web3 with a16z: Recent Episodes
a16z crypto, Sonal Chokshi, Chris Dixon
"web3 with a16z" is a show about the next generation of the internet, and about how builders and users -- whether artists, coders, creators, developers, companies, organizations, or communities -- now have the ability to not just "read" (web1) + "write" (web2) but "own" (web3) pieces of the internet, unlocking a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurship. Brought to you by a16z crypto, this show is the definitive resource for understanding and going deeper on all things crypto and web3.
From discussing the latest and leading trends to sharing research, data readouts, and insights from top scientists and makers in the space, this is a variety show with a variety of formats and topics listeners can pick and choose from. It is hosted by the longtime showrunner of (and original team behind) the popular a16z Podcast. Learn more at a16zcrypto.com.
How can you prove that something is true without revealing why it is true?
That question gave rise to zero-knowledge proofs, one of the most important breakthroughs in modern cryptography. What began as an attempt to solve a seemingly playful problem — playing poker securely over the telephone — ultimately changed how computer scientists think about proofs, privacy, and verification. In this episode of First Principles, Turing Award–winning cryptographer Shafi Goldwasser joins a16z crypto Head of Research Tim Roughgarden and Research Partner Justin Thaler to tell the origin story of zero-knowledge proofs and interactive proof systems.
Goldwasser recounts how she, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff developed a new kind of proof involving interaction, randomness, and a small probability of error. Their work introduced the idea that a prover could convince a verifier that a statement is true while revealing no additional information. The conversation follows those ideas through some of theoretical computer science’s deepest results, including interactive proofs, IP = PSPACE, probabilistically checkable proofs, the sum-check protocol, and SNARKs.
These concepts now power blockchain rollups, privacy-preserving applications, and systems for verifying computation without repeating all the work. They also explore why breakthrough ideas are often initially rejected, how toy problems can lead to foundational theories, why abstraction and narrative matter in scientific research, and whether AI systems should be required to prove their answers.
Highlights
0:00 — Intro
3:36 — How mental poker inspired zero-knowledge proofs: Proving that something is true without revealing the underlying information
6:30 — The simulation paradigm and the meaning of “zero knowledge”
8:33 — Why the original paper was repeatedly rejected
10:33 — How interactive proofs became more powerful than conventional proofs
13:36 — The road to modern SNARKs
19:02 — Why the sum-check protocol is so useful for verifiable computation
25:31 — Why many so-called “zk proofs” are not actually zero knowledge
34:06 — Why toy examples, playfulness, and narratives can produce deep theory
37:23 — The role of rigor and computational assumptions in cryptography
42:44 — Applying zero-knowledge proofs to law, evidence, and secret software
45:23 — Training AI systems to provide proofs alongside their answers
54:27 — Why genuinely new ideas are often difficult for experts to recognize
About First Principles
First Principles is a special limited series from a16z crypto about the scientific roots of modern computing — especially blockchains — told through rare conversations with the pioneers who helped shape the foundational ideas behind distributed systems, consensus protocols, economics, mechanism design, cryptography, zero knowledge, and more.
People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it.
Links
Shafi Goldwasser
MIT CSAIL: http://people.csail.mit.edu/shafi/
Simons Institute: https://simons.berkeley.edu/people/shafi-goldwasser
Tim Roughgarden
a16z crypto: https://a16zcrypto.com/team/tim-roughgarden/
Website: https://timroughgarden.org/ "X: https://x.com/Tim_Roughgarden
Justin Thaler
a16z crypto: https://a16zcrypto.com/team/justin-thaler/
Website: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/jthaler/
X: https://x.com/SuccinctJT
a16z crypto
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
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a16z Cofounder and General Partner Marc Andreessen and a16z crypto Founder and Managing Partner Chris Dixon on why the CLARITY ACT matters.
Congress is debating once-in-a-generation market structure legislation that could determine where financial and internet infrastructure gets built. Chris and Marc join host Robert Hackett to discuss why regulatory clarity matters, what the current policy environment has cost the United States, and what is at stake for developers, entrepreneurs, consumers, and the country’s technological leadership.
Marc also looks back at his influential 2014 essay “Why Bitcoin Matters,” when supporting crypto was still a deeply contrarian position, and reflects on how the technology and the political debate around it have evolved since.
The discussion explores the lessons of earlier technology revolutions, the importance of giving builders clear rules, and why crypto policy is ultimately about much more than a single industry. It is about who gets to shape the future of money, markets, and the internet.
Highlights
00:00 Intro
05:31 From crypto subculture to financial infrastructure
08:37 Why crypto needs rules now
12:20 The regulatory war on crypto
15:41 How CLARITY could prevent another FTX
22:42 Why criminals using crypto may be easier to catch
26:20 Privacy, blockchains, and the invention of HTTPS
30:41 Government ethics and crypto
34:52 The banking lobby’s stablecoin fight
37:05 Why every major bank is building on blockchains
41:04 Developer liability as a killshot
45:23 How CLARITY provides oversight
49:30 What happens if CLARITY fails?
50:50 Regulation vs. innovation
54:12 Why America should lead
55:36 What CLARITY could unlock
Links
Marc Andreessen: https://twitter.com/pmarca
Chris Dixon: https://twitter.com/cdixon
Robert Hackett: https://twitter.com/rhackett
Why Bitcoin matters: https://a16z.com/why-bitcoin-matters/
What builders need to know about the CLARITY Act: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/clarity-act-what-why-matters
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
Site: https://a16zcrypto.com/
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
Newsletter: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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For the first time, companies can treat AI token spending almost like headcount: allocate more money, deploy more intelligence, and potentially get more work done.
That shift could change much more than engineering productivity. It could reshape how companies form, how teams are managed, how businesses are financed, and who is best positioned to build them.
In this episode, a16z crypto General Partner Guy Wuollet and Head of Engineering Noah Citron join host Robert Hackett to explore the economics of the AI-native company.
They discuss why engineering teams may soon manage token budgets like P&Ls how AI enables companies to scale labor up and down almost instantly; and whether the future belongs to smaller, leaner businesses run by people who are unusually good at directing agents.
The conversation also covers software-engineering “pod shops,” AI as variable labor, the future of consulting and private equity, and why stablecoins and blockchains may become the default financial infrastructure for AI agents and businesses.
Finally, they ask a larger question: If AI has created so much new intelligence, why has it not yet produced an obvious jump in economic growth? And in a world where everyone can access powerful models, will intelligence matter less than grit, judgment, and agency?
Highlights
00:00 — Intro
4:01 — Why token spending is starting to resemble headcount
4:51 — Deciding how much spend is too much spend
9:04 — The agentic A/B test: How to quantify "return on tokens"
12:05 — The software-engineering "pod shop"
25:13 — Paying deference to the Machine God
26:06 — The rise (or not) of lean, AI-native microbusinesses
28:05 — Everyone's a manager? The new style of thinking for engineers
30:48 — Why AI agents may naturally use stablecoins
34:33 — When AI productivity will appear in GDP
47:49 — Why grit and agency may matter more than IQ
51:38 — How AI could create new paths for startups
54:53 — Innovation, commoditization, and creative destruction
Links:
Guy Wuollet: https://x.com/guywuolletjr
Noah Citron: https://x.com/noahcitron
Robert Hackett: https://x.com/rhackett
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
Website: https://a16zcrypto.com/
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
Newsletter: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Before the internet could become a place to bank or transact, it needed a way for strangers to know who they were talking to, and whether a message could be trusted.
Turing Award winners Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman helped invent it.
In this episode of First Principles, Rivest tells the story of how they developed RSA, the first practical public-key cryptosystem. Their breakthrough made it possible to encrypt information, verify identities, and authenticate messages across an open network without requiring participants to meet or exchange a secret in advance — laying essential groundwork for the secure internet and, decades later, blockchains.
Rivest joins Tim Roughgarden, Head of Research at a16z crypto and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, and Dan Boneh — Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, a16z crypto Senior Research Advisor, and the “B” in BLS signatures — for a conversation about the origins and future of modern cryptography.
They trace the field from its early days, when most cryptographic research was classified and even the meaning of “security” had not been formally defined, through the publication of the Diffie-Hellman paper and the open problem that ultimately led to RSA. Rivest recounts the night the core idea came together, why the difficulty of factoring made the system plausible, and why no one initially knew whether it would survive sustained attempts to break it.
The conversation also explores the other cryptographic primitives that underpin blockchains and the modern internet. Rivest explains why digital signatures interested him even more than encryption, how he designed the MD family of cryptographic hash functions, and why standards such as RSA, DSA, and SHA were shaped as much by politics, patents, and government pressure as by mathematics.
Finally, Rivest shares his unusually candid views on quantum computing, post-quantum security, and the deeper theoretical possibility that P could equal NP. Either development could threaten the foundations of modern cryptography — but, as Rivest argues, cryptographers have a responsibility to prepare for even the worst-case scenarios.
Highlights
00:00 – Intro: the two problems that could break modern cryptography
01:10 – Why Ron Rivest’s work underpins the internet and blockchains
08:10 – Before public-key cryptography, there was no theory of security
11:05 – The open problem that led to RSA
13:55 – The night Ron Rivest discovered the core idea behind RSA
17:55 – Why digital signatures were the real breakthrough
19:14 – The RSA challenge — and a prediction that was off by quadrillions of years
28:33 – How government pressure shaped cryptographic standards
30:36 – Designing the hash functions that made digital signatures practical
33:26 – The Fiat–Shamir transformation, explained
38:04 – Building a cryptography company before the web existed
42:31 – Will quantum computers ever become powerful enough to break RSA?
48:02 – The cryptography securing the internet, elections, and everyday life
50:11 – What surprised Dan: Quantum giveth and quantum taketh away
About First Principles
First Principles is a special limited series from a16z crypto about the scientific roots of modern computing — especially blockchains — told through rare conversations with the pioneers who helped shape the foundational ideas behind distributed systems, consensus protocols, economics, mechanism design, cryptography, zero knowledge, and more.
People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it.
Subscribe to follow along:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjQ9HCQMu_8yIg60YAq67HDdvp7E_T5e8
Hear more from:
Ron Rivest: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden
Dan Boneh: https://twitter.com/danboneh
Follow a16z crypto:
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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Long before onchain markets made mechanism design a daily engineering problem, Nobel Prize winner Paul Milgrom was asking how prices actually form — and how better auction rules could reshape actual markets.
His work helped transform auction theory from an elegant branch of economics into a practical toolkit for allocating scarce resources, from wireless spectrum to digital ads to financial markets.
In this episode of First Principles, Tim Roughgarden, Head of Research at a16z crypto, sits down with Milgrom alongside Scott Kominers — Harvard Business School professor and a16z crypto research partner — for a conversation about auctions, information, price discovery, and the design of complex markets.
Together, they explore Milgrom’s foundational work on auction theory, the famous Milgrom-Weber paper, the Grossman-Stiglitz paradox and the Glosten-Milgrom model of market microstructure, and why understanding how prices form matters for everything from prediction markets to decentralized finance.
They also discuss Milgrom’s work designing the FCC spectrum auctions — including the auctions that helped allocate wireless spectrum for technologies like mobile broadband and 5G — and the later FCC incentive auction, a massive market design challenge that combined economics, computer science, policy, and real-world implementation.
Highlights
00:00 Intro: economics assumptions that are “just wrong”
02:19 Scott Kominers on the genius of Paul Milgrom
05:35 The price discovery problem economics forgot
07:48 The auction theory breakthrough of the 1980s
17:15 Why market microstructure matters for DeFi
24:17 When math teaches economics something new
29:22 Designing auctions people can actually use
32:40 How theory became spectrum auction design
36:22 The floppy disk that helped convince the FCC
41:05 What changed when auctions moved online
45:28 The auction that reorganized television
57:25 Why the best auctions feel simple
1:07:30 What economics and computer science can learn from each other
1:13:22 Futures markets for compute
1:15:12 Paul Milgrom’s advice for builders
About First Principles
First Principles is a special limited series from a16z crypto about the scientific roots of modern computing — especially blockchains — told through rare conversations with the pioneers who helped shape the foundational ideas behind distributed systems, consensus protocols, economics, mechanism design, cryptography, zero knowledge, and more.
People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it.
Subscribe to follow along:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjQ9HCQMu_8yIg60YAq67HDdvp7E_T5e8
Hear more from
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden
Scott Kominers: https://twitter.com/skominers
Follow a16z crypto
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
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Long before crypto made coordination programmable, Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth was designing markets where coordination could save lives.
In this episode of First Principles, Roth tells the story of how he helped build systems for some of the hardest matching problems in the world, from where doctors train and where students go to school to how kidney donors can reach the patients who need them.
He joins Tim Roughgarden, Head of Research at a16z crypto, and Scott Kominers — Harvard Business School professor, a16z crypto research partner, and one of Roth’s former students — for a conversation about how market design moves from theory into the real world. They explore how economic theory becomes practical engineering, whether that's matching riders to Ubers, doctors to medical residencies, students to New York City high schools, or organ donors to people whose lives depend on it.
They also cover how these same problems show up in today’s crypto networks. Roth explains why markets are not just natural forces, but engineered systems; why the details of timing, congestion, incentives, and trust can make or break a marketplace; and why some of the most important markets are the ones where simply exchanging money can’t do the work.
This is a conversation about economics at its most practical and profound: how to design systems that coordinate people, solve real problems, and sometimes save lives.
00:00 Intro: Why market design matters
04:18 The economist as engineer
08:09 When theory meets the real world
07:02 Fixing the medical residency match
15:32 Why markets unravel
18:22 Redesigning NYC high school admissions
28:05 The hidden problem of congestion
34:47 How kidney exchange saves lives
45:26 How the internet changed market design
48:25 Airbnb, Uber and smarter marketplaces
51:28 Repugnant transactions and moral economics
53:32 When markets need social support
54:32 The unexpected effects of criminalizing surrogacy
01:04:58 Preference signals and the job market
01:18:53 A broken market: resettling refugees and other migrants
Hear more from:
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden
Scott Kominers: https://twitter.com/skominers
Follow a16z crypto:
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/ *
** As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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Before blockchains could reach consensus, Leslie Lamport had to define what agreement even meant when computers fail, lie, or disappear.
In this episode of First Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology, Turing Award-winning computer scientist Leslie Lamport joins Tim Roughgarden Head of Research at a16z crypto and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, and a16z crypto Research Partner Ittai Abraham to trace the ideas that helped define modern distributed computing.
Lamport’s work formalized some of the field’s deepest questions: how to reason about concurrent systems, how distributed systems can agree despite failures, and how to prove that protocols do what they are supposed to do. His work on logical clocks, state machine replication, the Byzantine Generals problem, and Paxos has shaped everything from cloud infrastructure to the consensus protocols underlying modern blockchains.
The conversation begins with Lamport’s early work on concurrency and the origins of the Byzantine Generals Problem, and then turns to fault tolerance: what happens when machines crash, behave unpredictably, or even act maliciously? We also cover the feedback loop between theory and practice, the long arc of fundamental research, and how blockchains are inheriting and extending decades of distributed systems work.
Highlights
00:00 – Intro: The problem every blockchain is built to solve
02:52 – Why concurrent systems are surprisingly tricky
04:40 – The origins of the bakery algorithm
07:37 – What does it mean for a protocol to be “correct”?
12:03 – The origins of the Byzantine Generals problem — and what happens when some computers fail
17:49 – How Paxos emerged from an attempted impossibility proof
23:47 – Why theory and practice need each other
33:48 – Government funding, DARPA, and the long arc of foundational research
About First Principles
First Principles is a special limited series from a16z crypto about the scientific roots of modern computing — especially blockchains — told through rare conversations with the pioneers who helped shape the foundational ideas behind distributed systems, consensus protocols, economics, mechanism design, cryptography, zero knowledge, and more.
People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it.
Hear more from:
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden
Ittai Abraham: https://twitter.com/ittaia
Follow a16z crypto:
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Every blockchain today leans on replication ideas worked out in the 1980s, by a Turing Award winner who wasn’t thinking about how it might apply to money at all.
In this episode of First Principles, a16z crypto Head of Research and Columbia professor Tim Roughgarden speaks with Barbara Liskov, MIT professor, Turing Award winner, and one of the most influential computer scientists in programming languages, data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing. a16z crypto research partner Ittai Abraham joins the conversation.
The discussion traces Liskov’s path from programming languages and modularity to distributed systems research; from CLU and Argus to viewstamped replication; and from benign failures to Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, or PBFT — a protocol family whose ideas now shape many modern blockchain systems. Liskov explains why modularity matters, how systems researchers thought about replication in the 1980s, why view changes were such a key idea, and how PBFT extended earlier work to handle malicious behavior on the internet.
The conversation also explores the bridge between theory and practice, the importance of proofs and specifications, and why the next generation of systems research may be reshaped by AI. First Principles is a special, limited series from a16z crypto about the scientific roots of modern computing — especially blockchains — told through rare conversations with the pioneers who helped shape the foundational ideas behind distributed systems, consensus protocols, economics, mechanism design, cryptography, zero-knowledge, and more. People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and behind blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography.
First Principles is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it.
Highlights:
00:00 Intro: How do systems stay reliable when parts fail?
01:18 Barbara Liskov’s path from programming languages to distributed systems
05:45 Why modularity is “everything”
07:22 The replication problem: keeping data available across many machines 09:58 Viewstamped replication and the “ledger” before blockchains
16:32 Why good research starts with what you don’t understand
18:10 Leslie Lamport, Paxos, and the inevitability of ideas in the right time, in the right place
21:48 Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance: what changes when replicas can lie
19:35 How PBFT bridged theory and practical systems
22:38 Why you should never trust an individual replica
28:39 Why blockchains are state machine replication in the wild
31:27 AI, verification, and the future of computer science
Follow:
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden
Ittai Abraham: https://twitter.com/ittaia
Follow a16z crypto: X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
*** As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Bitcoin often gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t.
The problem was named decades earlier — in the world of distributed computing — and researchers spent years studying how machines could reach agreement even when some participants were faulty, adversarial, or corrupt. What Bitcoin did was something different: It solved a classic Byzantine agreement problem in a radically new, permissionless setting. And it took the research world years to fully recognize what Satoshi had done.
In this episode of First Principles, a16z crypto Head of Research and Columbia professor Tim Roughgarden is joined by a16z crypto research partner Ittai Abraham — one of the world’s leading researchers in Byzantine agreement and consensus protocols, a founding member of VMware’s blockchain project, and founder of the technical blog Decentralized Thoughts — to unpack the scientific roots of blockchain consensus.
Together, Tim and Ittai trace the line from classic distributed systems research to Bitcoin, proof-of-stake, Tendermint, Casper, DAG-based protocols, Solana’s Alpenglow, and the modern race for higher throughput and lower latency. Along the way, they explain why concepts like Byzantine fault tolerance, state machine replication, safety, liveness, and partial synchrony are not just academic abstractions — they are the language and design principles behind today’s blockchain protocols.
This conversation kicks off First Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology — a special, limited series from a16z crypto on the scientific ideas behind modern computing — especially blockchains — told through conversations with the pioneers who helped create them, including Barbara Liskov, Leslie Lamport, and more. Hosted by Tim Roughgarden, the series explores the foundational concepts behind distributed systems and consensus protocols; economics, mechanism and market design; and cryptography, from digital signatures to zero knowledge. People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere.
But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and behind blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, told by the people who helped build it.
Highlights
00:00 Introduction to First Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology
00:56 Why consensus matters for blockchains
02:30 Byzantine agreement: The old computer science problem Bitcoin made practical
04:34 Blockchains as a shared system of record: State machine replication and blockchain state
06:41 How two research worlds — distributed computing and crypto — began to converge
07:49 Proof of work vs. proof of stake
09:27 Why Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake took years
11:08 When crypto rediscovered decades of distributed systems research
11:50 Why BFT became practical 12:49 Throughput, latency, and modern consensus design
14:05 DAG-based protocols and faster blockchains
15:25 Peace time vs. war time: why modern blockchains need two modes
16:47 Theory, practice, and the future of blockchain research
Follow:
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden
Ittai Abraham: https://twitter.com/ittaia
Follow a16z crypto:
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
**
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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Crypto has been walled off from the real economy for years — that's changing.
Sonal Chokshi and Robert Hackett sit down with Eddy Lazzarin, a16z crypto's newest General Partner, to break down why crypto is entering a completely different phase and what gets built once the rules finally catch up to the technology.
The discussion spans:
- what the CLARITY Act actually does and why it changes the design space for crypto founders
- the difference between a network token and a security, and why it needs to be written into law
- why stablecoins are crypto's first real killer app and how the rest of the economy is reconfiguring around them
- how tokens let builders decouple pricing from growth in a way stocks never could
- why 97.8% of the value created in capitalism leaks out, and what that means for anyone trying to capture any of it
Highlights:
00:00 Intro
01:25 What it means to be a GP
02:00 Consensus vs. non-consensus bets
04:27 Network tokens and the CLARITY Act
09:35 Revenue, value capture, and network-token business models
21:18 Stablecoins as crypto’s first killer app
28:52 Engineer-philosopher mindset 39:04 Intellectual influences
52:40 Eddy’s path to crypto 1:03:15 The exuberant adoption phase of AI
1:14:38 Being "pro–AI psychosis"
Follow: Eddy Lazzarin: https://twitter.com/eddylazzarin
Sonal Chokshi: https://twitter.com/smc90
Robert Hackett: https://twitter.com/rhackett
Follow a16z crypto:
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
Subscribe for more industry reports, trend updates, news analysis, builder guides, and other resources: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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Following a string of major DeFi exploits, we unpack what’s driving the recent rise in hacks across crypto.
a16z crypto GP Eddy Lazzarin and security engineer Matt Gleason join host Robert Hackett to take a closer look. Their argument: AI is not introducing entirely new vulnerabilities. It is making existing weaknesses easier to identify and exploit. The question is whether defenders can evolve as quickly as attackers.
They also cover:
- why “AI-powered hacking” is difficult to measure
- how geopolitical tensions may be influencing cyber activity
- why defenders should be aggressively stress-testing their own systems
- how AI could eventually outperform humans at resisting social engineering
- what users can do today to protect themselves online
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:57 - The surge, explained
01:37 - Did attackers use AI
04:19 - How AI can help defend against attacks
09:16 - The doomsday marketing debate
17:17 - DeFi transparency: opportunities and challenges
21:00 - Social engineering and how to stay safe
Follow along here:
Eddy Lazzarin: https://twitter.com/eddylazzarin
Robert Hackett: https://twitter.com/rhackett
Matt Gleason: https://twitter.com/mg_486662
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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We're announcing a16z crypto's Fund 5: $2.2B in committed capital to back the startups and founders who are building the next era of crypto. All four GPs sat down to talk through where crypto is right now, what's changed, and where it may be headed next. Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, Guy Wuollet, and Eddy Lazzarin join Robert Hackett to cover...
00:00 Open
01:31 Why raise Crypto Fund 5 now
02:10 The GENIUS Act and what regulatory clarity unlocks for builders
04:32 Why stablecoins are crypto's WhatsApp moment
08:54 Why the next era of crypto founders will be pragmatic, not ideological
11:49 From cypherpunk revolution to crypto's "collared shirt era"
15:02 Programmable money meets AI
21:15 Onchain capital markets for compute, energy, and credit
25:57 Why finance is the foundation, not the ceiling
28:48 AI agents as first-class economic actors
38:19 Why privacy is the only moat
41:26 Jevons paradox and the future of blockspace demand
43:20 Jolt and the zero-knowledge breakthrough
58:15 Writing the next chapter of Read Write Own
Resources:
Chris Dixon: https://x.com/cdixon
Ali Yahya: https://x.com/alive_eth
Eddy Lazzarin: https://x.com/eddylazzarin
Guy Wuollet: https://x.com/guywuolletjr
Robert Hackett: https://x.com/rhackett
Follow a16z crypto: X: https://x.com/a16zcrypto
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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Agents can now do almost anything a human can do with a computer. So what happens when they start spending money on your behalf?
Sam Ragsdale (founder and CEO of Merit Systems, a startup building infrastructure for the agentic economy) joins a16z crypto's Eddy Lazzarin, Noah Levine, and Robert Hackett on the open agentic commerce stack, and why the internet's business model is about to get rewired.
00:00 – Intro
01:33 – Two flavors of agentic commerce
04:30 – What is an agent, actually?
12:57 – The headless merchant thesis
17:17 – What happens to existing friction?
24:45 – The economic contract of the web is broken
27:46 – Will agents get distracted by ads?
35:152– Stablecoins vs. credit cards
41:54 – Sam's bear case on interchange
49:11 – The killer app for agentic commerce
Sam Ragsdale on X: /samrags_
Eddy Lazzarin on X: /eddylazzarin
Noah Levine on X: /nlevine19
Robert Hackett on X: /rhackett
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A few big companies control most of the infrastructure behind AI.
Most people experience AI through a wide range of different apps that actually depend on a deeply centralized stack of data and compute. In this conversation, Ben Fielding and Harry Grieve — cofounders of decentralized machine learning protocol Gensyn — explain why this matters, and what it would take to rebuild AI as open infrastructure instead.
From unused global compute to the philosophical implications of machine intelligence, they argue that the next evolution of AI must be owned, coordinated, and verified in a fundamentally different way.
Highlights
00:00 – Intro
00:29 – The biggest misconception about AI infrastructure
01:20 – Why centralization in AI is a deeper problem than people realize
04:19 – Why AI needs crypto
05:51 – How AI models are trained
08:15 – The rise of autonomous AI agents with onchain identities
10:37 – Lightning round
Ben Fielding on X: https://x.com/benfielding
Harry Grieve on X: https://x.com/harrygrieve
Gensyn on X: https://x.com/gensynai
Follow a16z crypto on X: https://x.com/a16zcrypto
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The internet already has a bot problem — and it's just getting worse.
a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg speak with Alex Blania of Tools for Humanity. World is building the largest real human network, a proof-of-human layer for the AI era. They cover the technical challenge of proving human uniqueness at scale using iris biometrics, the privacy architecture behind World ID, and why platforms from social networks to dating apps to video conferencing will soon require proof of human verification.
Timestamps:
- 0:00—Introduction
- 4:07—Three Big Ideas People Were Interested In
- 9:05—The Orb Verification Piece
- 15:20—Social Media Bots: PSYOPs and Propaganda
- 29:18—We Had Proof of Personhood for the Longest Time
- 36:44—Next Year Go-to-Market Is Focused on the US
- 40:09—Different Levels of Verification
Resources:
Follow Alex Blania on X: / alexblania
Follow Ben Horowitz on X: / bhorowitz
Follow Erik Torenberg on X: / eriktorenber
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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What if the future of lending doesn’t need banks at all?
Paul Frambot, cofounder and CEO of Morpho, explains what it means to build lending infrastructure without banks, and why DeFi’s real breakthrough isn’t “risk-free” loans, but open, onchain markets that make lending more transparent, competitive, and efficient.
In this conversation, Paul breaks down the biggest misconception in DeFi lending, how to think about risk onchain, why institutions are learning faster than expected, and where banks, asset managers, fintechs, and stablecoins fit into the next wave of adoption.
He also shares his long-term vision for finance: a world where open blockchain infrastructure replaces siloed financial systems, access to capital gets broader, and financial products become cheaper, more personalized, and easier to build.
Highlights:
- 0:00 Intro
- 0:36 What Morpho actually does
- 1:22 DeFi’s biggest misconception
5:26 Why Wall Street is paying attention now - 6:46 Who’s adopting onchain finance first: Banks or asset managers?
- 9:57 The race for a Euro stablecoin
- 10:49 The future of finance, 5–10 years out
- 11:16 Why finance is still broken
- 13:30 What open mortgage and credit markets could become on open blockchains
- 15:14 The worst advice Paul's received as a founder
- 17:17 What's wrong with an $8 croissant (besides the obvious)
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*** As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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What if opening a trading account was as easy as downloading an app?
Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito — a Solana-based liquid staking protocol — breaks down why he thinks all of finance is moving onchain, and what his small team is doing to make that happen.
During the 2022-2023 bear market, Jito was getting pitched constantly to jump ship to other chains. Lucas explains why they turned everything down, doubled down on Solana, and chewed a lot of glass.
We also cover how Jito acts like a Cloudflare for Solana, why cheap transactions create surprising problems, what convinced Lucas that the Solana engineers were in it for the right reasons, and his vision for a financial system anyone can access with just a phone.
Follow Jito: https://www.jito.network/
Follow Lucas: https://x.com/buffalu__
Highlights
- 0:00 — Intro
- 0:49 — What is Jito and why does it exist
- 1:11 — Why Solana transactions are less than a penny
- 2:00 — What attracted Lucas to Solana from Ethereum
- 2:39 — How Jito is like Cloudflare for blockchains
- 5:02 — The $1,500 Ethereum transaction fee problem
- 7:21 — The vision: all of finance onchain
- 7:46 — Onchain vs. opening a Robinhood account
- 8:37 — Lucas's journey from robotics to crypto
- 9:55 — Solana's rate of improvement and Anatoly's Law
- 10:44 — The pitch for people new to crypto
- 15:00 — Staying lean at 21 people
- 15:17 — Nicotine as a productivity hack
- 15:58 — Sleep, alcohol, and the Oura ring
- 16:40 — Smallest hill you'll die on: littering and shopping carts
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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Should we push AI forward as fast as possible, or be more careful about how it develops?
Two competing views are emerging:
- e/acc (effective accelerationism): go faster, progress is the only path forward
- d/acc (defensive / decentralized acceleration): accelerate, but carefully, or risk losing control
In this episode of the a16z crypto show, Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder) and Guillaume Verdon aka "Beff Jezos" (Extropic founder & CEO,) join Eddy Lazzarin (a16z crypto CTO) and Shaw Walters (Eliza Labs founder) for a deep debate about these two perspectives and what they mean for AI, crypto, and the future.
They discuss:
- Whether acceleration is something we can control
- The biggest risks of AI, from surveillance to concentration of power
- Why open source and decentralization may shape who benefits
- Whether slowing down AI is realistic or even desirable
- How humans stay relevant in a world of increasingly powerful systems
- What the next 10, 100, and 1,000 years might look like
- At its core, this episode asks: Can acceleration be steered, or is that beyond our control?
Highlights:
00:00 Opening
07:02 Thermodynamics and first principles
16:04 Acceleration, entropy, and civilization
28:29 The core disagreement
32:42 Comparing and contrasting e/acc and d/acc
36:20 Open source, open hardware, and local intelligence
54:18 Should AI be slowed down?
1:02:35 Autonomous agents and artificial life
1:21:07 Crypto as the trust layer between humans and AI
1:35:37 Closing arguments
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*** As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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What does the future of the creator economy actually look like? The economics of content creation are changing, what happens to copyright in a world of abundant generated content, and why human taste, curation, and connection may matter even more going forward.
In this episode, host Robert Hackett talks with Justin (CEO, Bond) and Michael Blau(Head of Product, Bond) about the changing relationship between creators, audiences, platforms, and technology.
They unpack how today’s platforms shape creator behavior, why audience relationships are often trapped inside algorithms, and what a more direct creator-fan connection could look like. They also explore broader questions around crypto infrastructure, stablecoins, and whether blockchain can enable new kinds of internet-native products without needing to be the focus of the user experience.
Along the way, Justin reflects on his path from music into crypto, Michael talks about how magic shaped the way he thinks about originality and performance, and both share thoughts on NFTs, digital ownership, productivity tools, books, and creative inspiration.
Highlights
- 0:00 Intro 0:47 The biggest misconceptions about creator monetization
- 1:04 Why creators still don’t know their audience
- 1:34 Trading, speculation, and the limits of past creator crypto models
- 2:31 Why creator-fan relationships could move onchain
- 4:41 Stablecoins and global internet products
- 6:55 Justin Michael’s journey from DJ to crypto builder
- 8:12 What artists still don’t get from platforms
- 10:09 Subscription models, fan support, and alternative mechanics
- 17:57 AI, content abundance, and the future of creativity
- 18:57 Why human curation still matters
- 19:36 Copyright, IP, and a world shaped by AI
- 25:00 The difference between AI and crypto products
- 25:38 What magic teaches about creativity and originality
- 28:23 Inspirations: John Mayer, Zedd, Brian Chesky, David Blaine
- 35:06 Why NFTs still matter
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Four years ago, artist Emily Yang aka pplpleasr began a creative journey that would help break new ground at the intersection of art, technology, and community.
In this episode, we sit down with Emily — founder of Shibuya — to talk about her evolution from illustrator to Emmy-winning storyteller.
Emily shares how Shibuya is pioneering “permissionless creativity,” using crypto rails to fund, build, and co-create original IP with global communities. Her breakout project, White Rabbit, became the first crypto-native project to win an Emmy (Outstanding Innovation in Emerging Media), proving that grassroots storytelling can reach mainstream acclaim. We dive into:
- How White Rabbit crowdfunded alternate story endings
- What it means to turn audiences from passive viewers into active participants
- Why efficient capital formation is a game-changer for creatives
- Building outside traditional studio systems
- The creative tension between community input and artistic vision
Plus, Emily's biggest inspirations (Ghost in the Shell, Miyazaki, David Lynch, and more).
- 00:00 Behind the Fortune Magazine Cover
- 01:46 Founding Shibuya, and “Permissionless Creativity”
- 02:13 Winning an Emmy for White Rabbit., the First Crypto Project to Win an Emmy
- 03:14 What Is White Rabbit? (Interactive + NFT Model Explained)
- 05:53 From Passive Viewing to Interactive Storytelling
- 07:19 Opportunities for Creatives
- 08:27 Creative Inspirations (Miyazaki, Black Mirror)
- 09:25 Going With Your Gut, And the Advice Should Founders Ignore
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*** As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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A hot paper — "Some Simple Economics of AGI" — has been making the rounds, so we sat down with the author, covering:
- Automation vs. verification: the key economic split
- Why AI agents now feel like coworkers - What's happening to junior roles and the “codifier’s curse”
- The “AI sandwich” structure for firms
- The value of "meaning-makers," consensus, and status economies
- Why crypto may become essential infrastructure for identity, provenance, and trust
- Two possible futures: a hollow vs. augmented economy
Featuring Christian Catalini (founder of MIT Crypto Economics Lab) and Eddy Lazzarin (CTO of a16z crypto) in conversation with Robert Hackett, our discussion dives deep into how automation is reshaping labor markets, as well as the nature of intelligence.
What do these changes mean for startups, the future of work, and your career?
Highlights
00:00 Introduction
01:47 AGI economics optimism and playbook
05:39 Agents as coworkers
07:39 Software work becomes verification
10:47 Automation versus verification
12:03 "Unknown unknowns" and taste
16:27 Human augmentation and intent
17:55 The "AI Sandwich" and "Codifier's Curse"
21:54 "Meaning-makers" and the human touch
23:48 Crypto for identity and trust?
27:10 Measurability: How to think about it
33:23 Machine coordination and art after automation
35:46 Trojan horse risks
37:47 Liability and insurance
41:08 Crypto and verification
44:31 A hollow vs. augmented economy
49:45 Career advice in the AI era
51:26 The one-person billion-dollar startup
57:15 Open-source as antibodies
58:42 Blockchains for coordination
01:01:49 Closing thoughts
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What does it actually mean to bring assets onchain — and why should investors care?
In this episode, Cynthia Lo Bessette, Head of Digital Asset Management at Fidelity Investments, breaks down Fidelity’s roadmap for digital market adoption — from Bitcoin ETPs to tokenized money market funds — and explains why tokenization is about far more than just putting assets on a blockchain.
We cover:
- The three phases of digital asset adoption: Hold, Use, Build
- Why tokenizing an asset must start with utility
- How tokenized money market funds bridge payments and yield
- The rapid rise of real-world assets (RWAs) onchain
- The impact of the regional bank crisis and stablecoin depegging
- Staking yield inside traditional wrappers
- Institutional adoption of DeFi infrastructure
- Build vs. partner decisions inside a major asset manager
Cynthia also shares insight into Fidelity’s early Bitcoin mining experiments, how they evaluate crypto founders, and why authenticity is the smallest hill she’ll always die on.
If you're interested in tokenization, real-world assets, crypto ETFs, DeFi infrastructure, or the future of asset management — this conversation is for you.
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What happens when AI becomes the primary economic actor?
In this conversation, Sean Neville (cofounder of Circle, architect of USDC, and now cofounder of Catena Labs) shares his vision for the next phase of the internet: an agent-native economy powered by programmable dollars and AI banks.
As stablecoins put dollars on internet rails, a new question emerges: what happens when AI agents start earning, spending, lending, investing — and even managing our assets — on our behalf?
From KYA (“Know Your Agent”) to programmable spending policies to secure agent communication standards, this conversation explores the foundational layers that must be built before AI can safely participate in the global economy.
Sean breaks down:
- Why he believes AI agents could become the dominant economic participants
- What an “AI-native bank” actually is (and why we’ll need one)
- The missing infrastructure required for safe agent-to-agent payments
- How cryptography can encode trust directly into software
- Why current financial risk systems are designed to block bots — and what needs to change
- The fragmented race to define standards for agent identity, payments, and communication-
- Lessons from building Circle and launching USDC
- Why he doesn’t love the term “stablecoin”
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Restaurants generated more than a trillion dollars in sales last year — but they don’t control the payment rails those dollars flow through.
In this episode, Ben Leventhal (founder of Eater, Resy, and now Blackbird) joins Robert Hackett to explain why that’s a problem, how loyalty and payments have failed independent restaurants, and where crypto fits into fixing it.
Ben breaks down:
- Why most restaurant tech misses the point
- How Blackbird uses crypto without making restaurants think about crypto
- What “restaurant-first” really means in payments and loyalty
- Why decentralization only makes sense at scale
- Lessons from building multiple companies in hospitality
- Why we’re living in the golden age of restaurants
- Plus: favorite NYC spots, founder productivity hacks, and the smallest hill he’ll die on.
This is a grounded conversation about technology, ownership, and the future of restaurants — from someone who’s been building in the space for over a decade.
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- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7pMZvsNXEnb0CYcPiDQywE
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/web3-with-a16z-crypto/id1622312549
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @zcabrams@rhackett
What happens when money moves 10x — or 100x — faster than it does today?
In this episode, Zach Abrams, cofounder and CEO of Bridge (now part of Stripe), lays out a bold vision for the future of money: a world where stablecoins become the dominant payment rail, most transactions happen between non-human agents, and entirely new financial infrastructure is required to keep up.
Zach explains why stablecoins are the next evolution of fintech, much like credit cards were decades ago — and why we’re still in the very early innings. We dig into agentic payments, AI-to-AI commerce, micro-transactions on the open internet, and what Stripe is building by assembling stablecoin infrastructure across the stack.
Along the way, we cover:
- Why cards succeeded — and what stablecoins must learn from them
- How AI agents could drive the majority of future payments
- What breaks when the velocity of money increases 10x
- Stripe’s long-term strategy behind Bridge, Privy, and Tempo
- The case for open, decentralized payment infrastructure
- Zach’s unconventional views on management, productivity, and product-market fit
If you’re curious about the future of payments, fintech, crypto, AI agents, or the economic foundations of the next internet, this conversation offers a look several steps ahead.
Highlights:
00:00 Introduction
00:36 Stablecoins: The next platform for money
01:38 Credit cards had a moral panic too
03:29 What stablecoin infrastructure still needs to be built
05:22 The use cases no one predicted
11:11 Why Stripe is building with crypto
13:08 Why payments infrastructure must stay open
15:12 Lightning round: Bad advice, great books, and deep work
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @alive_eth @rhackett
a16z crypto General Partner Ali Yahya explains why privacy — not performance — will determine the long-term winners in crypto, and how it creates powerful network effects.
In conversation with a16z crypto show host Robert Hackett, Ali lays out how privacy creates lock-in and winner-take-most dynamics — without sacrificing decentralization. They also dive into the technologies making privacy possible today, from zero-knowledge proofs to trusted execution environments, and why financial use cases will drive mainstream adoption first.
They cover:
- Why blockspace is becoming a commodity
- Why users tolerate surveillance in social media—but not in finance
- How anonymity sets work and why secrets are hard to migrate
- The real trade-offs between privacy, composability, and decentralization
- The four privacy technologies shaping the next generation of blockchains
Highlights:
00:00 — Introduction
01:41 — Blockspace is becoming commoditized
03:11 — Privacy as lock-in: why secrets are harder to move than assets
06:01 — Do people actually care about privacy?
08:51 — Beyond finance: social, gaming, and private onchain apps
11:55 — Privacy zones, anonymity sets, and network effects
18:46 — Winner-take-most dynamics, explained
20:22 — What it means for crypto’s decentralization ethos
23:06 — Is privacy lock-in different from web2 lock-in?
28:31 — The privacy tech stack: ZK, MPC, TEEs, and FHE
32:13 — What this means for builders and investors
33:18 — Future considerations: Quantum computing and AI
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @PalmerLuckey@cdixon
In this special episode — our 100th on the a16z crypto show! — Chris Dixon interviews Palmer Luckey (founder of Anduril; founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift) to talk about the future of technology, belief, and building.
What does it take to build hardware at scale? Where are many of today’s tech bottlenecks? And what's the case for optimism about the future despite growing geopolitical turmoil, regulatory constraints, and other blockers to innovation? The candid, wide-ranging conversation covers crypto, banking, and stablecoins, as well as modern warfare, the U.S.–China technology race, AI and manufacturing, and much more.
Dixon also digs into company building in good times and bad with Luckey; the conversation was recorded live at our Founders Summit.
Highlights:
0:00 — Introduction
2:08 — Early Oculus: Why VR was hard
8:02 — Bitcoin & early crypto days
9:49 — The Facebook acquisition
13:36 — How successful was VR, really?
18:59 — Starting Anduril
20:01 — Hiring for mission ("Don't Work at Anduril")
23:59 — How Anduril works (product dev, org design)
27:47 — How Palmer stays ahead of the curve
33:00 — The US-China technology race
34:40 — What Putin understood early about AI
39:45 — Stablecoins & banking risk
45:00 — Politics as bottleneck
47:00 — Future of technology: AI, fusion, quantum
50:23 — Automation, abundance, and optimism
53:23 — Ukraine, drones, and the reality of war
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with @ccatalini@rhackett
Today we’re talking about who — if anyone — should own the rails of global money.
Our guest is Christian Catalini, cofounder and chief strategy officer of the global payments startup Lightspark, and a former architect of Meta’s shuttered Libra project — one of the most ambitious attempts to create a corporate-backed digital currency.
In this episode, we talk about…
- why Bitcoin is more than “digital gold,”
- what Christian learned from his time at Facebook, and
- why he believes openness — not corporate control — will ultimately win
Christian also wrote a feature for us expanding on his argument, which you can read by subscribing to a16z crypto on Substack. Check it out and let us know what you think.
This episode is part of a special series of interviews we recorded live at our Founders Summit in October.
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @PrimordialAA @rhackett
In this episode, host Robert Hackett sits down with Bryan Pellegrino, cofounder and CEO of LayerZero, one of the core infrastructure projects that enables blockchains to talk to one another. We talk about why crypto went multichain, what it means for crypto to compete with legacy financial systems, and a lesson Bryan took firsthand from Elon Musk. We also get into Bryan’s background as a professional poker player, and how that has shaped his views on competition, conviction, and focus.
We go deep on founder psychology:
– When founders must replace early leadership — and why no one talks about it
– Why conviction matters more than advice
– And why the hardest decisions are the ones no playbook prepares you for
Highlights
0:00 – Introduction
0:47 – The need for interoperability
1:04 – How crypto went multichain
2:51 – The institutional adoption of crypto
6:56 – Focus and conviction
13:19 – The nature of competition
14:43 – Elon Musk's game-changing advice
18:48 – The importance of self-disruption
20:08 – Lightning round
22:56 – Challenges in scaling a company
26:46 – Book recommendations and productivity hacks
28:19 – Core principles and company culture
This episode is part of a special series of interviews we recorded live at our Founders Summit in October.
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @LairdLife @GabbyReece @AriannaSimpson
Today's episode features two people who’ve spent their careers performing at the highest levels in sport and business: big-wave surfing pioneer Laird Hamilton and former pro volleyball star Gabby Reece.
They join a16z crypto General Partner Arianna Simpson for a conversation that explores what it takes to endure and excel over decades — how to get back up after setbacks, when to push versus change course, and how to build resilience and adaptability. They also get into stress, burnout, intuition, and why experience and self-care matter as much as data.
It’s a fitting conversation as we head into the New Year: a moment to reflect on habits, goals, and the kind of people we wish to become.
They cover:
– How extreme environments teach resilience
– When to keep pushing forward (and when to walk away)
– Why adaptability matters more than strength or intelligence
– How data confirms intuition
– What it takes to sustain performance across decades
Highlights:
(0:00) Opening on ambition, discomfort, and pushing beyond limits
(0:55) A near-fatal big-wave wipeout and the decision to return
(2:57) Learning how to recover after fear, injury, and loss
(3:55) When to keep going and when to stop
(6:10) Are you attracting the right people?
(6:39) Adaptability as the core skill for uncertain environments
(8:22) Sustaining energy over decades
(10:42) Approaching work with a beginner’s mindset
(11:58) Working together under pressure
(15:00) Taking a company public
(16:37) Breaking bad habits and forming good ones
(18:20) Science & data confirming instinct
(20:58) Daily practices that matter
(24:06) Personal scars and the early experiences that shape resilience
(26:32) Choosing the right people
(28:30) Practical ways to de-stress and regain focus
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with @smc90 @rhackett @stephbzinn @Tim_Org
In a now-annual tradition, the a16z crypto editorial team discuss themes (and picks) from a16z crypto's latest reading lists, as well as books we keep re-reading, childhood favorites, classics, adaptations on adaptations — in book and movie form! — and much more.
We cover:
- What genres are we reading now, how, and why?
- How is technology — from AI and ChatGPT to the internet and audio — changing reading?
- Why are certain themes in the zeitgeist right now?
- Is all non-fiction just fiction now (and should we lean into this for education)?
- Are the kids alright?
From irony, truth, and why context matters, to Machiavelli, Formula 1, and nautical non-fiction this episode has it all... check out our "what we're reading" lists, podcasts, and more here:
https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/tags/what-were-reading
Highlights
(0:00) Overview of the summer reading list
(0:33) The list goes beyond tech and business books
(2:02) Formula One, optimization, and recurring reading themes
(3:12) Favorite picks: ASML, semiconductors, and industrial history
(4:50) Memoirs, grief, and reading for emotional understanding
(6:40) Why nonfiction feels broken — and what replaces it
(8:20) Adventure, boats, and narrative nonfiction
(11:39) Letters, primary sources, and Renaissance writing
(17:30) Antimimetics, ideas that resist spreading, and fresh nonfiction
(19:00) Mark Twain, irony, influence, and unreliable narrators
(24:16) Podcasts/the internet as book discovery engines
(26:10) The internet replaces nonfiction?
(27:31) Anne of Green Gables and its effects
(30:21) The role of the author in fiction vs. nonfiction
(32:00) Historical fiction, context, and why it still matters
(38:12) Machiavelli and interpreting texts across time
(45:43) Gothic fiction, Dracula, and modern adaptations
(51:00) Film adaptations and creative ownership
(55:16) Audiobooks, narration, and reading styles
(1:00:54) Reading aloud, poetry, and rhythm
(1:06:44) Childhood books that shape worldview
(1:15:24) Young adult books worth revisiting
(1:18:29) Closing reflections and where to find the full list
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @BChillman @jay_drainjr @rhackett
Crypto wallets are no longer just wallets. They’re the front door to a decentralized internet.
In this episode, Phantom CEO Brandon Millman joins a16z crypto Investment Partner Jay Drain and host Robert Hackett to unpack how crypto wallets are evolving into full-blown consumer finance platforms — and why they may be the most credible candidates to become the internet's next super apps.
We explore Phantom’s journey from a Solana-first wallet to a multi-chain platform, why wallets are uniquely positioned to win trust around money, and how features like onchain trading, perps, social feeds, prediction markets, and payments are reshaping what people expect from a consumer finance app.
The conversation also dives into:
- Why starting with finance may be a better path to a super app than starting with social
- How Phantom thinks about UX, trust, and security in crypto
- The rise of perpetual futures (perps) and prediction markets
- What the FTX collapse meant for Solana — and the counterintuitive silver lining
- Whether AI agents could one day replace apps and browsers
If you’re curious about where crypto, fintech, and consumer apps are headed next — and why wallets may become the most important interface on the internet — this episode is for you.
Highlights
01:32 – The evolution and role of crypto wallets
2:42 – Wallets vs. browsers: the right mental model
12:03 – Phantom’s origin story and the Solana bet
19:05 – Perps, trading, and product-market fit
26:08 – UX, trust, and consumer finance
30:52 – Social feeds, discovery, and network effects
35:21 – Crypto as "black hole" absorbing finance
37:09 – AI agents and the future of wallets
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @zcabrams @psneville @rhackett
In this episode, Robert Hackett sits down with Sean Neville, cofounder of Circle and co-creator of the USDC stablecoin, and Zach Abrams, founder of Bridge (now part of Stripe), for a deep dive into the real story behind stablecoins, finding product-market fit, and the future of payments infrastructure.
They explore the earliest days of USDC — when stablecoins were far from obvious and regulatory frameworks didn’t exist. Sean shares how his conviction in “money running at internet speed” helped shape a multibillion-dollar asset. Zach recounts Bridge’s pivot from NFTs to stablecoin infrastructure — and how his business has changed since joining Stripe.
Together, they break down:
- Why stablecoins are having their moment now
- What counts as product-market fit (and why founders rarely “feel” it)
- The challenges of building crypto and AI products within heavily regulated environments
- Why new base-layer chains like Arc, Tempo, and others may be needed
- How decentralization, liquidity moats, and interoperability will define the next decade of blockchain adoption
- What the future of programmable money and AI-driven financial workflows looks like
Whether you’re a founder, a crypto-curious builder, or someone trying to understand where global payments are headed, this conversation — originally recorded live at our recent a16z crypto Founders Summit — offers insights from two operators at the center of an industry-defining transformation.
Guests:
• Sean Neville — Cofounder, Circle; CEO and cofounder, Catena
• Zach Abrams — Founder and CEO, Bridge (acquired by Stripe)
Highlights:
01:26 — Origins of USDC
02:44 — Why stablecoins are having their moment now
04:14 — Circle’s early product experiments
06:19— Surviving crypto cycles
07:35 — Bridge: From NFT payments to stablecoins
08:58 — What product-market fit actually feels like
20:02 — Inevitability and the founder vs. employer mindset
20:58 — Why Bridge joined Stripe
26:18 — How AI changes company building
29:38 — What students should study now
30:27 — Why new payment chains (Tempo & Arc)?
35:55 — Decentralization as imperative
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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Every traditional financial institution faces the same dilemma: evolve or fall behind, build or buy. But when safety, predictability, and trust is paramount, how do traditional finance companies innovate? How do they place their innovation bets, and decide what to explore and not to explore?
Fidelity Chairman and CEO Abigail P. Johnson shares an inside look into Fidelity’s decade of crypto experimentation -- from early Bitcoin mining to building foundational custody infrastructure to stablecoins and much more. Johnson shares how Fidelity explored dozens of crypto use cases; why only one initially mattered, and how a single foothold shaped a long-term institutional strategy.
This episode is for anyone interested in exploring how innovation happens inside companies, how startups can partner with big institutions, how TradFi is approaching crypto in this "Year of Institutional Adoption"... and what the next decade of financial infrastructure might look like.
We originally recorded it at our Founders Summit event in October 2025, in conversation with a16z crypto COO Anthony Albanese, who was the Chief Regulatory Officer of the New York Stock Exchange before joining a16z; and was previously acting superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), where he signed and issued New York’s first-ever BitLicense.
As a reminder, none of the following is investment, business, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information.
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with @cdixon @illscience
Welcome to web3 with a16z crypto. Today’s episode digs into the forces shaping the next generation of consumer software — from AI-driven tools to the new economics of apps.
Joining is Chris Dixon, a16z crypto founder and managing partner and one of the firm’s original consumer investors. He sits down with a16z General Partner Anish Acharya to explore how exponential forces — like Moore’s Law, composability, and network effects — help determine which products ultimately win.
They talk about what it takes to build enduring consumer apps, how tools evolve into networks, and why niche communities like early crypto and open source movements can trigger massive technological shifts.
Topics covered:
- What exponential forces define tech progress
- Moore’s Law, composability, and network effects
- How tools evolve into networks
- The new economics of paid consumer software
- Investing in “movements” — from 3D printing to crypto
- What makes niche communities powerful
- AI as a platform shift and the “idea maze”
- Native vs skeuomorphic tech — and what’s next for AI interfaces
- The future of open-source AI and decentralization
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @mansourtarek_ @rhackett
In this episode of web3 with a16z crypto, host Robert Hackett talks with Kalshi Cofounder and CEO Tarek Mansour about how prediction markets are enabling people to trade directly on real-world events — from elections to inflation — and what this means for the future of finance and forecasting.
Tarek explains why prediction markets aren’t gambling, how regulation has been central to Kalshi’s success, and why the company is embracing crypto and stablecoins as key components of its international strategy. He also discusses lessons learned about policy, product design, and staying compliant while innovating at the frontier.
Topics include:
- How prediction markets make society "smarter"
- The role of regulation in fintech innovation
- Why Kalshi started with crypto payments
- Lessons from FTX and the importance of compliance
- Building consumer trust and network effects
- Tarek’s take on productivity, leadership, and even… kombucha
This episode kicks off a special series of interviews recorded live at our recent Founders Summit. Subscribe to web3 with a16z crypto for more conversations with founders and builders shaping the decentralized future.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction: What are prediction markets, and why now?
01:04 – Kalshi’s mission: making forecasting tradable
01:52 – Why crypto fits into Kalshi’s long-term strategy
03:19 – Going global with stablecoins
05:55 – The long road to regulation and why it mattered
7:51 – Coinbase and Robinhood as role models
08:17 – The Trump trade: direct vs. indirect exposure to events
10:51 – Lessons from FTX and why compliance is a moat
12:06 – How Kalshi monitors markets and prevents manipulation
15:00 – Momentum after the presidential election
16:48 – How policy in DC really works
17:56 – The hidden advantage of being regulated
18:52 – Lightning round: worst advice, productivity habits, and more
21:00 – The importance of process and patience (“The Score Takes Care of Itself”)
22:30 – The smallest hill Tarek will die on
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @DavidSacks @pmarca @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
Today’s episode features David Sacks, the Trump administration’s “AI and crypto czar," in conversation with a16z cofounders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and General Partner Erik Torenberg.
They dig into:
- how the U.S. is approaching AI and crypto policy,
- the fight over open source software,
- the status of tech regulation and legislation (like the CLARITY Act for crypto),
- what’s at stake in the geopolitical race with China, and more
This episode is a special crossover with the a16z podcast, which you can follow for more conversations like this.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:16 David Sacks on Crypto and AI Policy
02:34 Trump's Vision for Crypto
06:16 The Crypto Crackdown and Debanking Years
08:58 AI Regulatory Capture and Gatekeeping
11:30 How Permissionless Innovation Built Silicon Valley
16:21 "Woke" vs. Orwellian AI
21:48 When AGI?
24:29 Polytheistic AI and "End-to-End" Humans
31:07 The Future of AI: Controlled or Decentralized?
37:13 Open Source and Global Competition
41:53 The AI Race: US vs China
46:32 Amping Up Energy and Infrastructure
47:17 Cultural Divides Over the American Tech Stack
55:01 The European approach and Doomerism
01:06:14 Crypto and the Legislative Process (GENIUS, CLARITY)
01:11:13 The Future of the Democratic Party
01:14:12 San Francisco Politics
📩 Subscribe for more industry reports, trend updates, news analysis, builder guides, and other resourcesfrom a16z crypto: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @DarenMatsuoka @eddylazzarin
Today, we’re bringing you something special: a presentation from our 2025 Founders Summit, which we just wrapped last week in beautiful Carlsbad, Calif. You’ll hear from Daren Matsuoka, our Head of Data and Fund Strategy, as he walks through the insights from this year’s State of Crypto report — our deep-dive into the data, themes, and signals shaping the industry right now.
Stay through to the end for audience Q&A featuring our founders and to hear a16z crypto CTO Eddy Lazzarin share his takes on this year’s findings. To watch the full video — and explore more deep dives, explainers, and interviews — visit the a16z crypto Youtube channel. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to stay updated.
Oh, and if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the full State of Crypto report at a16zcrypto.com/stateofcrypto, and also to listen to the episode just before this one — a conversation between Daren, Eddy, and me where we unpack the numbers and trends, explain what they mean, and why they matter.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:56 Crypto Market Developments in 2025
07:19 Institutional Adoption and Market Trends
09:05 Stablecoins: The First Killer Use Case
12:08 The Evolution of Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
13:18 DePIN and Physical Infrastructure Networks
15:12 Blockchain Scaling and Infrastructure
17:24 Privacy, ZK Technology, and Quantum Computing
18:53 Crypto and AI: Converging Technologies
21:08 Regulatory Clarity and Legislative Progress
23:27 Looking Ahead
24:04 Q&A Session
📊 Download the full State of Crypto 2025 report and explore our interactive dashboard to track the industry’s key metrics.
📩 Subscribe for more industry reports, trend updates, news analysis, builder guides, and other resources.from a16z crypto: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
🎙️ Like, subscribe, comment, share the show: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/podcast/
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @DarenMatsuoka @eddylazzarin @rhhackett
Each year, the State of Crypto report analyzes the data — cutting through the noise — to track crypto’s evolution across markets, technology, policy, culture, and more. Now in its fourth edition, the 2025 State of Crypto report reveals how this once-fringe technology has hit recent all-time highs and gone mainstream — from stablecoins and tokenized assets to rapid adoption by major financial institutions.
In this episode, we dig into the findings and themes from this year’s report with lead author Daren Matsuoka, a16z crypto’s head of data and fund strategy; and Eddy Lazzarin, a16z crypto’s chief technology officer. We talk about what’s changed since last year, why stablecoins are “suddenly” taking over, and how institutions — from fintechs to legacy banks — are embracing crypto technologies.
We also look ahead at trends like:
- AI and crypto (and where the jobs are moving);
- why stablecoins have gone mainstream
- institutional adoption — from Stripe and Visa to BlackRock and Robinhood
- privacy on public blockchains
- tokenization of real world assets
- bitcoin’s resurgence and the rise of "digital gold"
- where developer energy is going
- what’s really happening with memecoins, perps, and prediction markets
- the changing regulatory environment in the U.S.
- and what the next phase of crypto’s “adulthood” might look like — what happens next year when crypto turns 18
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
02:39 Overview of the 2025 State of Crypto Report
05:04 The Evolution and Mainstreaming of Crypto
08:27 Crypto’s Market Cycles and All-Time Highs
12:08 The Price-Innovation Cycle (and Its Dislocation)
15:40 Memecoins, Stablecoins, and Entrepreneurs
17:25 AI and Attracting Tech Talent
21:18 Crypto Adoption and User Metrics
26:58 Airdrops, Farming, and Changing Metas
31:24 Bitcoin’s Resurgence and Store of Value
42:09 Institutional Adoption and Market Dynamics
50:08 The Evolution of Stablecoins
54:20 The Growing Role of Stablecoins in the Global Economy
01:00:54 The Importance of Privacy in Crypto
01:08:46 Tokenization of ‘Real World Assets’
01:20:46 Perpetual Futures and Prediction Markets
01:29:41 Outlook for the Future
📊 Download the full State of Crypto 2025 report and explore our interactive dashboard to track the industry’s key metrics.
📩 Subscribe for more industry reports, trend updates, news analysis, builder guides, and other resources.from a16z crypto: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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Prediction markets are a hot topic again — even cartoon characters are talking about them (South Park). But beyond the buzz, what is a prediction market, exactly? How do they work, how are they designed, and what makes them work?
We answer all these questions and more in this deep-dive featuring experts Alex Tabarrok (professor of economics at George Mason University) and Scott Kominers (a16z crypto research partner and Harvard Business School professor), in conversation with Sonal Chokshi.
While we originally covered this topic during last year’s election, the discussion is more relevant than ever today, as we go into the claims people make about prediction markets — what they’re good for (and not); how they fit in with other trends like AI, futarchy, and the crisis in scientific publishing; and where blockchains and crypto come in.
This is your definitive explainer on the topic.
for transcript, links, and more: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/podcast/prediction-markets-explained/
As a reminder: None of the following should be taken as business, investment, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information.
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with @AriannaSimpson @jacqmelinek
Crypto is known for its high and low market cycles: What must founders know — and what can they do — to survive the swings?
In this episode, we unpack the lessons of past crypto cycles and how they shape the current wave of building — from stablecoins to AI x crypto. We also dive into the founder journey: from raising money and staying committed in 2025, to handling copycat competitors, cofounder disputes, growing too fast (or slowly), and more.
You'll hear from a16z crypto General Partner Arianna Simpson, who has spent over a decade investing in crypto. She joins Jacquelyn Melinek, cofounder & CEO of Token Relations and host of the Talking Tokens podcast, where this conversation first aired, and which we’re excited to share with you here.
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
1:19 Arianna Simpson's Crypto Origin Story
3:23 Market Cycles & Investing Priorities
5:52 Interrogating the Stablecoin Trend
13:25 Intersection of AI x Crypto
17:49 The Role of Blockchains for Authenticity and Verification
23:07 Future of AI Agents and Monetization Models
27:23 Traits of Successful Crypto Founders
30:05 Challenges and Changes in Fundraising
33:57 Current State of the Market
37:33 Advice for Founders:
• Pivoting when PMF is missing
• Raising capital after bootstrapping
• Competing with copycats
• Cofounder disputes and breakups
• Growing too fast & scaling pains
47:52 Conclusion
📩 Subscribe for more from a16z crypto: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
🎙️ Like, subscribe, comment, share the show: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/podcast/
As always, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @eddylazzarin @milesjennings @JasonYanowitz
Welcome to web3 with a16z crypto. Today’s episode is on a super timely topic: How to design, govern, and grow decentralized networks in today’s changing policy landscape. It covers:
- Why the “foundation era” of crypto is ending — and what comes next with DUNAs and BORGs
- How U.S. policy shifts are creating real rules of the road
- The difference between network tokens vs. company tokens (and why it matters for investors, builders, and other participants)
- When protocols should flip the fee switch and start generating revenue
- Common mistakes founders make when launching tokens and structuring projects
To unpack it all, you’ll hear from Miles Jennings, head of policy and general counsel at a16z crypto, and Eddy Lazzarin, a16z crypto’s CTO, in conversation with Jason Yanowitz, cofounder of Blockworks and host of the Empire podcast (where this conversation first aired) ... and which we’re excited to bring to you here.
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
3:14 Regulatory Progress and Optimism in DC
9:34 The Problem with Offshore Foundations
13:58 The End of the Foundation Era
27:29 DUNAs and BORGs: New Legal Structures
38:42 Understanding Network Tokens
43:42 Network Tokens: Beyond L1 and L2
48:37 Company Tokens: Evolution and Challenges
51:09 The Legal Landscape of Token Offerings
1:04:25 Turning on the Fee Switch: When and Why
1:12:47 Balancing Portfolio Needs and Regulatory Clarity
1:15:36 Common Questions from Founders
1:20:17 Conclusion
📩 Subscribe for more from a16z crypto: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/
🎙️ Like, subscribe, comment, share the show: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/podcast/
As always, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @nayafia and @smc90
Ideas, memes, and vibes are some of the most important drivers of modern technology adoption, marketing, and much more -- and have been much-covered by everyone from Darwin to Dawkins to Girard to many others. Yet the topic of antimemetics -- self-censoring (vs. self-propagating) ideas -- whether something fringe, forgotten, or forbidden -- haven't been studied as much, especially in the context of modern networks.
So in this special book-launch episode, we cover the important concept of antimemetics (and memetics) -- focusing on:
- where and how ideas take off in groups, whether in online chats or other high-shared context communities;
- how ideas not just spread but are contained, or mutate in strange ways;
- why packaging ideas matters; and
- what we can all do to move ideas to action.
Where do bureacracy, institutions, and protocols come in? What about tacit knowledge that lies in these communities, how (or do) we make it explicit? What roles -- from truth tellers to champions to individual nodes in networks -- can and do people play in making something go from mere commentary to reality? After all, ideas -- or ideas as viruses -- are how movements happen, how innovation happens, how things change... or don't ever change despite being discussed all the time.
Our expert guest in this special book episode (following in our long tradition of sharing what we're reading) is Nadia Asparouhova, the author of the new book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading; she is also the author of the book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. a16z crypto's Sonal Chokshi -- who previously hosted Nadia's book-launch episode for the a16z Podcast and almost a decade before that on the changing culture of open source -- interviews Nadia on these themes, how they connect, and why they matter for the crypto industry and beyond. We also dig into some critiques -- and opportunities for builders -- too, including what happens to the public commons; network propagation including across networks; reality distortion fields; hidden knowledge; and cultural stagnation vs. cultural abundance. All this and more in this episode of web3 with a16z!
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with @rhhackett @milesjennings @BenNapier & Michael Reed
Today we're talking about the passage of the GENIUS Act — that's the "Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act" — which provides clear rules of the road for stablecoins in the U.S. We cover the law's implications, the recent high-stakes vote in the House of Representatives, and the bipartisan efforts to pass this groundbreaking bill.
We also touch on the CLARITY Act — a major new “market structure” bill that would establish a clear regulatory framework for digital asset markets — which the House also passed with bipartisan support and which is now headed to the Senate.
Here to separate the signal from the noise are members of the a16z crypto team who had a front-row seat to the action. We've got Miles Jennings, a16z crypto's General Counsel and Head of Policy, plus a16z Government Affairs Partners Ben Napier and Michael Reed, who are responsible for liaising with House Republicans and House Democrats, respectively. They share the inside scoop.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(1:01) Understanding the GENIUS Act
(3:56) News Summary: What Happened in the House
(5:45) Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Contention
(7:01) House Vote Drama: Republicans
(9:31) House Vote Drama: Democrats
(14:28) Winners and Losers
(16:01) Decentralized Stablecoins and SEC Involvement
(17:49) CLARITY Act and Future Legislation
(21:47) Looking Ahead
Resources:
- The GENIUS Act [full text]
- Clear rules for stablecoins and the road ahead by Chris Dixon (a16z crypto, July 2025)
- The CLARITY Act — Why it matters, what to know, and what to do by Miles Jennings and Aiden Slavin (a16z crypto, July 2025)
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @rhhackett @SamBroner @skominers @liz_harkavy @CarraWu@jay_drainjr @mg_486662
Today's episode is a special one. It's a round table on some of the most compelling ideas at the intersection of AI and crypto, sourced from members of the a16z crypto team. You're going to hear from builders, researchers, and deal makers who are all wrestling with the big question: How will these two powerful technologies collide, and what happens when they do?
First, Investment Partner Sam Broner makes the case for giving AI agents universal identities. Then Research Partner Scott Kominers presents how crypto can provide AI with levels and layers of rich context. You'll also hear from Investment Partners Liz Harkavy on AI monetization models; Carra Wu on the next evolution of web crawlers; Jay Drain on proving personhood online; and finally, Security Engineer Matt Gleason on how crypto turns internet advertising on its head.
This is a tour of big, fresh ideas that hint at what an internet of the near future could look like. For the full list of ideas, check out our recent AI x crypto crossovers package, which you can find at a16zcrypto.com.
Timestamps
(0:00) Introduction
(1:44) Universal Identity for AI Agents
(5:25) Why Crypto Makes a Difference
(10:07) Context in AI: Memory and Interoperability
(15:00) Vibe Coding Applications
(19:32) Registries with Global Context
(21:47) Honkaku Mystery Novels
(24:13) Monetization Models for AI x Crypto
(28:36) Overcoming Technical Challenges
(31:34) AI Agents and the Rise of Web Crawlers
(36:05) Collapse of the Social Contract
(39:21) AI Bots and Blockchain Solutions
(44:31) Proof of Personhood: Ensuring Human-ness
(50:41) Future of Personalized Advertising
(1:01:54) Final Thoughts
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @rhhackett @smc90 @stephbzinn @tim_org
In a now-annual tradition, the a16z crypto editorial team discuss themes (and picks) from a16z crypto's latest reading list, as well as books we keep re-reading, childhood favorites, classics, adaptations on adaptations -- in book and movie form! -- and much more.
What genres are we reading now, how, and why? How is technology -- from AI and ChatGPT to the internet and audio -- changing reading? And why are certain themes in the zeitgeist right now? Is all non-fiction just fiction now, and should we lean in to this for education? Are the kids alright?
From irony, truth, and why context matters, to Machiavelli to Formula 1 to nautical non-fiction to memoirs, this episode has it all...
check out our "what we're reading" lists, podcasts, and more here:
https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/tags/what-were-reading
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with @DarenMatsuoka @rhhackett
Today we've got a midyear market update and news episode for you.
At the end of last year, our guest — and resident data weatherman — Daren Matsuoka put out a post on "5 metrics to watch in 2025." Most of the metrics that Daren picked measure how crypto's adoption: from mobile wallet usage and onchain transaction fees to volume across stablecoins, decentralized exchanges (or DEXs), and exchange traded-products. Now that we're about midway through 2025, it's a great time for an update.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(2:27) Chart 1: Monthly Mobile Wallet Users
(6:16) Chart 2: Adjusted Stablecoin Transaction Volume
(10:01) Chart 3: ETF Net Flows for Bitcoin and Ethereum
(13:30) Chart 4: Decentralized vs Centralized Exchange Volume
(15:50) Chart 5: Total Transaction Fees
(21:46) Emerging Metrics and Industry Insights
(25:07) Recent Industry News and Developments
(27:13) Conclusion
Relevant news:
- Circle, issuer of the USDC stablecoin, went public on the New York Stock Exchange exchange on June 5 and there was extremely strong demand for the company's offering.
- Stripe announced on June 11 that it would be acquiring a crypto company, Privy, which helps companies create crypto wallets — adding to Stripe's earlier acquisition of Bridge, which helps companies work with stablecoins.
- Shopify partnered with Stripe and Coinbase to enable merchants to accept USDC payments.
- Coinbase has a new credit card in partnership with American Express, which gives you Bitcoin rewards.
- The French bank Société Générale announced plans for a dollar-backed stablecoin that will run on Ethereum and Solana with BNY Mellon acting as custodian for the reserves.
- JPMorgan Chase plans to launch a U.S. dollar “deposit token” called JPMD on Coinbase's Base network.
If you enjoyed this episode, stay tuned for our annual big State of Crypto Report, which we'll drop in the fall. If you want more from Daren, you can follow him @DarenMatsuoka on X or visit a16zcrypto.com to read his posts, including the one we talked about today.
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @MinarikLaw @EMinSF @rhhackett
Imagine waking up one day to find your bank account frozen. No warning. No explanation. No recourse.
This is not a thought experiment. It’s a real situation. And it’s happened not just to crypto companies and their founders, but to ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives. That includes our guest today, who learned firsthand what it means to be “debanked.”
In this episode, we talk about the unseen algorithms that monitor people’s accounts, the ramifications of the Bank Secrecy Act, and how crypto and decentralized finance may offer a much-needed check — and safety net — against the opaque systems of traditional finance.
Joining us are:
- Uniswap Labs’s Chief Legal Officer Katherine Minarik, who shares her personal story of being debanked and what it taught her.
- a16z crypto Finance and Operations Partner Em Westerhold, who helps founders navigate these issues, and who has tracked dozens of instances of debanking across our own portfolio.
A big thank you to Katherine for trusting us to share her story, which you can read a first-hand account of in an op-ed she contributed to a16zcrypto.com earlier this year. Find that and more below.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(2:03) The Problem of Debanking
(5:58) Debanking: A Personal Story
(7:33) Understanding the Bank Secrecy Act
(11:53) The Information Vacuum
(16:55) The Impact on Crypto Companies
(20:07) Addressing Skeptics
(22:07) Banks: Good vs. Bad
(27:35) The Scariest Moment
(36:17) "Operation Chokepoint 2.0"
(38:08) History of the Bank Secrecy Act
(44:04) Security Theater
(45:31) What Would You Change?
(48:45) The Impact of Financial Consolidation
(49:30) Crypto as Banking Solution
(53:02) Is Debanking Still Happening?
(58:35) Unresolved Mysteries
(1:01:47) One More Debanking Story
(1:08:07) Conspiracy or Coincidence?
(1:09:39) It Shouldn't Be This Hard
(1:11:18) Out From Under the SEC's Cloud
(1:14:23) The Urgent Need for Legislation
(1:17:26) Possible Tech Futures
(1:19:33) Advice for Founders
(1:22:04) Final Thoughts
Resources:
- Anyone can get debanked. DeFi is a critical safety net by Katherine Minarik (a16z crypto, February 2025)
- This op-ed is part of a bigger package of crypto policy views found here: “U.S. as the crypto capital: What it would take”
- Debanking: What you need to know (a16z crypto, December 2024)
- End the era of mass financial surveillance by Grant Rabenn (a16z crypto, February 2025)
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @aeyakovenko @alive_eth
Today’s episode features Solana cofounder Anatoly Yakovenko in conversation with a16z General Partner Ali Yahya, recorded live at our CSX Crypto Startup Accelerator program earlier this year.
Anatoly shares the origin story of Solana — from a late-night eureka moment to thousands of investor meetings and several near-death startup experiences. He talks about what it took to get the network off the ground, how his engineering background at Qualcomm shaped its design, and why a need for speed gave Solana its edge.
They also get into developer culture, engineering trade-offs, and what differentiates Solana’s approach to building — including its willingness to ship, iterate, and rethink everything: including, most recently, its consensus algorithm.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(2:54) Early Career and Move to SF
(3:57) Discovering Crypto and Solana's Beginnings
(8:28) Challenges and Fundraising
(12:12) Building Solana and Overcoming Obstacles
(13:41) Solana's Vision and Market Strategy
(17:23) Navigating Crises and Team Resilience
(22:37) Solana's Unique Approach and Future Plans
(24:57) Solana's Unique Approach to Software Development
(26:35) Redesigning Solana: Lessons Learned
(30:22) The Importance of Hackathons and Community
(32:32) Technical Choices and Implications
(34:16) Prioritizing User Experience Over Developer Comfort
(36:40) Competitive Landscape of Layer 1 Chains
(38:49) Building a Loyal Developer Community
(42:36) Future of Blockchains and Solana's Vision
(47:29) Long-Term View and Goals
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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In this special episode from TED Tech, hear from GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke on how AI is breaking the barrier to entry for coding. Who could a coder look like if you could code just by talking out loud? Learn how, thanks to AI, creating software is becoming as simple (and joyful) as building LEGO. In a live demo, he introduces Copilot Workspace: an AI assistant that helps you create code when you speak to it, in any language.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(0:28) Personal Journey into Coding
(2:31) The Evolution of Programming Languages
(4:02) The Birth of GitHub Copilot
(6:14) Live Demo: Building with Copilot
(9:58) The Future of Software Development
(13:04) Q&A: The Role of Humans in AI-Driven Development
(14:32) Conclusion
About TED Tech:
From the construction of virtual realities to the internet of things — technology is changing our world every day. But how can we make sure that the quickly-evolving role that tech plays in our lives is one that builds, empowers, and connects us? Host Sherrell Dorsey guides you through the latest ideas from TED Speakers, uncovering the riveting questions that sit at the intersection of technology, society, science, design, business, and innovation. Listen in every Friday.
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @eddylazzarin @adrian_ludwig @remco @smc90
Hi everyone, welcome to this week’s episode of web3 with a16z podcast, I’m Sonal, and today we’re talking about a hot topic which is also very evergreen because we’re entering a world where AI – including AI agents, bots, deep fakes, and so on -- are changing the internet, very drastically. And so we will need proof of who’s human, or not, online – aka “proof of human” (as Tools for Humanity and World app call it).
The theme is actually represented on the latest cover of Time magazine, which features the Tools for Humanity orb: a ball-like hardware device that maps your eye’s iris code to an app on your phone to verify you’re human. (It’s actually only the fifth time in the past decade that hardware tech’s been on the cover; the other times are the iphone, Oculus, consumer drones, and SpaceX.)
Since the technology -- and network -- story here draws on both existing and new tech to help solve what’s actually a very difficult problem -- and in a way where privacy is by default -- we begin with the why it matters, then go into some common questions, and finally how it all works under the hood. Our expert guests are:
- Eddy Lazzarin, CTO at a16zcrypto;
- Adrian Ludwig, Chief Architect and CISO at Tools for Humanity; and
- Remco Bloemen, Head of Protocol at World.
As a reminder: None of the following is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information including link to a list of our investments.
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with @kimbatronic@amandatylerj@clairekart
Welcome to web3 with a16z. Since our show covers both tech trends and company building, today’s topic is all about marketing — including differences between marketing in crypto and traditional tech.
The conversation shares a candid look at what works — and what doesn’t — when it comes to building reputation and community, attracting developers, hiring teams and agencies, launching tokens, raising founder profiles, and more.
Our experts are:
... Amanda Tyler, who was most recently Head of Marketing at the Optimism Foundation (and was formerly at Polygon, Coinbase, and Google);
... Claire Kart, Chief Marketing Officer at Aztec (who previously was at Risc Zero and SoFi);
... in conversation with Kim Milosevich, CMO at a16z crypto (who was formerly VP of Comms at Coinbase, and who has spent decades in tech at a16z, Skype, Yahoo, and elsewhere).
Timestamps
(0:00) Introduction
(1:41) The Role of Marketers
(4:52) Tech Marketing vs. Crypto Marketing
(6:34) Understanding the Core Audience
(10:56) Marketing for Ethereum and Layer 2 Projects
(16:09) The Role of Community Managers and Developer Relations
(25:21) Token Launch Strategies
(34:42) Building Founders' Profiles (Without Being Cringe)
(38:53) How to Support Founders
(40:55) When to Hire
(43:05) Consultants vs. Agencies
(46:08) Structuring a Marketing Team
(48:27) Finding and Hiring Talent
(50:36) Building an Editorial Content Operation
(53:39) International Marketing Strategies
(56:41) The Role of Events
(1:01:48) Memes and Crypto Culture
(1:04:57) Conclusion
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @cdixon @SamBroner @rhhackett
Stablecoins are quietly transforming how money moves — faster, cheaper, and more globally than ever before.
In this episode, we take a deep look at why stablecoins have emerged as one of the most promising applications in crypto today — and how they could reshape global payments.
I’m joined by Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner of a16z crypto and author of the New York Times-bestselling book Read Write Own, and Sam Broner, a deal partner at a16z crypto who focuses on stablecoins.
Together, we unpack the technical and regulatory foundations of stablecoins, explore the cracks in the current payments system, and look ahead to what becomes possible once digital dollars go mainstream. We also dig into the current state of regulation — and why the future of money might end up looking a lot more like email or the web than a bank.
Check out the show notes for links and resources that we reference throughout this episode. Also be sure to listen to the episode we dropped just before this one where we analyze all the recent stablecoin news.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(1:45) Payments, Finance, and the Internet
(4:03) The Promise and Potential of Stablecoins
(9:02) Global Financial System and Its Shortcomings
(11:29) The WhatsApp Analogy
(15:38) The Read Write Own Thesis
(19:15) The Power of Blockchains
(21:06) Venmo's Business Model
(23:17) Stripe's Opportunity
(25:11) Backwards Compatibility (Like Skype)
(28:13) The Role of Stablecoin Regulation
(34:36) Political Realities (vs. Big Banks)
(38:11) The Business Implications of Stablecoins
(40:31) The Stablecoin Investment Paradox
(47:07) Why Blockchains?
(51:11) Tech Marketing: Words vs. Products
(54:28) What Happens Next
(57:26) Global Demand for Stablecoins
(59:37) Learning from the Past
(1:05:06) Conclusion
Links to related resources:
- A guide to stablecoins: What, why, and how by a16z crypto editorial (a16z crypto, April 2025)
- Stablecoins: Payments without intermediaries by Chris Dixon (a16z crypto, April 2025)
- The month fintechs embraced stablecoins by Sam Broner (a16z crypto, May 2025)
- What Stripe's acquisition of Bridge means for fintech and stablecoins by James da Costa and Sam Broner (a16z crypto, April 2025)
- How stablecoins will eat payments, and what happens next by Sam Broner (a16z crypto, December 2024)
- A useful framework for understanding stablecoins: Banking history by Sam Broner (a16z crypto, November 2024)
- Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet by Chris Dixon (Random House, January 2024)
- A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class by Joe Nocera (Simon & Schuster, October 1994)
- All about airdrops [podcast] by Eddy Lazzarin, Daren Matsuoka, Andrew Hall, and Robert Hackett (a16z crypto, April 2025)
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @rhhackett@smc90@DarenMatsuoka@SamBroner
Welcome to web3 with a16z, a show about the next generation of the internet. I'm Robert Hackett.
There has been a flurry of stablecoin news lately, so we're doing a special bonus episode to cover everything that's been going on. Sonal and I are joined by a16z crypto’s Data Science lead Daren Matsuoka who shares the actual data behind the stablecoin trend. Then we have Sam Broner — who is a Deal Partner here and our frequent author on stablecoins — to analyze the news, and help highlight the signal versus the noise.
Here's a selection of the news:
- USDC issuer Circle filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange
- Coinbase released an agentic payments standard with support for stablecoin payments
- Visa and Mastercard enhanced stablecoin support
- Stripe announced stablecoin financial account balances, a programmable stablecoin (via Bridge), a stablecoin-backed card, and more
- Meta is reportedly in talks to introduce stablecoins as a means for payouts
- And much more
We also have one of our regular episodes covering the broader stablecoins trend and big picture, dropping separately in the feed, also with Sam and a16z crypto Founder Chris Dixon, so be sure to check that out next.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(1:30) Stablecoin Data Overview
(3:55) Stablecoin Adoption and Infrastructure
(4:24) Market Share of Issuers and Blockchains
(6:10) Stablecoin Growth vs. Crypto Market Cycles
(7:45) Stablecoin News and Developments
(9:44) Fintech Embraces Stablecoins
(12:44) Legacy Payment Systems vs. Stablecoins
(17:04) The Future of Stablecoins and Open Networks
(22:11) Conclusion
Links to related resources:
- Everything stablecoins: Big picture, deep dive with Chris Dixon, Sam Broner, and Robert Hackett (a16z crypto, May 2025)
- A chart of stablecoin usage growth vs. crypto market cyclicality (@DarenMatsuoka on X)
- The month fintechs embraced stablecoins by Sam Broner (a16z crypto, May 2025)
- What Stripe's acquisition of Bridge means for fintech and stablecoins by James da Costa and Sam Broner (a16z crypto, April 2025)
- A guide to stablecoins: What, why, and how by a16z crypto editorial (a16z crypto, April 2025)
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @danboneh @succinctJT @smc90
This episode is all about quantum computing -- what it is, how it works, what's hype vs. reality, and how to prepare for it/ what builders should do.
Specifically, we cover:
- What quantum computing is and isn't, and what people are really talking about when they worry about a quantum computer that can break cryptographic systems that are not secure against quantum attacks.
- When is it happening/ what are the "timelines" for quantum computing becoming a reality -- or rather, when could we have a cryptographically relevant quantum computer -- how many years away are we? and when are the U.S. government's deadlines/ NIST standards for post-quantum cryptography?
- How will different types of cryptography be affected, or not? What are different approaches and tradeoffs?
- Where does quantum computing and post-quantum crypto apply to blockchains -- which by and large rely on signatures, not encryption, so may be more quantum-resistant in many ways (and not in others)...
As always, we tease apart the signal vs. the noise in recent "science-by-press release" corporate quantum-computing milestone announcements. We also help answer questions on when do builders need to plan their switch to a post-quantum crypto world, what pitfalls to avoid there (hint: bugs! software upgrades!). Finally, we briefly cover different approaches to post-quantum crypto; and also dig deeper on zero-knowledge/ succinct-proof systems and how they relate to post-quantum crypto.
Our expert guests, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi, are:
- Dan Boneh,Stanford University professor and applied cryptography expert and pioneer; also Senior Research Advisor to a16z crypto;
- Justin Thaler, research partner at a16z, professor at Georgetown, and longtime expert and pioneer in interactive and ZK proof systems.
SEE ALSO: Post-quantum blockchains by Valeria Nikolaenko
more resources + papers on topics mentioned:
- A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography by Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup [see also]
- Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Justin Thaler
- LatticeFold+: Faster, Simpler, Shorter Lattice-Based Folding for Succinct Proof Systems by Dan Boneh and Binyi Chen
- Neo: Lattice-based folding scheme for CCS over small fields and pay-per-bit commitments by Wilson Nguyen and Srinath Setty
- "Q-Day Clock" from Project Eleven -- public dashboard to visually track timeline for quantum computing to reach cryptographically relevant capabilities and break widely used encryption algorithms
- on hard forks for quantum emergencies
- Quantum analysis of AES, Kyungbae Jang, Anubhab Baksi, Hyunji Kim, Gyeongju Song, Hwajeong Seo, Anupam Chattopadhyay
- The Google Willow Thing by Scott Aaronson
- FAQs on Microsoft’s topological qubit thing by Scott Aaronson
- Microsoft’s claim of a topological qubit faces tough questions, American Physical Society
As a reminder, none of this is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information including a link to our investments.
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with @eddylazzarin @skominers @milesjennings @rhhackett
Today we're diving deep into the defining concept in crypto: tokens.
We're moving beyond conventional categories — like “governance tokens” or “utility tokens” or even “memecoins” — to present a full taxonomy that details what tokens are, what they aren’t, and what they're capable of becoming.
Questions we'll explore include: What is a token? Is it a form of money? A piece of data? Something else? How many types of tokens are there — and who is in control of each? And how should we think about their actual economic, legal, and technical characteristics? We'll also dig into different token designs and their uses; where tokens derive value from; how they jibe with securities laws; and much more.
In this conversation, you’ll hear from several experts on the a16z crypto team who have developed a new 7-part framework for classifying tokens, which you can find linked below. Joining us are the coauthors: Chief Technology Officer Eddy Lazzarin, General Counsel and Head of Policy Miles Jennings, and Research Partner Scott Kominers, who is also a Professor at Harvard Business School where he teaches courses on market design and entrepreneurship.
Check out the resources below for a flowchart that we’ll also be referencing throughout this episode and that will be helpful as we wend our way through the token idea maze.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(3:28) The Evolution of Token Terminology
(6:19) Classifying Tokens: Economic, Legal, and Technical Dimensions
(8:37) Moving Beyond “Governance Tokens”
(12:05) Inherent Value: The Memecoin Debate
(15:35) Company-Controlled Tokens: Risks and Realities
(31:33) Arcade Tokens: Stability and Utility
(46:00) The Power of Blockchain Interoperability
(49:34) Shared Rewards and Loyalty Programs
(59:19) Asset-Backed Tokens and Their Mechanisms
(1:08:23) Collectible Tokens and Their Uniqueness
(1:14:31) Network Tokens: The Future of Decentralized Marketplaces
(1:31:03) Regulatory Challenges and "Lawyer Tokens"
(1:36:57) Final Thoughts and Future Prospects
Resources referenced in this episode:
- 7 canonical tokens, defined [see flowchart] by Miles Jennings, Scott Duke Kominers, and Eddy Lazzarin (a16z crypto newsletter, March 2025)
- Defining tokens by Miles Jennings, Scott Duke Kominers, and Eddy Lazzarin (a16z crypto, March 2025)
- Network tokens vs. company-backed tokens by Miles Jennings, Scott Duke Kominers, and Eddy Lazzarin (a16z crypto, March 2025)
- Defining decentralization: It comes down to control by Miles Jennings (a16z crypto, February 2025)
- Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet by Chris Dixon (Penguin Random House, January 2024)
- The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create by Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers (Penguin Random House, January 2024)
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @ilblackdragon @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. I’m your host, Robert Hackett.
In this episode, we're diving deep into one of the most intriguing intersections in tech today: AI and crypto.
To help us unpack it, we're joined by Illia Polosukhin — co-founder of the crypto protocol NEAR and co-author of the groundbreaking 2017 "transformers" paper that kicked off the current AI boom. Ilia has been early to some of the biggest recent tech trends, and today he brings us a rare, panoramic view of the tech industry’s cutting edge.
Together we explore what the phrase “user-owned AI” really means; why the so-called agentic internet — that is, a world where your AI assistant talks directly to services on your behalf — might replace the very notion of websites and apps as we know them; and much more.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(3:40) Centralization and Challenges of AI
(6:17) "User-Owned" AI
(12:14) Confidential Computing and AI
(17:51) The Birth of Transformers
(22:33) NEAR AI and Crowdsourcing
(27:56) AI Agents and Future Applications
(31:04) The End of Websites and Applications
(34:08) Dead Internet Theory & Distinguishing Humans
(41:49) Open Source vs. Open Weight Models
(43:48) Geopolitical Implications of AI
(46:55) NEAR Protocol and Blockchain Scaling
(59:29) The Role of Humans in an AI World
Resources:
- Attention is all you need by Vaswani et al. (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2017)
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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with @eddylazzarin @DarenMatsuoka @ahall_research @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. I’m Robert Hackett.
Today we’re talking about one of the most familiar — and most misunderstood — mechanics in crypto: the airdrop.
We’ll explore the history of airdrops in and outside crypto, the challenges of incentive design, and learnings from airdrops to date. We’ll also answer questions like how do you avoid Sybil attacks and professional airdrop farming? Should your drop be big or small, one-time or ongoing? And what happens when AI agents enter the mix?
To break it all down, we’re joined by:
- a16z crypto’s Chief Technology Officer Eddy Lazzarin;
- a16z crypto Data Science Partner Daren Matsuoka; and
- a16z crypto Research Consultant Andrew Hall, who is also a Professor of Political Economics at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Whether you're planning a token launch, looking for token rewards, or just curious why airdrops have become such a powerful mechanism in crypto — this episode is for you.
Timestamps:
(0:00) introduction
(1:42) what is an airdrop?
(6:27) tokens vs traditional equity
(8:49) incentive design challenges
(15:18) origins from credit cards to crypto
(17:14) Optimism airdrop case study
(23:09) NFT market learnings
(28:32) Sybil resistance and verifying humanity
(33:04) Uniswap airdrop and beyond
(36:35) AI agents and the future of airdrops
(40:33) connection to performance reviews
(45:30) token vesting and volatility
(49:08) experimentation vs. best practices
(59:20) Batesian mimicry
Resources:
- Research into how airdrops can increase user retention [Optimism Collective forum; January 2025]
- Effects of Optimism airdrop 2 on governance participation [a16z crypto; June 2024]
- One From Many: Visa and the Rise of Chaordic Organization by Dee Hock [Berrett-Koehler Publishers; October 2005]
- How the '9-Box' talent review system can make or break your career [Forbes; March 2024]
- Batesian mimicry [American Museum of Natural History; July 2023]
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @mostrovs @skominers @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. I’m your host Robert Hackett, and today we’re talking about congestion pricing — an area of mechanism design that’s aimed at alleviating something everyone hates: traffic.
Now you may have heard this term recently since New York adopted its own version of congestion pricing at the beginning of the year. This is the first program of its kind in the U.S. — and it’s got supporters and detractors. We’ll talk about that, and we’re also going to talk about much more.
In the first part of today’s episode we’ll trace the history of the economic ideas that got us here. In the middle, we’ll dig deeper into the details of putting congestion pricing into practice, plus technological alternatives. And in the final part, we’ll explore parallels to — and implications for — crypto networks.
Our guests are Michael Ostrovsky, a Stanford Economics Professor who specializes in this area and who has done research on congestion pricing in New York. We’re also joined by a16z crypto Research Partner Scott Kominers, who is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School where he teaches market design and entrepreneurship.
Timestamps:
(0:00) introduction
(1:51) NYC proposal history
(3:38) economic theory of congestion pricing
(9:15) implementation: challenges and solutions
(26:00) technological alternatives and drones
(29:49) overnight delivery and other possibilities
(35:20) carpooling and how to encourage it
(39:34) congestion pricing and crypto
(47:59) lessons for blockchains
Resources:
- Michael Ostrovsky's paper on congestion pricing in New York City (from before the launch, foreseeing its issues): https://web.stanford.edu/~ost/papers/nyc.pdf
- Michael Ostrovsky's thread that went viral on X shortly after the debut of congestion pricing in New York, discussing the post-launch evidence, his team's data collection efforts, and the link between observed data and predictions in the above paper: https://x.com/mostrovs/status/1876798157595476420
- Two of Ostrovsky's earlier theoretical papers on the topic: (1) https://web.stanford.edu/~ost/papers/complementarity.pdf, (2) https://web.stanford.edu/~ost/papers/sdc.pdf
- Economist William Vickrey's influential paper on congestion pricing: Vickrey, W. S. (1969). Congestion theory and transport investment. American Economic Review 59 (2), 251–260. https://matthewturner.org/ec2410/readings/Vickrey_AER_1969.pdf
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
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Welcome to web3 with a16z. Today we’re talking about a founder’s journey from academia to the tech startup world — and the many lessons he’s learned along the way.
We dig into big ideas, like what people mean when they call blockchains "truth machines." We also share practical advice and insights, like how to go about deciding on your life’s work; what you can do to keep increasing — and compounding — your leverage; plus, how a bungled interview question can change your life.
Today’s episode features a conversation between Eigen Labs Founder Sreeram Kannan, formerly an associate professor at the University of Washington where he led its Blockchain Lab, and a16z crypto General Partner Ali Yahya.
This conversation originally took place in the fall at our CSX crypto startup accelerator in New York. If you like what you hear, subscribe to the a16z crypto YouTube channel for this video and many others like it.
Timestamps:
(0:00) introduction
(1:25) open innovation
(4:08) evolution of blockchain technologies
(12:34) journey from academia
(16:00) one of the best life lessons
(19:40) impact of network information theory
(24:31) activation energy and moving earth
(29:13) building a trust network
(36:20) blockchains as commitment engines
(45:17) Q&A
(45:57) the power of narrative
(52:19) restaking and the memetic sphere
(56:01) two approaches to problem solving
(59:53) startup focus and exponential games
(1:04:56) professor coins
(1:09:03) win-win or no deal
(01:13:59) conclusion
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @SashaSpiegelman @Tim_Roughgarden @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. Today we’re talking about the ins and outs of blockchain performance.
How does the “speed” of one chain compare to another? What are the tricky ways that people talk about important metrics like throughput and latency? And how do design choices across things like consensus and execution result in performance tradeoffs?
Our guest today is Aptos Labs’ Head of Research Sasha Spiegelman, who is helping build out and develop technologies he originally co-created at Meta. We’re also joined by a16z crypto Head of Research and Columbia University professor Tim Roughgarden, who specializes in the intersection of computer science and economics, which is fitting as we dig into technical details throughout.
Timestamps:
(0:00) introduction
(2:48) understanding blockchain metrics
(7:59) consensus protocols: PBFT and beyond
(14:56) innovations from Meta’s Novi to Aptos
(20:51) optimizing blockchain execution (with BlockSTM)
(25:23) tech debate: dynamic vs. static parallelism
(27:55) open source and the prisoner’s dilemma
(29:15) conclusion
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @mg_486662 and @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. I’m Robert Hackett and today we’re talking about what is potentially the biggest heist of all time — a hack of the Dubai-based crypto exchange ByBit which took place last month for a total of $1.5 billion and which the Federal Bureau of Investigation has attributed to a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group.
In this episode, we cover details of how the attack went down, the state of crypto security across different types of wallets and organizations, and what you can do to help protect yourself from similar attacks.
We’re joined by Matt Gleason, a security expert at a16z crypto, whose excellent write-up of the incident you can find below. We’ve also included an FBI PSA about the hack and other useful links as well.
Resources:
- Breaking down the ByBit hack: Lessons to learn from crypto’s largest heist [a16z crypto; March 2025]
- North Korea responsible for $1.5 billion ByBit hack [FBI; February 2025]
- Learn THIS so you don't lose $50M | Multi-sig (Safe) Hardware Wallet Verification [Patrick Collins on YouTube; January 2025]
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @haydenzadams @kidsuper @smc90
This episode involves a special mix of guests:
- Hayden Adams, founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs, and inventor of the Uniswap Protocol a leader in decentralized finance (DeFi); they recently announced Unichain; and
- Colm Dillane, the multimedia artist behind fashion brand KidSuper, CFDA award winner who has his own Warhol Factory-like creative studio and space; Dillane started out selling t-shirts in his highschool cafeteria, and then went on to present his collection at Paris Fashion week — and has also done creative campaigns for iconic brands from Louis Vuitton and Mercedes Benz to Puma and Converse
...in conversation with editor in chief Sonal Chokshi. The conversation originally took place at our Founder Summit (October 2024) but is more relevant than ever as the crypto industry focuses on mainstream applications and users. It covers:
- industry jargon, to making technology not just more broadly available but more culturally and socially understood
- the power of naming, including the origin story behind the unicorn and Unisocks and more
- the difference between marketing vs. spectacle
- the power of early community and what it means to expand to new users vs "sell out”
- drops -- “airdrops” in crypto; drops in fashion (a la Supreme), and just product launches in general
We also touch on some questions and issues around open source, including forking and copying -- good or bad? -- and whether a collective can actually do good design.
The theme throughout is about innovating vs. stagnating -- learning from different industries and places; trying (unexpected) new things, even when there may not be a clear business case up front, and much more.
As a reminder: None of the following should be taken as business, investment, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Welcome to web3 with a16z, today we’re running a special episode about the intersection of AI and crypto.
Our guests are a16z crypto Founder and Managing Partner Chris Dixon & a16z Growth General Partner David George. They discuss the broken economics of the internet, new models for creative people, how to think through the first-, second- and third-order effects of big platform shifts, and more.
Today’s episode is a crossover from a16z’s AI Revolution conversation series — and it’s especially timely as the paperback edition of Chris Dixon’s bestselling book Read Write Own goes to print. Check out the show notes for links to those and more.
- Watch the video here
- Read the transcript here
- See more from the AI Revolution conversation series here
- Check out Chris Dixon's book Read Write Own here
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @1HowardWu @SuccinctJT @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. Today’s show is all about privacy, why it matters, and how to achieve it technically onchain.
It's fair to say that many blockchains today are quite… revealing. But that openness and transparency doesn’t work for everything — who would want anyone to have full-on X-Ray vision into your finances? That’s one reason why there’s been a growing appreciation for — and trend toward — more blockchain privacy.
Our guest today argues that there are many other reasons you might want some secrecy too, including a whole host of onchain applications and uses that only become feasible when you have a notion of privacy. That guest is Provable Cofounder and CEO Howard Wu who helped invent the protocols behind and build Aleo, a privacy-focused blockchain network. Wu joins a16z crypto Research Partner Justin Thaler, who is also a computer scientist at Georgetown University (as well as the brains behind the cutting-edge, open source zkVM Jolt), plus me, your host, Robert Hackett.
The first voice you’ll hear is mine, then Howard’s, then Justin’s.
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @benleventhal @AriannaSimpson
Welcome to web3 with a16z. How many of you are regulars at a favorite cafe, bar, or dinner spot? Probably a lot of you — but if you’re not, well, our guest today aims to make you one.
This episode features Ben Leventhal — the founder and CEO of BlackBird, and formerly the founder of Resy and Eater. In it, he shares his journey as a serial entrepreneur in conversation with a16z crypto General Partner Arianna Simpson.
Ben shares hard-won lessons learned in company-building, including navigating in wartime; the difference between measuring vs feeling when it comes to defining success; and more.
Today’s conversation originally took place in the fall at our CSX Crypto Startup Accelerator in New York. We're currently accepting applications for our next cohort in the spring in San Francisco. Visit a16zcrypto.com/csx for more information and to apply.
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @0xgaut @ishverduzco @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. Today we’re talking about how to make social media workfor you, rather than overwhelming you.
Whether you’re a startup founder, creator, avid doomscroller, or longtime lurker, this show has tips and tactics you can use to attract attention, build a following, and level up your online presence.
In this episode, we cover what to do and what not to do, how much of your authentic self to bring to the table vs. merely playing to the algorithms, turning your interests and obsessions into viral hits, and what standup comedy has to do with the art of posting.
Our guest today is Gauthier Le Meur, aka Gaut, a meme-maker with a cult following who also happens to be the cofounder and chief operating officer of Alongside, a DeFi project that creates investible crypto market indices. Joining him is the man behind our handles, a16z crypto Social Lead Ish Verduzco, as well as me, your host, Robert Hackett.
Resources
- Social for startup founders: A practical guide to building an online presence by Ish Verduzco [a16z crypto, August 2024]
- How to build a social presence in web3 and beyond [video]
- How to 10x on Twitter (without getting lucky) [@ishverduzco on X, March 2021]
- 24 Prompts to Get Over Writer's Block in 2024 by Ish Verduzco [The Creator Blueprint, January 2024]
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Welcome to web3 with a16z. Today's episode is all about design, creativity, and taste-making.
Our special guest is Jason Mayden, the chief design officer of Jordan Brand at Nike — that's Jordan as in former NBA superstar Michael Jordan. In his role, Mayden is responsible for the look and feel of iconic products, like Air Jordan sneakers and related apparel.
In this episode, Mayden speaks with Chris Lyons, a16z crypto's president of web3 media, about the interdisciplinary nature of industrial design, the role of humans in an AI world, what makes fashion and food alike, and how to build a brand, whether you’re in crypto, sportswear, or another field.
This conversation originally took place at a16z crypto's Founders Summit in the fall of 2024. Be sure to subscribe to the a16z crypto Youtube channel where you can listen to more from that event, plus many more thought-provoking talks and other resources.
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @carrawu @eddylazzarin @0xkarmacoma and @smc90 @rhhackett
Welcome to our special end-of-year episodes -- which also look ahead to 2025 -- covering our annual Big Ideas lists, where various a16z crypto team members share what they are personally excited about. (You can see the firmwide list, also including all the trends of the crypto team, here.)
This episode is part 2 of 2 -- but you don't have to listen to them in any particular order -- covering the intersection of crypto & AI:
- agents that have their own crypto wallets -- and also AI agents in games; DePin/ decentralized physical infrastructure, like energy grids; and more;
- proof of personhood, and why having a unique ID matters in a world of deepfakes, bots, scams and more is needed with proliferating AI;
- decentralized, truly autonomous, chatbots (using TEEs or trusted execution environment).
Covering each of these -- and coming from the investing, engineering, and other teams -- are: Carra Wu, Eddy Lazzarin, and Karma (aka Daniel Reynaud); in conversation with hosts Sonal Chokshi and Robert Hackett, who also share some commentary at the top.
These are just a few of the 14 trends we shared; you can check out the full list at a16zcrypto.com/bigideas.
Also be sure to check out part 1, which covers the trends of stablecoins, app stores, infrastructure, and user experience.
As a reminder, none of the content is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @sambroner @meigga @darenmatsuoka @jneu_net @chrislyons and @rhhackett @smc90
Welcome to our special end-of-year episodes -- which also look ahead to 2025 -- covering our annual Big Ideas lists, where various a16z crypto team members share what they are personally excited about. (You can see the firmwide list, also including all the trends of the crypto team, here.)
This episode is part 1 of 2 -- but you don't have to listen to them in any particular order -- covering the trends and themes of:
- stablecoins, payments, and where the early adopters will come from;
- app store distribution, curation, and discovery;
- where the next crypto users will come from, turning passive holders into active users;
- how builders improve, and better choose, infrastructure; and
- simplifying user experience.
Covering each of these -- and coming from the investing, go-to-market, data science, research, and media teams are: Sam Broner, Maggie Hsu, Daren Matsuoka, Joachim Neu, and Chris Lyons; in conversation with hosts Sonal Chokshi and Robert Hackett. (Stay tuned until the end for some of our meta-commentary.)
These are just 5 of the 14 trends we shared; you can check out the full list at a16zcrypto.com/bigideas.
Also be sure to check out part 2, which covers all the trends at the intersection of crypto and AI.
As a reminder, none of the content is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @atabarrok @skominers @smc90
We've heard a lot about the premise and the promise of prediction markets for a long time, but they finally hit the main stage with the most recent election. So what worked (and didn't) this time? Are they better than pollsters, journalists, domain experts, superforecasters?
So in this conversation, we tease apart the hype from the reality of prediction markets, from the recent election to market foundations... going more deeply into the how, why, and where these markets work. We also discuss the design challenges and opportunities, including implications for builders throughout. And we also cover other information aggregation mechanisms -- from peer prediction to others -- given that prediction markets are part of a broader category of information-elicitation and information-aggregation mechanisms.
Where do (and don't) blockchain and crypto technologies come in -- and what specific features (decentralization, transparency, real-time, open source, etc.) matter most, and in what contexts? Finally, we discuss applications for prediction and decision markets -- things we could do right away to in the near-to distant future -- touching on everything from corporate decisions and scientific replication to trends like AI, DeSci, futarchy/ governance, and more?
Our special expert guests are Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University and Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center; and Scott Duke Kominers, research partner at a16z crypto, and professor at Harvard Business School -- both in conversation with Sonal Chokshi.
RESOURCES
(from links to research mentioned to more on the topics discussed)
- The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich Hayek (American Economic Review, 1945)
- Everything is priced in by rsd99 (r/wallstreetbets, 2019)
- Idea Futures (aka prediction markets, information markets) by Robin Hanson (1996)
- Auctions: The Social Construction of Value by Charles Smith
- Social value of public information by Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin (American Economic Review, December 2002)
- Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research by Anna Dreber, Thomas Pfeiffer, Johan Almenberg, Siri Isaksson, Brad Wilson, Yiling Chen, Brian Nosek, and Magnus Johannesson (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (November 2015)
- A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem by Dražen Prelec, Sebastian Seung, and John McCoy (Nature, January 2017)
- Targeting high ability entrepreneurs using community information: Mechanism design in the field by Reshmaan Hussam, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin Roth (American Economic Review, March 2022)
- Information aggregation mechanisms: concept, design, and implementation for a sales forecasting problem by Charles Plott and Kay-Yut Chen, Hewlett Packard Laboratories (March 2002)
- If I had a million [on deciding to dump the CEO or not] by Robin Hanson (2008)
- Futarchy: Vote values, but bet beliefs by Robin Hanson (2013)
- From prediction markets to info finance by Vitalik Buterin (November 2024)
- Composability is innovation by Linda Xie (June 2021)
- Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance by Chris Dixon (October 2021)
- resources & research on DAOs, a16z crypto
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with @baileyflan @ahall_research @rhhackett
Today we’re dusting off an ancient practice that has become trendy once again: the old-but-new idea of “sortition,” or selecting representatives by lottery.
Sortition was used in ancient Athenian democracy to elect public officials. It’s also been lately revived by tech companies like Meta and AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic to tackle some of their thorniest policymaking challenges.
Our guests today are experts on sortition, including Bailey Flanigan, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who is joining MIT as an assistant professor next year, and who has helped develop selection algorithms for sortition that are in use today. Also joining is Andrew Hall, Stanford University poli sci professor, advisor to Meta, and consultant to a16z crypto research.
In this episode, we discuss why not to rely exclusively on expert authority, how the process of deliberation changes people’s minds, and how sortition can apply everywhere from the governance of countries to the governance of crypto projects, and more.
Related resources:
- Algorithms for fair, manipulation-robust, and transparent sortition with Bailey Flanigan
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @pmarca @bhorowitz
Today we’re running a special episode featuring a16z cofounders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz talking about AI bots and crypto. They discuss what happens when you mix postmodern theories and internet memes in an LLM. They also get into the sudden rise of a strange memecoin, the state of crypto regulation in the U.S., and more.
This episode is a crossover from the Ben & Marc Show, which you can follow on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
See the original episode:
- How An AI Bot Became a Crypto Millionaire
As always, none of the content should be taken as tax, business, legal or investment advice. See a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
with @DarenMatsuoka @eddylazzarin @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. Today we're taking you behind the scenes of our newly released, annual State of Crypto Report — a16z crypto's analysis of the latest data and trends that have defined the industry in 2024.
This year's report features some brand new insights, from estimating the number of real crypto users globally, to understanding how much interest in crypto swing states may have ahead of the U.S. election. We also dig into infrastructure improvements to blockchains and key applications — including stablecoins, AI, and so-called DePIN. Be sure to visit a16zcrypto.com for all this and more including a new “Builder Energy” dashboard, which we’ll discuss on the show.
Joining me to talk about the findings are lead data scientist and report author Daren Matsuoka and CTO Eddy Lazzarin. The first voice you'll hear after mine is Daren's, then Eddy's.
a16z crypto resources:
- State of Crypto Report 2024
- Builder Energy dashboard
- Estimating the number of real crypto users by Daren Matsuoka and Eddy Lazzarin
As always, none of the content should be taken as tax, business, legal or investment advice. See a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Welcome to web3 with a16z. Today we explore the messy secrets of blockchain bridges. These cross-chain connectors are the go-betweens in today's multichain world, but their short history has been a checkered one, with prominent projects succumbing to major hacks and other hijinks.
So we've brought on one of the builders who knows this world best to help disentangle the messiness. That’s Bryan Pellegrino, cofounder and CEO of LayerZero Labs, maker of a popular blockchain interoperability protocol. In this episode, Bryan delivers a crash course on the evolution of bridges, including the ups and downs of various approaches. You'll also learn about the technology's inner workings, its applications, and how it fits in with ongoing efforts to scale blockchains.
Joining is a16z crypto general partner Ali Yayha, who is also an expert in this area; plus me, your cohost, Robert Hackett. The first voice you'll hear after mine is Bryan's, then Ali's.
As always, none of the content should be taken as tax, business, legal or investment advice. See a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @HilmarVeigar @eddylazzarin
Our featured guest today is Hilmar Pétursson, the CEO of CCP Games, maker of EVE Online, a massive multiplayer online role playing game. In this episode, Pétursson shares his unique world view and game-making philosophy, as well as a deep dive into the technology and economic design of his sci-fi simulation. He also touches on how niche cults can break into mainstream culture, how slow databases can make for fun gameplay, and what to expect from EVE Frontier, a new blockchain-based overhaul of the space survival game that is now inviting people to apply as playtesters.
The other voice you'll hear is that of Eddy Lazzarin, a16z crypto’s Chief Technology Officer and an avid gamer himself. This conversation originally took place earlier this year at a16z crypto's CSX startup accelerator program in London, videos of which are posted on the a16z crypto YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe for more thought-provoking conversations and other insightful content.
Related links:
- "Crafting Virtual Worlds with Hilmar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games" (a16z crypto Youtube)
- Eve Online (eveonline.com)
- Eve Frontier (evefrontier.com / projectawakening.io)
- Playtest signup
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with Dan Boneh @tim_roughgarden @smc90
In this special 50th episode of the web3 with a16z podcast, we discuss how work in the blockchains/ crypto space has led to advances in several important technologies — which can be (and are being) used by many other industries beyond crypto.
Tim Roughgarden (a16z crypto Head of Research and professor at Columbia University) and Dan Boneh (a16z crypto Senior Research Advisor and professor at Stanford University) discuss these advances in conversation with Sonal Chokshi.
Topics covered include automated market makers; credible auctions, collusion, and mechanism design not possible before; as well as zero knowledge; trusted execution environments (TEEs) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE); and much more. We also discuss the recurring theme of how web3 provides a laboratory not only for experiments in governance, but for macroeconomics and more. The two also offer many useful explanations for anyone new to these technologies or seeking to understand why they matter in the big picture.
It’s an innovation story we’ve seen over and over again, from the space program to other massive invention efforts: Technologies developed for one purpose often lead to benefits for humanity overall.
Pieces mentioned in this episode and other resources:
- On some results and challenges in cryptoeconomics -- Tim Roughgarden, CESC 2022
- 8 reasons why blockchain mechanism design is hard -- Tim Roughgarden, a16zcrypto.com, 2024
- The computer in the sky (short version) -- Tim Roughgarden, 2024
- Zero knowledge canon -- with Justin Thaler's annotated bibliography, a16zcrypto,com 2022
- Using zero-knowledge proofs to fight disinformation -- Trisha Datta and Dan Boneh, IACR 2023
- VerITAS: Verifying Image Transformations at Scale -- Trisha Datta, Binyi Chen, Dan Boneh, 2024
- Achieving crypto privacy and regulatory compliance [+pdf of full paper]-- Joseph Burleson, Michele Korver, Dan Boneh, 2022
- Credible auctions: A trilemma -- Mohammad Akbarpour, Shengwu Li, Econometrica, 2020
- Auction design for web3 [episode 3 of this podcast] -- Scott Duke Kominers, Tim Roughgarden, Sonal Chokshi, 2022
- Building Cicada: Private on-chain voting using time-lock puzzles -- Michael Zhu, 2023
- Transaction fee mechanism design for the Ethereum blockchain: An economic analysis of EIP-1559 -- Tim Roughgarden, 2020
- Collusion-resilience in transaction fee mechanism design -- Hao Chung, Tim Roughgarden, Elaine Shi, 2024
- Transaction fee mechanism design in a Post-MEV world -- Maryam Bahrani, Pranav Garimidi,Tim Roughgarden, 2024
- Notes on Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) -- Barnabé Monnot, 2022
- Complexity-approximation trade-offs in exchange mechanisms: AMMs vs. LOBs -- Jason Milionis, Ciamac Moallemi, Tim Roughgarden, 2023
- Trusted execution environments (TEEs) for blockchain applications -- Ari Juels, a16zcrypto.com, 2023
As a reminder, none of the following is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information including a link to a list of our investments.
with @ahall_research @eddylazzarin @0xShuel @smc90
In this episode, we cover both recent events + evergreen governance questions in political systems: Specifically, we breakdown the recent Compound “governance attack”... as well as the broader topic of DAO governance and voting in general. We also discuss how to avoid, prevent, and respond to such governance attacks -- highlighting key differences between on-chain/ token-based/ digital voting systems vs. physical-world political systems around the world.
What happens when you have activity from actors that the majority doesn’t necessarily agree with? How do you distinguish between good-faith and bad-faith activity, especially on-chain? And other such tricky questions?? Our experts answering these questions (in conversation with Sonal Chokshi) include:
- a16z crypto CTO Eddy Lazzarin;
- head of network operations Ross Shuel;
- and a16z crypto research collaborator, and Stanford professor of political science, Andrew Hall.
The episode begins by quickly recapping the exact sequence of a recent Compound governance “attack” event a few weeks ago -- including discussing whether “governance attack” is the right label for it or not; how it’s different from other attacks; and the broader trend of online vs offline governance attacks in general -- before then going into specific solutions. The team also shares some behind-scenes tick tock on what happened, how people figure out motives behind actions on-chain (especially given the "indistinguishability problem"), and much more.
Pieces mentioned in this episode and other resources:
- DAO governance attacks, and how to avoid them by Pranav Garimidi, Scott Duke Kominers, Tim Roughgarden
- The DUNA: An Oasis For DAOs by Miles Jennings and David Kerr
- Governance FAQs by Andrew Hall
- A new financial model for app tokens: How to generate cash flows by Mason Hall, Porter Smith, Miles Jennings, and Ross Shuel
- all things DAOs on a16zcrypto.com
- all things decentralization on a16zcrypto.com
- Voting, Security, and Governance in Blockchains (a16z Podcast, 2019) with Phil Daian and Ali Yahya (see also "On-Chain Vote Buying and the Rise of Dark DAOs" by Phil Daian, Tyler Kell, Ian Miers, and Ari Juels)
- PoS Blockchains - Designs, Consensus, Attacks (web3 with a16z Podcast, 2022) with Valeria Nikolaenko, Tim Roughgarden, Sonal Chokshi
- Lightspeed Democracy: What web3 organizations can learn from the history of governance by Andrew Hall and Porter Smith
- Governing democracy, the internet, and boardrooms (web3 with a16z Podcast, 2024) with Noah Feldman, Andrew Hall, Robert Hackett
As a reminder: None of this should be taken as business, investment, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
with @eddylazzarin @milesjennings @rhhackett
Today’s episode covers all things tokens — that includes what tokens have to do with decentralized protocols, understanding the different types of tokens, and, of course, the Do's and Don'ts of designing and launching a token.
Our guests are a16z crypto chief technology officer Eddy Lazzarin, as well as a16z crypto general counsel and head of decentralization Miles Jennings, the two of whom have advised many scores of projects on protocol design and tokencraft. They discuss what sets web3 apart from earlier technology eras; avoiding common pitfalls in the search for product market fit; how to reason about various designs and strategies, as well as their risk and reward tradeoffs; and more.
Related resources:
The token launch playbook (part 1)
- "Operational guidelines for token launches, from creation to custody" by Adina Fischer, Matt Gleason, and Justin Simcock
- "5 rules for token launches" by Miles Jennings
- "Getting ready to launch a token: What you need to know" by Miles Jennings and Jason Rosenthal
- "How to navigate token launch risks" by Miles Jennings
- "Launching compliant tokens" by Miles Jennings
The token launch playbook (part 2)
- "Tokencraft" with Eddy Lazzarin
- "Planning for token launches" with Miles Jennings
As a reminder: None of the content should be taken as investment, legal, business, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @matthewclifford @smc90
This special episode is all about regional innovation — at both a systems and people level.
We cover what does and doesn’t work in making certain places become hubs of innovation and economic growth (aka “innovation ecosystems”). But we also discuss — going back and forth between the structural and individual — when to intervene for entrepreneurial talent; the nature of ambition, yearning, and finding one’s path; and more broadly, mindsets for navigating risk/reward and dynamism in different regions including London and Europe. We also discuss new ways of funding breakthrough R&D at a national level, tech trends of interest including crypto, and much more.
Our special guest — in conversation with editor in chief Sonal Chokshi, who also brought him to the a16z Podcast over 8 years ago in its first-ever UK roadshow in December 2015 — is Matt Clifford, who’s played an important role in the London entrepreneurial and tech ecosystem since 2011. Matt is the Chair of Entrepreneur First (which he co-founded with Alice Bentinck over a decade ago); and is also the Chair of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). [Before this episode was recorded, Matt was also the Prime Minister’s representative for the AI Safety Summit — which he helped organize at Bletchley Park (the historic home of computing in the UK); after this episode was recorded, Matt was appointed by the UK secretary of science to deliver an “AI Opportunities Action Plan” to the UK government, which was just announced last week.]
Fittingly, this episode was recorded live from Andreessen Horowitz’s first international office, in London; for more on our efforts there, and other content from there, please visit a16zcrypto.com/uk.
As a reminder: None of the following should be taken as investment, legal, business, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
with @rhhackett @smc90 @stephbzinn @tim_org
In this fun hallway-style conversation, a16z crypto's Sonal Chokshi, Robert Hackett, Tim Sullivan, and Stephanie Zinn discusses picks from our latest annual summer reading list, as well as evergreen/ Lindy picks that show up on our what-we're-reading lists again and again. We also share our top picks of all time.
Throughout, we also discuss HOW we read — whether audiobooks count as reading or listening, graphic novels, read-alouds; on multiple modes of reading; and technologies for reading and how they have changed us over time. Which books are better as movies and TV shows, and games too? Also, are collaboratively-filtered recommendations via family or friends really that great? What other heuristics — and anti-heuristics! — do we use to read?
Finally, WHY do we read?? Is mythology and fantasy filling a hole left by religion? Wherefore nonfiction vs. fiction... or seemingly new genres such as "infotainment," "romantasy," and others? From Shakespeare to Prince Harry to erstwhile seafarers to modern mermaids, this episode is a rollicking ride — and love letter — to all things books, and reading, from the a16z crypto editorial team and Andreessen Horowitz. Curiosity is magic, after all!
with @jasonrosenthal @benrbn
Welcome to web3 with a16z, a show about building the next generation of the internet.
Our featured guest today is serial entrepreneur Ben Rubin, who previously built the viral livestreaming app Meerkat, and then the group video chat app Houseparty — acquired by Epic Games in 2019 — and who is now CEO and cofounder of Here Not There Labs, which is building a decentralized messaging protocol.
Rubin spoke with Jason Rosenthal, head of a16z crypto's CSX startup accelerator program, about paths to product market fit, given his journey in building breakout apps; they also discuss his unique perspective on creating company culture and more.
This conversation first took place at our recent CSX program, which just concluded in London. (Watch the video interview on Youtube here.)
As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @NoahRFeldman, @ahall_research, @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z. I'm Robert Hackett and today we have a special episode about governance in many forms — from nation states to corporate boards to internet services and beyond.
Our special guests are Noah Feldman, constitutional law scholar at Harvard who also architected the Meta oversight board (among many other things); he is also the author of several books. And our other special guest is Andy Hall, professor of political science at Stanford who is an advisor of a16z crypto research — and who also co-authored several papers and posts about web3 as a laboratory for designing and testing new political systems, including new work we'll link to in the shownotes.
Our hallway style conversation covers technologies and approaches to governance, from constitutions to crypto/ blockchains and DAOs. As such we also discuss content moderation and community standards; best practices for citizens assemblies; courts vs. legislatures; and much more where governance comes up.
Throughout, we reference the history and evolution of democracy — from Ancient Greece to the present day — as well as examples of governance from big companies like Meta, to startups like Anthropic.
Resources for references in this episode:
- On the U.S. Supreme Court case NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton (Scotusblog)
- On Meta's oversight board (Oversightboard.com)
- On Anthropic's long term benefit trust (Anthropic, September 2023)
- On "Boaty McBoatface" winning a boat-naming poll (Guardian, April 2016)
- On Athenian democracy (World History Encyclopedia, April 2018)
- The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President by Noah Feldman (Random House, October 2017)
A selection of recent posts and papers by Andrew Hall:
- The web3 governance lab: Using DAOs to study political institutions and behavior at scale by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak (a16z crypto, June 2024)
- DAO research: A roadmap for experimenting with governance by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak (a16z crypto, June 2024)
- The effects of retroactive rewards on participating in online governance by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak (a16z crypto, June 2024)
- Lightspeed Democracy: What web3 organizations can learn from the history of governance by Andrew Hall and Porter Smith (a16z crypto, June 2023)
- What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy? Evidence from a Massive Online Governance Experiment by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak (working paper, November 2023)
- Bringing decentralized governance to tech platforms with Andrew Hall (a16z crypto Youtube, July 2022)
- The evolution of decentralized governance with Andrew Hall (a16z crypto Youtube, July 2022)
- Toppling the Internet’s Accidental Monarchs: How to Design web3 Platform Governance by Porter Smith and Andrew Hall (a16z crypto, October 2022)
- Paying People to Participate in Governance by Ethan Bueno de Mesquita and Andrew Hall (a16z crypto, November 2022)
As a reminder: none of the following should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice. See a16zcrypto.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @jasonrosenthal @skominers @meigga @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z, I’m Robert Hackett and today, we discuss pricing strategy for startups — from traditional businesses to web2 to web3.
Topics we cover include:
- unit economics
- understanding consumer psychology
- using onchain data to inform pricing decisions
- Common mistakes and how to avoid them
- How to navigate a pricing pivot
- And lessons from real world pricing case studies, including Tesla, Nvidia, and others
Our experts include a16z crypto's Maggie Hsu, head of our go-to-market team; research partner and Harvard Business School professor of economics Scott Kominers; and head of our CSX startup accelerator Jason Rosenthal, who is a tech veteran having spent the last 25 years at various internet companies — the three combine all their different expertise around the theme of this episode.
Resources for references in this episode:
- When is decentralizing on a blockchain valuable? by Marco Reuter (a16z crypto, January 2023)
- The Value of Decentralization Using the Blockchain: An Economic Analysis by Marco Reuter (a16z crypto, January 2023)
- "The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power..." — Warren Buffett (Bloomberg, February 2011)
- Network Effects, Moats, & the Business of Web3 (Episode 25) (web3 with a16z podcast, May 2023)
- 6 questions every founder should ask about pricing by Jason Rosenthal and Maggie Hsu (a16z crypto, May 2023)
- Zipcar: Refining the business model by Myra M. Hart, Michael J. Roberts and Julia Stevens (Harvard Business School Case Collection, May 2005)
- Ning CEO: Building a Better Website by Adam Lashinsky (Fortune, September 2010)
- On the best business advice Disney CEO Bob Iger ever received by Jeff Haden (Inc., December 2020)
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (HarperCollins, February 2008)
- On the Bored Ape Kennel Club donating secondary sale proceeds to charity (Twitter, June 2021)
- Chief's Silicon Valley Stardom Quickly Clashed at J.C. Penney by Stephanie Clifford (New York Times, April 2013)
- Tesla turns up heat on rivals with global price cuts by (Reuters, January 2023)
As a reminder none of the following should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice. See a16zcrypto.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @jinglejamOP @eddylazzarin @rhhackett
Hello and welcome to web3 with a16z, a show about building the next era of the internet by the team at a16z crypto, that includes me, host Robert Hackett.
Today’s episode features Jing Wang, CEO and executive director of the Optimism Foundation, along with a16z crypto CTO Eddy Lazzarin. We discuss the peculiarities of open source software — including the incentives that bind contributors together, tradeoffs between the freedom to customize versus sticking to standards, and the challenges in setting up and running a foundation
We also cover the nuances of governance and accountability, the importance of vibes, the indispensability of shipping products (versus debating roadmaps), and, the vision behind the so-called “superchain”.
As head of the Optimism Foundation, Wang helps stewards the Optimism collective — a band of decentralized companies, communities, contributors, and others who are using a suite of open source software – called the OP Stack — to scale the Ethereum blockchain network. The OP Stack also powers a number of popular "layer two" rollups — including Base, which we covered in last week's episode with its creator and lead, Coinbase’s head of protocols Jesse Pollak.
Be sure also to check out the a16z crypto YouTube channel for video podcast episodes, as well as talks from our recent startup accelerator programs CSX featuring Jing, Optimism co-founder Karl Floersch, and more.
Resources for references in this episode:
- More on Optimism:
- open source code
- software licenses
- the OP Stack
- More on the Optimism superchain collective, including:
- Coinbase's Base
- Redstone
- Worldcoin
- "Understanding Dencun, the biggest upgrade to Ethereum since The Merge" by Noah Citron and Valeria Nikolaenko (a16z crypto, March 2024)
- More on Ethereum upgrade EIP-4844 (Github)
- "Layer 2, rollups, and building onchain (with Base)" by Jesse Pollak, Eddy Lazzarin, and Robert Hackett (a16z crypto, May 2024)
- "Composability is to software as compound interest is to finance" by Chris Dixon (a16z crypto, October 2021)
- "The Nature of the Firm" by Ronald Coase (Economica, November 1937)
- "Weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation" [Intro 6.2 footnote] (Congress.gov)
As a reminder none of the following should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice. See a16zcrypto.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @jessepollak @NoahCitron @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z, a show about building the next era of the internet by the team at a16z crypto, that includes me, host Robert Hackett.
Today’s episode covers the bustling area of “layer 2” rollups, a technology for scaling “layer 1” blockchains such as Ethereum. Joining us is Jesse Pollak, who previously led engineering for Coinbase’s retail side and who now is the company’s head of protocols where he founded and leads the popular layer 2 rollup Base.
We’re also joined by Noah Citron, an engineer at a16z crypto who works on many open source projects and protocols, and who closely tracks developments in this area.
Our conversation digs into the shifting history and future of Ethereum, the arrival of upgrades like EIP-4844, experiments in futarchy, and the difference between leading — and innovating — inside companies versus within decentralized communities. We also discuss the challenges of winning developer mindshare, how to refine business metrics and measures, understanding the tangled interactions between rollups and bridges, and whether you should ever hyphenate the word “onchain.”
Resources for references in this episode:
- jessepollak.com — Jesse Pollak's personal website
- "A rollup-centric Ethereum roadmap" by Vitalik Buterin (Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians, October 2020)
- "The Coinbase Secret Master Plan" by Brian Armstrong (Coinbase, September 2016)
- "Proposed milestones for rollups taking off training wheels" by VItalik Buterin (Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians, November 2022)
- L2Beat — dashboard of the state of the layer 2s
- DefiLlama — dashboard of the state of DeFi
- Relevant Dune dashboards relating to layer 2s
- Ethereum blobs
- Ethereum blob fee market
- DEX cross-chain metrics
- Farcasters users transactions by chain
- "How rollups actually work" by Kelvin Fichter (ETHGlobal Scaling Ethereum Summit, March 2023)
- "Rollups are L1s (& L2s) a.k.a. how rollups actually actually actually work" by Jon Charbonneau (Mirror.xyz, May 2023)
- "Rollups, Rigor, and Reality" by Kevlin Fichter (kelvinfichter.com)
- "Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs" by Robin Hanson (George Mason University, August 2000)
- "Ethereum Rollup Improvement Proposals (RIP)" (Github)
- Ethereum EIP-4844 (Github, March 2023)
As a reminder none of the following should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice. See a16zcrypto.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @SuccinctJT @samrags_ @moodlezoup @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z, a show about building the next era of the internet by the team at a16z crypto. That includes me, host Robert Hackett. Today's all new episode covers a very important and now fast developing area of technology that can help scale blockchains, but that also has many uses beyond blockchains as well.
That category of technology is verifiable computing, and specifically, SNARKs. So today we dig into zkVMs, or "zero knowledge virtual machines," which use SNARKs, and we discuss a new design for them that the guests on this episode helped develop — work that resulted in Jolt, the most performant, easy-for-developers-to-use zkVM to date.
The conversation that follows covers the history and evolution of the field, the surprising similarities between SNARK design and computer chip architecture, the tensions between general purpose versus application specific programming, and the challenges of turning abstract research theory into concrete engineering practice.
Our guests include Justin Thaler, research partner at a16z crypto and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, who came up with the insights underpinning Jolt, along with collaborators from Microsoft Research, Carnegie Mellon, and New York Universities. His is the first voice you'll hear after mine, followed by Sam Ragsdale, investment engineer at a16z crypto, and Michael Zhu, research engineer at a16Z crypto, both of whom brought Jolt from concept to code.
Resources for references in this episode:
- "Jolt: SNARKs for Virtual Machines via Lookups" by Arasu Arun, Srinath Setty & Justin Thaler (Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2023)
- the Jolt Github page
- Michael Zhu and Sam Ragsdale’s post on the open source implementation
- Justin Thaler’s post on the ideas behind Jolt
- an FAQ untangling this new SNARK design paradigm
- our Lasso + Jolt archives
- ▶️📹 Jolt, zkVMs, and speeding up blockchains by Justin Thaler — a quick (five minute) explanation of what Jolt is and why it's important
- ▶️📹 Correcting some SNARK misconceptions by Justin Thaler — a deeper dive into some of the common misconceptions behind Lasso (the theoretical foundation of Jolt) and how this new paradigm works
- "Zero Knowledge Canon, Part 1 & 2" by Elena Burger et al. (a16z crypto, September 2022)
- Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach by Sanjeev Arora and Boaz Barak (Princeton University, January 2007)
As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice. See a16zcrypto.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @creeefs @blauyourmind @rhhackett
Welcome to web3 with a16z, a show about building the next generation of the internet from the team at a16z crypto — that includes me, Robert Hackett, your cohost and an editor here. Today's episode explores the merging of the physical and digital worlds, as well as what that means for the future of our interactions and identities.
Our guests today are Chris Lee, cofounder of IYK, a startup that's bringing the physical closer together to the digital through NFC chips, and joining us is Michael Blau, a deal partner at a16z crypto who creates generative art in his spare time.
In the conversation ahead, we cover new consumer experiences in everything from concert-going to commerce, the intersection of high tech and high fashion, and differences between building in web2 versus web3. We also dig into the power of open standards, the challenges of posed by bots and counterfeiting, and debates over terminology, including whether 'phygital' should be a thing.
Resources for references in this episode:
- "After Taylor Swift Ticket Chaos, Senators Question FTC Over Bot Law Enforcement" (Rolling Stone, November 2022)
- "Pearl Jam: Taking on Ticketmaster" (Rolling Stone, December 1995)
- IYK FAQ (Notion)
- "Tap to pay your fare with OMNY" (MTA)
- "Introducing Stories Highlights and Stories Archive" (Instagram, December 2017)
- Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour
- Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (Live Aid 1985) (Youtube)
- "Queen win greatest live gig poll" (BBC News, November 2005)
- "The tech behind Taylor Swift concert wristbands" (Wired, June 2023)
- "Finally, The P.J. Tucker x D&G Collab is Here" (GQ, July 2021)
- On different models for linking NFTs to physical items (Mirror.xyz, February 2023)
- "Lessons from 2023's fashion and beauty NFTs" (Vogue Business, December 2023)
- "Singer Vérité’s fan-first approach to Web3, music NFTs and community building" (Cointelegraph, October 2023)
- "How to Spot a Real Moncler Jacket" (TheRealReal, November 2019)
- "Why Knockoffs Can Help Build a Strong Brand" (Freakonomics, September 2012)
- On the verification process at StockX (StockX)
- "I Returned to Webkinz So You Wouldn’t Have To" (Yale News, January 2019)
- "A Wine-Soaked True Crime Doc with ‘Fraud, Deception and Intrigue’" (Wine Enthusiast, May 2023)
- Sour Grapes (2016) documentary (Amazon Prime)
- "I Love the Blockchain, Just Not Bitcoin" (Coindesk, November 2014)
- "Timeline: Causes of the global semiconductor chip shortage" (Supply Chain Digital, January 2023)
- "ERC-721 Non-fungible Token Standard" (Ethereum Foundation, November 2023)
- Read Write Own by Chris Dixon book, bookmark, and NFT (Random House, January 2024)
- On Duolingo outfits (Duolingo Wiki)
- Ready Player One (Netflix, 2018)
- On "phygital" (Collectid, March 2023)
As a reminder none of the following should be taken as business, legal, tax, or investment advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information including a link to a list of our investments.
with @dennnnnnnnny @smc90
We know that technology has changed art, and that artists have evolved with every new technology — it’s a tale as old as humanity, moving from cave paintings to computers. Underlying these movements are endless debates around inventing versus remixing; between commercialism and art; between mainstream canon and fringe art; whether we’re living in an artistic monoculture now (the answer may surprise you); and much much more.
So in this new episode featuring Berlin-based contemporary artist Simon Denny -- in conversation with a16z crypto editor in chief Sonal Chokshi -- we discuss all of the above debates. We also cover how artists experimented with the emergence of new technology platforms like the web browser, the iPhone, Instagram and social media; to how generative art found its “native” medium on blockchains, why NFTs; and other art movements.
Denny also thinks of entrepreneurial ideas -- from Peter Thiel's to Chris Dixon's Read Write Own -- as an "aesthetic"; and thinks of technology artifacts (like NSA sketches!) as art -- reflecting all of these in his works across various mediums and contexts. How has technology changed art, and more importantly, how have artists changed with technology? How does art change our place in the world, or span beyond space? It's about optimism, and seeing things anew... all this and more in this episode.
As a reminder: none of this is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
SHOW NOTES:
with @brian_armstrong @cdixon
Welcome to web3 with a16z, a show about building the next generation of the internet from the team at a16z crypto. This episode features Brian Armstrong, CEO and cofounder of Coinbase, in conversation with a16z crypto founder and managing partner Chris Dixon.
The conversation was originally recorded at our Founders Summit in November. It covers the aftermath of FTX and the rise of crypto in politics — but it also goes into company building at scale, lessons for directing product development, how to balance core business with disruptive innovation, and more.
As a reminder none of the following should be taken as business, legal, tax, or investment advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information including a link to a list of our investments.
with @tobi @bhorowitz
Welcome to the web3 with a16z podcast. Today's episode features a conversation between Tobias Lütke, CEO and cofounder of the ecommerce platform Shopify, and Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z, which took place at our second annual Founders Summit in November. They discuss what it takes to build a breakout startup in a crowded category; the changing face of retail; how to effect change in the workplace; and how to handle individual emotions and corporate culture — including dealing with calls for activism as well as the value of embracing negativity. They also touch on the moral imperative behind creating quality software, the symbiosis between AI and crypto, and more.
As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as business, legal, tax, or investment advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @cdixon @pmarca @bhorowitz @rhhackett
Welcome to the web3 with a16z podcast. Today's episode is the final installment in our limited series on Read Write Own, the new book by a16z crypto founding partner Chris Dixon. Today's episode features Dixon in conversation with a16z cofounders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen. Their discussion covers the internet’s corporate takeover and how that affects startups, creativity, and innovation; blockchains as inheritors of the open source ethos; where AI comes in; and the next battleground in global politics. This episode is a crossover from the Ben & Marc Show, which you can find and follow on the a16z YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcasts.
Resources for references in this episode:
- "How an economic moat provides a competitive advantage" by Chris Gallant (Investopedia, August 2023)
- "The dynamics of network effects" by D'Arcy Coolican and Li Jin (a16z, December 2018)
- "Skeuomorphism" (Interaction Design Foundation)
- "How to rebuild social media on top of RSS" (Hacker News, December 2022)
- "Cardinal conversations: Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel on 'technology and politics'" (Hoover Institute, January 2018) [see @ 29:00]
- "Peter Thiel: AI is communist" by Dan Primack (Axios, February 2018)
- "Sam Altman seeks trillions of dollars to reshape business of chips and AI" by Keach Hagey and Asa Fitch (Wall Street Journal, February 2024)
- "Join a union—but also join a DAO" by Daisy Alioto (The Nation, December 2021)
- Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto by Aaron Bastani (Verso, June 2019)
- "Friedrich Hayek and the price system" by Randal K. Quarles ("The Road to Serfdom at 75" conference, November 2019)
- Pandora's Box: A Fable from the Age of Science "Part 1. The Engineers' Plot" by Adam Curtis (BBC, June 1992) [see @ 25:00]
- "Going from web2 to web3: 'Your take rate is my opportunity'" by Chris Dixon (a16z crypto, August 2021)
- "Blockchain & internet glossary (A–Z): Key terms from Read Write Own" by Chris Dixon and Robert Hackett (a16z crypto, February 2024)
- "Why decentralization matters" by Chris Dixon (a16z crypto, February 2018)
- "The Vision Pro needs apps. Now is not a good time for Apple to be at odds with developers" by Hasan Chowdhury (Business Insider, January 2024)
- "Upgrading Ethereum | 4.2.5 Deneb" by Ben Edgington (Eth2book, September 2023)
- "What to expect from Ethereum's Cancun-Deneb Upgrade" by Wilfred Daye (Coindesk, February 2024)
- "Bitcoin Obituaries" (99 Bitcoins)
- "An Overview of H.R. 4766, Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act" by Paul Tierno and Andrew P. Scott (Congressional Research Service, September 2023)
- "The Rings of Power" (The Lord of the Rings Wiki)
- "There's no downplaying the impact of Operation Choke Point" by Dennis Shaul (American Banker, November 2018)
- "Operation Choke Point 2.0: The Federal Bank Regulators Come for Crypto" by David H. Thompson, et al. (Cooper & Kirk Lawyers, March 2023)
- "Google Chatbot’s A.I. Images Put People of Color in Nazi-Era Uniforms" by Nico Grant (New York Times, February 2024)
- "This is Worldcoin: Humanness in the age of AI" (Worldcoin, February 2024)
- The Blocksize War: The Battle for Control Over Bitcoin's Protocol Rules by Jonathan Bier (Amazon, March 2021)
- "Balaji Srinivasan: The Bitcoin Network State" (Bitcoin Magazine, October 2023)
with @stevenbjohnson @cdixon @rhhackett
Welcome to the web3 with a16z crypto podcast. Today's episode features a conversation between Steven Johnson, a prolific author of books about technology and innovation who is also, as editorial director at Google Labs, helping to develop AI writing tools such as NotebookLM, and Chris Dixon, founding partner of a16z crypto and author of the new book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. The two discuss the history of their shared interests, they explore the emergent properties of decentralized networks, and they dig into the past, present, and future of the internet.
Resources for references in this episode:
- Author page for Steven Johnson
- Google Labs's personalized AI writing tool NotebookLM
- "Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble" by Steven Johnson (New York Times Magazine, January 2018)
- How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books: 2015)
- Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, And History's First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books: 2021)
- Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson (Sribner: 2002)
- Chris Dixon's blog at cdixon.org
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (Random House: 1961)
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro (Vintage: 1975)
- The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Basic Books: 2000)
- "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" by John Perry Barlow
- "1000 True Fans" by Kevin Kelly
- Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan (W.W. Norton: 2022)
- ReadWriteWeb blog (ca. 2003)
- "Airbnb Proposes Giving Hosts a Stake in the Company" by Aisha Al-Muslim and Maureen Farrell (Wall Street Journal, September 2018)
- "Lyft Unlikely to Get SEC Pushback on Plan for Two Share Classes" by Nabila Ahmed and Ben Bain (Bloomberg, March 2019)
- "OpenAI Says New York Times Lawsuit Against It Is Without Merit" by Cade Metz (New York Times, January 2024)
with @cdixon @rhhackett
Welcome to the web3 with a16z crypto podcast. I'm Robert Hackett, an editor here at a16z crypto, and I'm here with Chris Dixon, founding partner of a16z crypto and author of the new book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. I had the privilege of editing Chris throughout the book writing process, and I'm thrilled now to talk to you about what went on behind the scenes, the big themes of the book, the challenges, and also about the crypto industry at large as well as what we can expect from it in the future.
Learn more at https://readwriteown.com/.
Resources for references in this episode:
- Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse
- "'It's a canon event' TikTok trend, explained"
- Chris Dixon's blog at cdixon.org
- "Come for the tool, stay for the network"
- "The next big thing starts out looking like a toy"
- "Can't be evil"
- The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen
- On Andrew Chen's writing habits
- On investing in Coinbase in 2013
- Guidance from the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission in 2019: "Framework for 'Investment Contract' Analysis of Digital Assets"
- On blockchains as "a programmable computer that lives in the sky" via a16z crypto head of research Tim Roughgarden
- Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstader
- "How Aristotle Created the Computer" by Chris Dixon for The Atlantic
- "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" by Claude Shannon
- Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead
- An Investigation of the Laws of Thought by George Boole
- The End of Education by Neil Postman
- "Inside out vs. outside in: The adoption of new technologies" by Chris Dixon
- "The Inevitable Showdown Between Twitter and Twitter Apps" by Chris Dixon
- "Elon Musk says X is discouraging links in posts" by Sara Fischer
- "Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again" by Vitalik Buterin
- "What Will Happen in 2024" by Fred Wilson
- "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by McCullough and Pitts
- Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
- On "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" and Hegel's Dialectics
As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as business, legal, tax, or investment advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
Welcome back to web3 with a16z -- a show about building the next generation of the internet, from the team at a16z crypto. This show is for anyone -- whether company leader or other entrepreneur, creator or developer, media or policymaker -- seeking to understand, and go deeper on all things blockchains, crypto, and web3. We’re back with all new episodes this season, beginning with some conversations that took place at our recent Founders Summit.
Today's guest is Jonathan Dotan, tech founder, Emmy-nominated producer, and writer who spent six seasons on HBO's show Silicon Valley. He is also the founding director of The Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford & USC -- which prototypes tools and principles to bring historians, legal experts, and journalists into the new era of web3 -- and where he leads applied research on the decentralized web and human rights.
This episode is based on a conversation that took place at our recent second annual Founders Summit -- with a16z crypto's Robert Hackett (also former senior writer at Fortune) -- in which they discuss how cryptographic technologies can help establish "ground truth" in conflict zones; the history of open source regulation; and more.
Dotan is also a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Blockchain Research and a lecturer at Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Graduate School of Business. This talk was preceded by a short presentation from Dotan on the "enduring promise of web3" delivered at our second annual a16z crypto Founder Summit in November 2023, which you can watch on YouTube.
As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as business, legal, tax, or investment advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @smc90 @stanfordgsb
How does one communicate well -- especially in crypto, but also in other technical industries or open source communities? Or in distributed, decentralized organizations, where you may have participants that are both remote and in person, or a mix of regulars and newcomers/ strangers. (Take for instance a community call to discuss technical or governance changes.)
How do you present information to different types of stakeholders; speak spontaneously; or resolve and recover from conflicts on the spot? So in this special book-launch episode of web3 with a16z, we invited Matt Abrahams -- author of the new, just-released book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You're Put on the Spot (he also hosts a popular podcast by a similar name, “Think Fast Talk Smart”, which you should also subscribe to!). Matt is not only a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, but he works with lots of companies and leaders on strategic communication, persuasive communication, interpersonal communication, and much more.
In this episode, Matt covers -- in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi -- specific templates, tactics, and tools that anyone can use; but we begin the first 15 minutes setting some foundational context, including the difference between informal vs. formal communication; why structure matters and how it relates to "spontaneity"; the art of listening with pace, space, and grace (for listening to oneself, too). We then cover several types of structures that anyone -- whether leader or individual contributor, engineer, marketing, sales -- can use in many types of communication.
Ultimately, crypto isn't just about technology and code -- but about open source, decentralization, collaboration -- people coordinating with each other at unprecedented scale: a very human thing. That's why finding the "common" in communication is essential, and represents the future of work, now.
resources referenced in this episode:
- How to Moderate Talks, Panels, Meetings, and More (Virtual and Beyond!), a16z Podcast, November 2020 -- with Matt Abrahams and Sonal Chokshi
- Ethereum, Merge and Beyond, web3 with a16z podcast, September 2022 -- with Tim Beiko et al
None of the following should be taken as investment, legal, business, or tax advice. Please also see a16z.com/disclosures for important information -- including a link to a list of our investments -- since we are investors in some of the companies mentioned in this episode.
with @guywuolletjr @eddylazzarin @smc90
"Which blockchain should I build in?" Is a very top of mind question for builders in web3, including for people coming into the space for the first time -- but also relevant to anyone interested in tech innovation, tech stacks, and the evolution of infrastructure. So how does one decide among all the chain choices out there, particularly given how fast-moving the crypto and web3 space is? Things are constantly changing, things are still being built, and there's no one size fits all answer...
So in this episode, we -- a16z crypto’s Guy Wuollet, and CTO Eddy Lazzarin, in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi -- tease apart all the tangled threads and nuances of the topic. In the first third of the discussion, we sketch out the overall landscape, why it matters, quick definitions. Then, we focus on common/ frequently asked questions, specific tradeoffs, and a framework for deciding which chain -- including discussing different technical specs, as well as other dimensions such as: community, marketing & ecosystem support, security, custody, programming languages, and much, much more.
resources related to or mentioned in this episode:
- Programming Languages & Crypto (2023) with Sam Blackshear, Eddy Lazzarin, Noah Citron, Sonal Chokshi
- The Four Horsemen of Centralization (2018) by Ali Yahya
- Decentralization for web3 Builders: Principles, Models, How (2022) by Miles Jennings
- Network Effects, Origin Stories, and the Evolution of Tech (2018), with Brian Arthur, Marc Andreessen, and Sonal Chokshi [see also this paper referenced]
None of the following should be taken as investment, legal, business, or tax advice. Please also see a16z.com/disclosures for important information -- including a link to a list of our investments -- since we are investors in some of the companies mentioned in this episode.
with @aeyakovenko @alive_eth @guywuolletjr @smc90
This all-new deep-dive, hallway-style chat features a16z crypto general partner Ali Yahya and deal team partner Guy Wuollet, in conversation with Solana co-founder and Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko -- who also worked at Qualcomm for over a decade, where he was a senior engineer and engineering manager among other things.
The first half of the episode is a discussion/ debate blockchain architectures -- including of course Solana & Ethereum, the themes of monolithic vs. modular, et cetera -- but really is about what are the tradeoffs, and what should one optimize for (or not!), depending on what you’re building, and to make crypto happen at scale (now and in the future).
The second half of the episode covers company-, community-, and ecosystem-building -- including discussing the nuances of leadership in open source; and wherefore messiahs/ prophets?! -- as well as touching on engineering hiring, devrel (developer relations), governance; the Solana phone, and some of the Solana backstory as well.
What are the differences between hardware and software innovation? And how does innovation play out, in theory versus practice? These are the throughlines of this episode...
For more on some of the topics discussed, see also:
- a high-level overview of topics including VDFs, defined (with Joe Bonneau)
- resources on all things VDFs /verifiable delay functions on a16zcrypto.com, including:
- an introduction to verifiable delay functions (from a16z crypto research partner Joe Bonneau)
- our episode on AI & crypto (with Ali Yahya)
- our discussion on the evolution of programming languages & crypto (including Move's Sam Blackshear)
As a reminder: none of this should be taken as investment, legal, business, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
with @davidmarcus @smc90
This wide-ranging conversation covers company building, big to small -- including what cadence and when is the right "time" to ship; the relationship between centralization, decentralization, platforms, and financial freedom; moving from web2 to web3 in both crypto AND payments... as well as why bitcoin, views on remote work, and much much more.
Our guest is David Marcus, CEO and co-founder of Lightspark; Marcus was also a co-creator of Diem (aka Libra and Novi, the cryptocurrency project initiated by Facebook). Before that, he was vice president of messaging products there, where he ran the Facebook Messenger unit; and prior to joining Facebook, Marcus was the former president of PayPal (which had acquired his previous startup).
This episode begins with an interview just to help kick things off and then features a rich set of questions from the audience -- as this originally took place live on stage at our Crypto Startup School 2023.
As a reminder: none of this should be taken as investment, legal, business, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
related readings:
- Regulate apps, not protocols series (2022-2023) - Miles Jennings et al, a16z crypto)
- What it will take to create the next great Silicon Valleys (2014) - Marc Andreessen (Politico, a16z)
- Why bitcoin matters (2014) - Marc Andreeessen (NYT, a16z)
- When one app rules them all: The case of WeChat and Mobile in China (2015) - Connie Chan (a16z)
with @alive_eth @danboneh @smc90
This week's all-new episode covers the convergence of two important, very top-of-mind trends: AI (artificial intelligence) & blockchains/ crypto. These domains together have major implications for how we all live our lives everyday; so this episode is for anyone just curious about, or already building in the space.
The conversation covers topics ranging from deep fakes, bots, and the need for proof-of-humanity in a world of AI; to big data, large language models like ChatGPT, user control, governance, privacy and security, zero knowledge and zkML; to MEV, media, art, and much more. Our expert guests (in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi) include:
- Dan Boneh, Stanford Professor (and Senior Research Advisor at a16z crypto), a cryptographer who’s been working on blockchains for over a decade and who specializes in cryptography, computer security, and machine learning -- all of which intersect in this episode;
- Ali Yahya, general partner at a16z crypto, who also previously worked at Google -- where he not only worked on a distributed system for a fleet of robots (a sort of "collective reinforcement learning") but also worked on Google Brain, where he was one of the core contributors to the machine learning library TensorFlow built at Google.
The first half of the hallway-style conversation between Ali & Dan (who go back together as student and professor at Stanford) is all about how AI could benefit from crypto, and the second half on how crypto could benefit from AI... the thread throughout is the tension between centralization vs. decentralization. So we also discuss where the intersection of crypto and AI can bring about things that aren't possible by either one of them alone...
pieces referenced in this episode:
- Voting, Security, and Governance in Blockchains (2019) with Ali Yahya and Phil Daian
As a reminder: none of the following should be taken as investment, legal, business, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including to a link to a list of our investments – especially since we are investors in companies mentioned in this episode.
with @mclader @smc90
In this wide-ranging conversation, Uniswap Labs COO Mary Catherine (aka MC) Lader discusses the challenges -- and opportunities -- of decentralized finance (DeFi); business strategy (& competition) in a world of open source; product vs. protocol innovation... as well as organizational structure & collaboration, hiring, metrics, community engagement, app store policies, decentralization, and much, much more.
The conversation -- based on an interview with host Sonal Chokshi and founder Q&A live from a16z crypto Startup School earlier this year -- also covers how to make decisions on what to innovate on or not; how to move from idea and vision to business; and the transition overall from traditional finance/ tradfi. Before joining Uniswap Labs (which contributes to Uniswap, a protocol for trading and automated liquidity provision on Ethereum) -- Lader was a managing director at BlackRock (and chief operating officer of the firm’s digital wealth business and head of its climate tech business); was formerly a fintech entrepreneur; and began her career as an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs.
As a reminder: none of the following should be taken as investment, legal, business, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
with @skominers @smc90
In this deep dive and tour through key business concepts, from theory to practice, we cover the topics of strategy, competitive advantage, network effects, moats, and more -- covering both both basic foundations, as well as the tricky nuances in a new world of open source, including web3. In the first half of this discussion, we cover foundational business concepts and questions -- such as the nature of competition, and how it really changes in web3; as well as how network effects really work -- and then, in the second half (in case you want to skip ahead), we cover mindsets and general guidance for builders…
Our expert guest -- in conversation with editor in chief and host Sonal Chokshi -- is a16z crypto research partner Scott Duke Kominers, who is also a professor at Harvard Business School; a faculty affiliate in Harvard’s Department of Economics; and advises several companies on marketplace development, incentive design, and more; as well as advises, and is directly involved, in several NFT communities.
Scott also teaches on these topics -- both at Harvard and also recently at our Crypto Startup School -- so be sure to subscribe to our playlist for those talks on the a16z crypto YouTube channel to get the latest updates as we release more videos from the 2023 cohort.
related links // see also:
- Can web3 bring back competition to digital platforms? by Christian Catalini and Scott Duke Kominers
- Why build in web3 by Jad Esber and Scott Duke Kominers
- Vampire attacks: A theory (and thread) on 'blood sucking' platform competition by John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
- Why NFT creators are going cc0 by Flashrekt and Scott Duke Kominers
- Decentralized identity: Your reputation travels with you by Scott Duke Kominers and Jad Esber
- Increasing returns and the new world of business (1996) by W. Brian Arthur
- Network effects, origin Stories, and the evolution of tech with W. Brian Arthur, Marc Andreeessen, and Sonal Chokshi
- The five competitive forces that shape strategy (2008 reformulation of 1979 paper) by Michael Porter
- Strategies for two-sided markets (2006) by Tom Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall Van Alstyne
As a reminder: none of the following is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
with @lera_banda @danboneh @rhhackett
This episode introduces concepts behind -- and applications of -- data availability sampling (DAS), a key piece of the puzzle that could help blockchains like Ethereum achieve full scaling. A low-overhead technique that uses random sampling of data to ensure that all necessary blockchain data has been made available to nodes without straining the network, DAS features heavily in a series of planned Ethereum upgrades called "Danksharding" [named to reference Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist]. The next Danksharding milestone for Ethereum is an upgrade called EIP-4844, known as "Protodanksharding" [also named to reference Ethereum researcher Protolambda, now at OP Labs] -- which is planned for later this year.
Our expert guests include:
- Valeria Nikolaenko, a16z crypto research partner
- Dan Boneh, Stanford cryptography professor and a16z crypto senior research advisor
...who discuss their recent piece on data availability sampling and Danksharding -- including a proposal they put forward to the improve current plans for upgrading Ethereum -- with Robert Hackett (a16z crypto features editor and head of special projects), based on a live conversation that took place recently on Twitter Spaces.
links to pieces/ topics referenced in this episode:
- on data availability sampling and danksharding, an overview and proposal / Valeria Nikolaenko & Dan Boneh
- on Proto-Danksharding, a technical analysis / grizzly-answer-991
- EIP-4844: the specification of ProtoDankSharding / Ethereum Foundation
- Proto-Danksharding FAQ / Vitalik Buterin
- Danksharding workshop video / Devcon (Oct 2022)
- 2D data availability with Kate commitments discussion on commitments' expansion / Ethereum Research Forum
- a note on data availability and erasure coding / Github
---
None of this is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information – including a link to a list of our investments.
with @cdixon @eddylazzarin @DarenMatsuoka @rhhackett
An in-depth overview of web3 trends and tech progress toward building the next internet, this conversation covers themes from the 2023 State of Crypto Report.
The first half of the discussion (from our recent Twitter Spaces), delves into data points and analyses: what’s behind the recent uptick in NFT activity and experimentation; the curious relationship between gaming (including on-chain gaming) and innovation; as well as challenges, and opportunities, in blockchain scaling. We also discuss the pace of advances in the field of zero knowledge cryptography, plus what new applications and products are now possible... including beyond web3.
The second half (based on a separate discussion) delves deeper into the report’s methodology, especially behind the interactive State of Crypto Index data tool… finally zooming out on the big picture.
Guests include Chris Dixon, founding general partner at a16z crypto; Eddy Lazzarin, chief technology officer; and Daren Matsuoka, lead data scientist -- in conversation with guest host Robert Hackett, a16z crypto features editor and head of special projects.
links to pieces or topics referenced in this episode:
- the 2023 State of Crypto Report (+ PDF, livestream, Twitter Spaces) / Daren Matsuoka, Eddy Lazzarin, Robert Hackett, & Stephanie Zinn
- the State of Crypto Index / Daren Matsuoka, Eddy Lazzarin, Robert Hackett, & Stephanie Zinn
- on the “domino effect” meme / knowyourmeme
- on John Carmack, see "Masters of Doom" by David Kushner / book
- on web3 gaming & on-chain games / web3 with a16z crypto podcast
- on EIP-4844 aka “protodanksharding” / Ethereum Improvement Proposals
- on “Jevons paradox” in economics / Wikipedia
- on the concept of “induced demand” / WIRED
- on zero knowledge applications to machine learning / Elena Burger
- the zero knowledge canon (parts 1 + 2) / Elena Burger, Bryan Chiang, Sonal Chokshi, Eddy Lazzarin, Justin Thaler, & Ali Yahya
- on developer activity trends in crypto / Electric Capital
None of the content is investment, business, legal, or tax advice. See a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments. Also, please note that any charts, data, or projections discussed here are subject to change without notice, may differ from opinions expressed by others, and are for informational purposes only – they should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. The content speaks only as of the date indicated, and a16z has not independently verified third party sources nor makes representations about the enduring accuracy of the information.
with @amandacassatt @kimbatronic @smc90
All about marketing, and web3 -- not just for marketers already in or seeking to enter web3, but also anyone doing community marketing/ community management, devrel (developer relations); or simply doing marketing in web2 or classic growth marketing, seeking to understand the latest trends and tactics.
With the author of the new book, Web3 Marketing: A Handbook for the Next Internet Revolution, Amanda Cassatt (who was also the first CMO at ConsenSys, helping bring Ethereum to market; and also founded and leads the pioneering, native web3-marketing agency Serotonin). Also joining this episode to share insights on marketing web3 -- in conversation with host and editor in chief Sonal Chokshi -- is Kim Milosevich, CMO at a16z crypto, where she oversees brand, marketing, events, and communications (and before that was VP of communications at Coinbase, where she took the company through its direct listing while leading internal, policy, product, and corporate communications internationally).
The episode also covers key top of mind questions for web3 builders and others, including how to do community marketing, manage "profiles" in decentralized and open source, and finding your audience... including feedback for product-market fit. And much. much more!
with @ariannasimpson @eddylazzarin @smc90
This episode provides an overview of web3 gaming, as enabled by crypto & blockchains -- including what ownership and decentralization really means for gamers and others; degrees of on-chain games; and a pulse-check on what’s working so far, what's more or less ready, and where the most exciting design spaces are for all kinds of builders.
The conversation -- between a16z crypto general partner Arianna Simpson and CTO Eddy Lazzarin, in discussion with editor-in-chief Sonal Chokshi -- also covers specific trends such as "play-to-earn" (P2E), metaverse, autonomous worlds, and other forms of worldbuilding -- and also touches on key themes such as design, user onboarding, open source, and frameworks for technology innovation.
shownotes // links referenced in this episode:
- on "strong vs. weak" forms of technology / Chris Dixon
- on Carlota Perez' framework for Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, a summary / Jerry Neumann
- on "autonomous worlds" / 0xPARC
- on "on-chain procedural generation" / 0xPARC
- on a few of the things we're excited about / a16z crypto
None of this is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
with @milesjennings @brianquintenz @colinmccune @smc90
We provide an overview of policy and regulation in the crypto industry right now -- from a lay of the land to pulse checks on sentiment -- as well as share helpful frameworks for policymakers, and quick guidance on how things work (and how to navigate and participate) for builders.
We also dig into the mindsets, myths, debates, nuances; and quickly discuss what to expect for regulation in a few specific domains -- from DeFi to DAOs, to briefly touching on CEX vs DEX, stablecoins, banks custodying crypto, unhosted wallets, etc.
Our expert guests include:
- Miles Jennings, general counsel at a16z crypto; he was also previously at Latham & Watkins, where he co-chaired its global blockchain and cryptocurrency task force -- Jennings has written a lot for us here, including developing frameworks for regulating crypto while preserving both innovation and protecting consumers; developing and evolving legal frameworks for DAOs; releasing "can't be evil" licensing for NFTs; and sharing detailed guides to decentralization for builders.
- Brian Quintenz, now head of policy at a16z crypto; previously, he was a commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where he had led the agency’s Technology Advisory Committee -- during his service, the CFTC oversaw the listing of the first U.S. regulated Bitcoin and Ether futures contracts on derivatives exchanges, and the rapid expansion of DeFi.
- Collin McCune, who joined as head of government affairs at a16z crypto a few months ago; he has spent a decade on Capitol Hill, and most recently was Deputy Staff Director of the House Financial Services Committee. I asked McCune to jump in on this episode for where we cover navigating Congress and the legislative process.
- ...all in conversation with editor in chief Sonal Chokshi.
To stay up to date on our ongoing efforts, regular regulatory recaps, and other resources or educational materials that you can use or point others to, please also subscribe to our newsletter for the latest dispatches.
As a reminder: none of the discussion is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
with @b1ackd0g @noahcitron @eddylazzarin @smc90
This episode is all about programming languages and crypto -- and it’s for both existing blockchain & smart contract programmers, and also other non-web3 developers seeking to enter the space... and, for anyone who is just curious about how programming languages evolve and come into existence (as well as interested in the intersection of language, code, and expression!)
It's a fun and fascinating ride, because we cover everything from differences (and similarities) in conventional programming languages vs. smart contract programming; discuss and debate the unique constraints (and opportunities) of blockchains; and also touch on topics such as formal verification, governance & community, tooling, cross-platform adaptation, and much much more... But we also dig into with the history, ebbs, and flows of traditional programming to today.
Our guests in this episode, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi, include:
- Sam Blackshear -- co-founder and CTO of Mysten Labs (which is building foundations for the decentralized future of web3); Sam has a long history in programming languages from his PhD to working at Facebook (and Libra/Diem) to creating and being one of the authors of Move, an open-source programming language for building smart contracts;
- Noah Citron, smart contract & research engineer here at a16z crypto (who also recently authored a light client for Ethereum called Helios, and, won a challenging gas-optimization challenge with another partner here); and
- Eddy Lazzarin, head of engineering for a16z crypto; before that, Eddy was in software engineering at Netflix, as well as data engineering and data science at Facebook.
As a reminder, none of this is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information – including, a link to a list of our investments.
with @robertiger @cdixon @smc90
In this intimate chat with Bob Iger (now-again CEO of Disney, although this conversation was recorded a few months ago), a16z crypto host Sonal Chokshi and founding general partner Chris Dixon discuss the interplay between technology, content, and distribution... Bob shares his journey (as captured in his book The Ride of a Lifetime and beyond) -- and the journey of various creators! -- especially as the industry has evolved from TV and cable to the advent of the internet/ web 1.0; to web 2.0 and distribution models like streaming, to business models like advertising; to web3 and emerging technologies like VR and AR.
We also touch briefly on related top of mind topics like IP, decentralization, remote work, and more. As well as other themes top of mind for company (and community) builders of all sizes -- from the innovator's dilemma and whether to build vs. buy, to managing creatives and much more.
As a reminder, none of the discussion should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a list of our investments.
with @brian_armstrong @bhorowitz
An all-new, guest-hosted episode based on a chat that took place just this week between:
- CEO and co-founder of Coinbase Brian Armstrong;
- interviewed by a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, who authored the bestselling business books The Hard Things About the Hard Things and What You Do is Who You Are on how to create your business culture.
Their conversation — which took place just this week (November 29, 2022) at our inaugural a16z crypto Founder Summit — goes into management, company culture, and much more on building and overcoming the hard things while innovating… as well as commentary on recent events and news (FTX etc.) in the crypto industry and beyond.
You can also watch this on our YouTube channel at: https://youtu.be/_YqQGs4QxDM
As a reminder, none of the discussion should be taken as business, legal, tax, or investment advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
A hallway-style conversation between a16z crypto's Chris Dixon, Eddy Lazzarin, and Sonal Chokshi about market conditions, cycles of innovation, and mental models for navigating crypto and web3 -- as well as the longer arc and evolution of technology; methods & metrics for measuring price-innovation cycle ebbs and flows; some key trends; and more.
This episode originally ran in May 2022, as episode #1 in our new show 'web3 with a16z'. The 2022 State of Crypto report referenced can be found at a16zcrypto.com/stateofcrypto -- please sign up for our newsletter to be notified about the next report and other resources + updates: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/
As a reminder, none of this discussion should be taken as business, legal, tax, or investment advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @punk6529 @cdixon @smc90
Chris Dixon and Sonal Chokshi chat with Punk6529 about NFT use cases; NFT art (and generative art!); VR, AR, metaverse; more. As well as about regulatory mindsets, moves, and news -- such as Apple's in-app purchasing guidelines for NFTs, and Reddit NFTs.
links:
https://twitter.com/punk6529
https://web3-with-a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/metaverse-crypto-vr-games-virtual-society
https://web3-with-a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/web2-to-web3-nfts-art-ai-hot-topics-trends-cycles-in-computing-u_kA5xPh
https://future.com/podcasts/crypto-creators-art-galleries-tokenized-collectibles/
https://cdixon.org/2019/01/08/strong-and-weak-technologies
https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2021/the-rise-of-long-form-generative-art
---
web3 with a16z is a show about building the next generation of the internet, from the team at a16z crypto. As a reminder, none of the content is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
This episode is a deep dive on all things metaverse, defining what the metaverse is, and what it isn’t; covering frequent misconceptions (and nuances) around how VR or virtual reality, videogames, and other applications relate (and don't relate) to the metaverse; and discussing how communities, fashion, sports, and more play here.
We also go into where crypto comes in -- including discussing trends in on-chain gaming, DAOs; themes like interoperability, composability; etc. But we also go well beyond technology -- and into science fiction, the arts, low-fidelity design, narrative, and much, much more -- in this wide-ranging, hallway-style conversation between:
- Herman Narula, author of the new book Virtual Society: The Metaverse and the New Frontiers of Human Experience; Narula is also the CEO and co-founder of Improbable;
- Elena Burger, deal partner on a16z crypto (where she focuses on games, NFTs, web3 media, infrastructure, and more); Berger also wrote a thoughtful review of Narula’s book;
- ...and host Sonal Chokshi (who also shares writings on topics such as "narrative collapse" and more as well as past episodes of the a16z Podcast with Narula on distributed systems at scale, gaming, and more).
For more on metaverse from the a16z crypto, please see this piece.
To order Narula's book, please select from here.
web3 with a16z is a show about building the next generation of the internet, from the team at a16z crypto. As a reminder, none of the content is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @kevinrose @cdixon
This wide-ranging discussion is a tour through tech trends and hot topics both within and beyond crypto – including art, AI, the evolution of mediums including blockchains; a deep dive on NFTs, artists, communities; debates around cc0, modding and copying on the internet, royalties; plus role of brands, DAOs, wisdom of crowds; and much more.
The hallway-style conversation took place this week between Chris Dixon (founding general partner of a16z crypto, former entrepreneur) and Kevin Rose (co-founder of Proof Collective, Digg, more). Their discussion is not just a journey through time (long cycles of computing, web2 to web3) and place (LA, SF, NYC), but into "the age of wonders". Are we at the end of (computing) history, or the beginning? You decide... but only after listening to this conversation.
As a reminder, NONE of this is investment, business, legal, or tax advice -- nor is it directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund – also, please note that any a16z investments and portfolio companies mentioned are not representative of all a16z investments; you can see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @timbeiko @tim_roughgarden @alive_eth @smc90
A deep dive on all things Ethereum, which this week makes the big move to Proof of Stake in The Merge. So in this long and wide-ranging conversation with Tim Beiko -- who runs the core devs calls and Protocol Support for Ethereum Foundation -- a16z crypto head of research (Tim Roughgarden), general partner (Ali Yahya), and editor in chief (Sonal Chokshi) cover:
- how Ethereum got here today -- and the co-evolution of the protocol and the community;
- what went into The Merge -- both technical and the social processes behind the outcomes; what changes, what doesn't;
- top of mind tech trends such as rollups, data availability, EVMs, and more (as well as hot topics including proposer-builder separation and others);
- views on token governance
- the nature of distributed collaboration especially between R&D
...but it's really a conversation about how innovation happens, in a decentralized way. And what does that mean for community involvement, who participates, and how more people can participate in web3?
In case you missed it, check out last week's episode for an overview of proof of stake blockchains.
As a reminder, none of the following is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
"web3 with a16z" is a show about building the next generation of the internet from the team at a16z crypto; this show is for anyone seeking to understand, and go deeper, on all things crypto and web3.
with @lera_banda @tim_roughgarden @smc90
We share an overview of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains -- from quick background on how blockchains work, differences between PoS & PoW (including the energy question), and approaches to improving both; to digging deeper into Sybill attacks and Sybill resistance... and much more on the design (and some debates) of PoS blockchains overall.
We therefore also go into different consensus approaches for PoS blockchains, from Nakamoto to BFT-style consensus and beyond; touch briefly on the question/ debate of centralization vs. decentralization in practice when it comes to PoS blockchains; and cover costless simulation and long-range attacks... plus briefly discuss topics like slashing and more, when issues are "escalated" to the social vs. protocol layer. [We don’t go into too much detail on Ethereum or the Merge i this episode, since we cover that in an upcoming episode.]
Our expert guests in this episode (in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi) are:
- Valeria (Lera) Nikolaenko, a16z crypto research partner -- who was previously on Novi at Meta (formerly Facebook), where she was a research scientist and cryptographer for the Diem blockchain; Lera specializes in modern cryptography, post-quantum cryptography, proof-of-stake blockchain design, and more.
- Tim Roughgarden, a16z crypto Head of Research -- who, among many other things, is also a computer science professor at Columbia, and before that Stanford (and who joins as co-host in this episode).
Be sure to also subscribe to our YouTube channel for several introductory and deep-dive videos -- including the exact topics discussed in this episode, on an overview of PoS Blockchains & on long-range attacks on PoS blockchains, as presented by Lera -- just search for 'a16z crypto research'. See also Tim Roughgarden's YouTube channel with several lectures on foundations of blockchains, including on topics mentioned in this episode (Tendermint protocol, longest-range consensus, random leader selection, more).
Finally, if you’d also like a more high-level survey of research in web3 -- and a quick tour through tech topics like VDFs, rollups, and more -- be sure to check out episode 8 in this feed, which was also a hallway-style jam with the research team...
As a reminder, none of the following investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @michelekorver @jai_ramaswamy @smc90
We tease apart the facts vs buzz around recent news -- that the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash for allegedly laundering proceeds of cybercrimes, and then later the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service stated that they arrested a suspected developer of Tornado Cash Tornado Cash -- including what's novel and what's not here, as well as the broader regulatory and compliance backdrop.
But we also share an evergreen explainer that goes well beyond recent events, to help crypto founders and others navigate various regulatory and compliance requirements for builders... while still ensuring innovation.
- The first third covers a ton of analysis beyond the news around Tornado Cash -- from broader backdrop to specifics to players to what's novel or not in recent actions; as well as going into the differences between sanctions and national securities laws, to civil enforcement actions, criminal liability and money laundering, and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and anti-money laundering (AML) program compliance requirements.
- We then do a brief interlude on the difference between obfuscating vs privacy preserving technologies, and why that matters in the big picture.
- And then the SECOND half of the episode dives deep into understanding and navigating compliance and legal for builders, covering: different frameworks, principles, common myths & misconceptions; when and how to resource (tooling to hiring); a lightning-round primer on the alphabet soup of governmentt entities relevant to this space; advice for BOTH entrepreneurs & government agencies on engaging with each other
- and much, much more… that’s all in the second half of the episode.
Our expert guests (in conversation with Sonal Chokshi) are:
- Michele Korver, head of regulatory at a16z crypto, former federal prosecutor who was also at the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as their chief digital currency advisor; she also spent time in the U.S. Departmentt of Justice, where she was the first dedicated subject matter expert in cryptocurrency-related prosecutions and forfeitures; and
- Jai Ramaswamy, chief legal officer at Andreessen Horowitz, where he oversees legal and compliance; he was also formerly chief risk and compliance officer at cLabs, which launched the decentralized protocol Celo; Jai also headed (or advised) on AML compliance & risk management at major banks (Capital One, Bank of America); and previously spent over a decade in government including significant time in the U.S. Department of Justice criminal division, where he focused on cybercrime, asset forfeiture, and money laundering.
As a reminder: None of the following is legal, business, investment, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @mg_486662 @riyazdf @nassyweazy and @smc90
This week’s all-new episode digs into recent high-profile hacks that took place in the crypto space over the last week -- we not only dig into what happened, including a more technical breakdown of the how and how we know -- but also cover the categories and issues specific to (and not specific to!) web3 security; as well as solutions and advice for builders.
We also touch on related trends and topics such as the role of open source; communications around hacks, as well as social media status signaling; and much more. Throughout, we try to help tease apart what’s hype/ what’s real, as well as the signal vs. the noise, in the narratives out there...
Joining host Sonal Chokshi this week are experts from the a16z crypto security team, including: security engineer Matt Gleason; CTO Riyaz Faizullabhoy; and CISO Nassim Eddequiouaq -- both of whom previously worked at Facebook, Anchorage, and Docker [Nass also appeared on an earlier episode of this show, on evolving NFTs & security, available here].
But for this episode, just to quickly recap for your context, the hacks we’re specifically covering are:
- The hack of the Nomad bridge -- which connects several different blockchains including Avalanche, Ethereum, Evmos, Moonbeam, and others – with reported range of between $185-$190M stolen;
- The hack of the Slope wallet -- a non-custodial, browser-based wallet that was reported to affect nearly 8000 users on Solana as well as other ecosystems -- with reported range of between $4.5-8M stolen. It occurred a week ago and Slope just posted their latest update today confirming some of the details in this episode (which was recorded a few days earlier).
As a reminder: None of the following is investment, business, tax, or legal advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
@tim_roughgarden @josephbonneau @skominers with @alive_eth @cdixon
A tour though top-of-mind blockchain & crypto tech topics, explained by several a16z crypto researchers, including VDFs (verifiable delay functions); zk-rollups, SNARKs, and zero knowledge in general; and others. We quickly zip up and down the stack, and across themes -- such as scalability; data availability; reputation and the creator economy, also discussing applications for NFTs and more.
It is based on a conversation that took place a few months ago (on the heels of our a16z crypto research lab announcement), live on Twitter with:
- Tim Roughgarden, Head of Research at a16z crypto and professor in the computer science department at Columbia University;
- Joseph Bonneau, research partner at a16z crypto, who also wrote the textbook on cryptocurrency technologies, pioneered VDFs, and has taught cryptocurrency courses at several top universities; and
- Scott Duke Kominers, research partner at a16z crypto and professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics, who also advises a variety of marketplace businesses, startups, and crypto projects, and serves as an expert on NFT-related matters.
- ...with moderators and general partners Chris Dixon and Ali Yahya.
Be sure to also subscribe to our YouTube channel -- as well as our newsletter at a16zcrypto.substack.com -- for more related content, and videos from researchers, going deeper on the topics discussed in this episode and beyond...
Welcome to web3 with a16z, a show about building the next generation of the internet, from the team at a16z crypto -- this show is for anyone (whether researcher, developer, engineer, artist, company leader, community manager, entrepreneur or other builder) -- seeking to understand, and go deeper on all things crypto and web3: towards a decentralized, community-owned, and creator-owned internet.
@jakeauch @cdixon @milesjennings
A quick overview of principles for thinking about policy, briefly covering topics and recent moves that are top of mind in U.S. crypto regulation -- from stablecoins to NFTs to DAOs to more. It is based (only lightly edited for this medium) on a live conversation that took place a couple weeks ago on Twitter with:
- Congressman Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, also Vice-Chair of the Financial Services Committee (he also formerly led product development at both a Fortune 100 insurance company and a cybersecurity startup);
- Miles Jennings, general counsel and head of decentralization at a16z crypto who has advanced and published several frameworks for both builders and industry on topics such as decentralization in practice, legal frameworks for DAOs, and more;
- Chris Dixon, a16z crypto founding general and managing partner who also moderates this conversation.
Welcome to web3 with a16z, a show about building the next generation of the internet from the team at a16z crypto. This show is for anyone -- whether developer, artist, community leader; startup entrepreneur or other builder, policymakers, company leaders, others – anyone seeking to understand, and go deeper on all things crypto and web3: towards a decentralized, community-owned, and creator-owned internet.
As a reminder: None of the following is investment, business, tax, or legal advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @x0rart / @blauyourmind, @nassyweazy, @smc90
Building “usable” security will be critical as NFTs scale across applications and mediums — including “dynamic NFTs” for art, identity, experiences (token access, more). In the latest episode of our podcast ‘web3 with a16z’, expert guests discuss security best practices for builders, experiments, and trends now and ahead — also addressing common myths and misconceptions along the way (artist royalties in smart contracts? immutability?... well…)
As a reminder: None of the following is investment, business, tax, or legal advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @enigmida @skominers @smc90
A special bonus holiday episode (during our brief summer vacation) based on a hallway-style conversation we did linking two seemingly unrelated things: puzzle design, and crypto.
What's the connection? Our experts riff on all things puzzle design, from types of puzzles and mediums to mindsets -- as well as the parallels between the general principles of incentive design, engagement, accessibility, and more to NFTs, escape rooms, games, and other experience design -- drawing on their deep experience and passion from both inside puzzle communities and from work they've done for different crypto projects.
Hosted by Sonal Chokshi, our guests in this episode are: Scott Kominers (a16z crypto research partner and professor at Harvard Business School), who also wrote Bloomberg’s puzzle column for a couple years; and Matthew Stein (former software engineer at Google and now full-time puzzle designer), who specializes in narrative puzzle hunts, as well as in designing alternate reality games for NFT communities, movies, musicians, companies, individuals, and others. Stein also designs puzzles for Art of Play's art journal; and is a reviewer for Room Escape Artist, the largest escape room website in North America, where he also writes about various topics in immersive gaming.
As a reminder, none of this is investment, legal, business, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @RMcElhenney @cdixon @smc90
This first live taping of 'web3 with a16z' took place an event hosted by a16z crypto & Adim during NFT NYC June 20, 2022 -- with special guest Rob McElhenney* in conversation with Chris Dixon and Sonal Chokshi. Given the theme of "decentralized media"/ "decentralized content creation", the conversation covers decentralized creativity and collaboration; community, creator access; IP and evolution of the internet; and where NFTs and web3 specifically comes in... do we really need web3 for this?
We also touch on topics such as the metaverse, storytelling across mediums, managing writer’s rooms, favorite TV shows, nostalgia, and much more.
Rob McElhenney is the creative force behind It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the critically-acclaimed FXX comedy series in which he co-stars and serves as executive producer and writer; the fifteenth season premiered in December 2021, breaking the record as the longest-running live-action television sitcom in history. He is also the creator, executive producer, and star of Mythic Quest, the acclaimed comedy series that debuted on Apple TV+ (co-created by Megan Ganz and Charlie Day, and a co-production of Ubisoft and Lionsgate Television); it was recognized as one of the best new series of 2020. McElhenney is the co-founder and co-chairperson of Adim, which brings web3 technology to creative development to build a new model and value network for creators and collaborators to have a stake in the success and evolution of what they create -- initially through a scaled network of writer's rooms and through a platform for a broad character ecosystem.*
As a reminder, none of this is investment, legal, business, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
with @skominers @tim_roughgarden @smc90
In this episode, we go into all things auctions – which, broadly defined, are simply ways of selling and allocating scarce things – and which applies in web3 contexts to everything from NFT mints, to blockchains themselves. (Which we also go into in this episode, including an overview of the technical challenges specific to mechanism design in a permissionless context. We also briefly cover EIP 1559).
We provide a quick overview of auction types, and incentive design, and how it works in both theory and practice -- including the nuances of market-clearing prices, gas wars, and more… sharing tradeoffs, choices, and principles for builders designing these systems throughout.
Our expert guests in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi are Scott Kominers, a16z crypto research partner and professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in market, marketplace, and incentive design; and Tim Roughgarden, head of research at a16zcrypto and professor at Columbia, who led the development of the field of algorithmic game theory -- which brings together computer science and economics to solve real-world computing problems.
This conversation includes a brief mention of lotteries, which are sometimes used in conjunction with auctions, and which we kept for educational purposes only. Note there are some questions about the legality of such mechanisms like “sweepstakes” that narrow participants by requiring them to do something to enter -- so builders should NOT use these without consulting a lawyer. As a reminder, NONE of the following is legal, business, tax, or investment advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information.
with @cdixon @alive_eth @tim_roughgarden @smc90
We set some context, quickly, into the connection between blockchains, crypto, and web3 – and offer some useful analogies, and more mental models, for thinking about a blossoming area of computer science in both theory and practice.
web3 with a16z is a new podcast for anyone seeking to understand and go deeper on blockchains, crypto, and web3. It is about how users and builders -- whether artists, coders, creators, developers, companies, organizations, or communities -- now have the ability to not just "read" (web1) + "write" (web2) but "own" (web3) and build with pieces of the internet, unlocking a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurship.
Brought to you by the team at a16z crypto (and the original team behind the a16z Podcast), this show features hallway conversations, discussions, interviews, oral essays, and more on the latest and leading trends in the space, including sharing research, occasional data readouts, and insights from the top scientists, and makers, in the space. It is hosted by Sonal Chokshi, longtime showrunner (2014-2022) and host of the popular a16z Podcast and network, now editor in chief at a16z crypto; as well as a rotating cast of characters from our team who appear in and occasionally co-host episodes as well.
In the initial episodes, we start by setting some quick context, before we dive deep the rest of the season on topics ranging from auction design and mechanics, NFTs, security, zero knowledge, gaming, decentralized media, tokenomics, history, infrastructure, roadmaps, and much more -- in the form of everything from hallway conversations to interviews to oral essays; but as always, as is a signature of our other shows, with high density insights and respect for our listeners' time and attention.
You can find show notes with links to resources, books, or papers discussed; transcripts; and more at a16zcrypto.com.
This episode was produced, and edited by Sonal Chokshi. The episode was technically edited by our audio editor Justin Golden, with thanks to longtime sound engineer Seven Morris. Credit also to Moonshot Design for the art. And special acknowledgments to Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner; CMO Kim Milosevich; and several others on our team here for their support.
To follow more of our work and get updates, resources from us, and from others – be sure to subscribe to our newsletter web3 weekly; you can find it on our website at a16zcrypto.com.
with @cdixon @eddylazzarin @smc90
A conversation about the markets and how recent events affect crypto and web3; mental models for thinking about crypto and web3, and the longer arc and evolution of technology history, open source, etc.; and methods & metrics for measuring price-innovation cycle ebbs and flows, creators in web2 vs web3, and much more -- as well as key trends that are top of mind.
web3 with a16z is a new podcast for anyone seeking to understand and go deeper on blockchains, crypto, and web3. It is about how users and builders -- whether artists, coders, creators, developers, companies, organizations, or communities -- now have the ability to not just "read" (web1) + "write" (web2) but "own" (web3) and build with pieces of the internet, unlocking a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurship.
Brought to you by the team at a16z crypto (and the original team behind the a16z Podcast), this show features hallway conversations, discussions, interviews, oral essays, and more on the latest and leading trends in the space, including sharing research, occasional data readouts, and insights from the top scientists, and makers, in the space. It is hosted by Sonal Chokshi, longtime showrunner (2014-2022) and host of the popular a16z Podcast and network, now editor in chief at a16z crypto; as well as a rotating cast of characters from our team who appear in and occasionally co-host episodes as well.
In the initial episodes, we start by setting some quick context, before we dive deep the rest of the season on topics ranging from auction design and mechanics, NFTs, security, zero knowledge, gaming, decentralized media, tokenomics, history, infrastructure, roadmaps, and much more -- in the form of everything from hallway conversations to interviews to oral essays; but as always, as is a signature of our other shows, with high density insights and respect for our listeners' time and attention.
You can find show notes with links to resources, books, or papers discussed; transcripts; and more at a16zcrypto.com.
This episode was produced, and edited by Sonal Chokshi. The episode was technically edited by our audio editor Justin Golden, with thanks to longtime sound engineer Seven Morris. Credit also to Moonshot Design for the art. And special acknowledgments to Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner; CMO Kim Milosevich; and several others on our team here for their support.
To follow more of our work and get updates, resources from us, and from others – be sure to subscribe to our newsletter web3 weekly; you can find it on our website at a16zcrypto.com.
"web3 with a16z" is a show about the next generation of the internet, and about how builders and users -- whether artists, coders, creators, developers, companies, organizations, or communities -- now have the ability to not just "read" (web1) + "write" (web2) but "own" (web3) pieces of the internet, unlocking a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurship. Brought to you by a16z crypto, this show is the definitive resource for understanding and going deeper on all things crypto and web3.
From discussing the latest and leading trends to sharing research, data readouts, and insights from top scientists and makers in the space, this is a variety show with a variety of formats and topics listeners can pick and choose from. It is hosted by the longtime showrunner of (and original team behind) the popular a16z Podcast. Learn more at a16zcrypto.com.