His predictions for 2025 were that web3 gaming was poised for a breakthrough, with top-quality games projected to attract hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of active users; that institutional interest in web3 would accelerate; that regulatory clarity was likely in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry and other major markets; and that full-service platforms integrating the most adopted blockchain, wallets and player infrastructure would set the standard. His resolution was to “Drive the next wave of web3 gaming growth.”⁠[12]

The speaker biography that CoinDesk published for Consensus Hong Kong 2025 introduces him as co-founder and president of the web3 gaming platform Immutable and states that he had led Immutable to first place in gaming market share, with 70% of the market; it states that Immutable had signed more than 500 well-funded games and partners, including Illuvium, Treeverse, Space Nation and TikTok, that about $1 billion had been invested in games built in its ecosystem, and that the company had raised more than $300 million from investors including Temasek, Tencent and Bitkraft and was most recently valued at $2.5 billion.⁠[11]

He is the younger brother of James Ferguson, who earned a Bachelor of Commerce (2013) and a Bachelor of Laws (2016) at the University of Sydney; James Ferguson took a year off his studies to code in San Francisco and jokingly calls himself a “recovering law student.”⁠[1][4]

Forbes Australia writes that he gave his brother a hardcopy of Bull Run, a work by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), rather than the NFT.⁠[1]

The Australian Financial Review’s podcast How I Made It states that at 25 he made the Financial Review Rich List, the youngest person on the list since it began in 1983, and that he and his brother James Ferguson had a combined wealth of “$1 billion” from Immutable. Forbes Australia wrote in September 2022 that the Series C round took the brothers’ combined net worth to “$1.01 billion.”⁠[13][1]

On the 2024 Financial Review Young Rich List the brothers entered the top five for the first time, ranking fourth with a combined “$1.7 billion,” after their wealth rose 50 per cent, thanks to the increasing value of their IMX cryptocurrency tokens. On the 2025 list they ranked third with a combined “$1.7 billion.”⁠[14][15]

The AirTree Ventures article draws on his experience at the age of 27 and describes how he moved from individual contributor, once working in a team of 15, to people manager and then to company leader; he described himself as a first-time manager who had learned to give and receive feedback, and mentioned that six months earlier he had still been doing a lot of business development work.⁠[5]

He advised founders to hire the smartest people they know, with Alex Connolly as his example, and mentioned that the company had hired an experienced chief operating officer who had previously helped grow SafetyCulture in Australia.⁠[5]

SXSW Sydney’s schedule lists him on the panel “Panel: ANZ Unicorn Co-Founders Hosted by King River Capital” on Tuesday, October 17 at 10:00 a.m., moderated by King River Capital co-founder Chris Barter, alongside Gus McDonald of Cover Genius and Aaron McDonald of FutureVerse. His speaker biography states that he believes future generations will spend most of their waking hours in virtual reality and that he wants those digital worlds to be economically meaningful.⁠[16][3]

Immutable: Official website: https://www.immutable.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

X: Public account: https://x.com/0xferg (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbieferguson/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]