a16z crypto
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Videos
A handful of ideas hold up the entire digital world, but most of us never learn where they came from. So we went to the source: the people who solved these problems, and won Turing Awards and Nobel Prizes for it. First Principles, hosted by Tim Roughgarden. First episode out now.
a16z crypto649,185 Aufrufe • vor 29 Tagen
"Satoshi knew." a16z crypto research partner Ittai Abraham on how Bitcoin solved a 40-year-old academic problem, and how its creator knew it all along: "It actually took quite a few years for people to realize that this is kind of solving a Byzantine agreement problem… a very core academic problem that has been studied for 40 years." "In that sense Bitcoin is kind of this huge revolution in how to solve Byzantine agreement. In fact, if you look at early emails from Satoshi Nakamoto, he said the core technical aspect of Bitcoin is solving Byzantine agreement."
a16z crypto49,223 Aufrufe • vor 11 Tagen
What makes a great founder? Guy Wuollet on the Promethean flame:
a16z crypto42,325 Aufrufe • vor 10 Tagen
It started on a napkin. Turing Award winner Leslie Lamport on sketching a piece of modern cryptography in a Berkeley coffee shop, and how the fault model behind every blockchain came from research on keeping airplanes in the sky: "I was one of the few people in the world who happened to have heard about digital signatures… So I just wrote, literally on a napkin, a simple algorithm for writing digital signatures." "They had to assume that it could do anything, and therefore they were faced with the Byzantine generals problem… Once hackers started appearing on the scene, it was obvious that you really did need Byzantine fault tolerance."
a16z crypto49,301 Aufrufe • vor 12 Tagen
First Principles Ep. 1 Bitcoin gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t. The problem was named in the 1980s, and it took the research world years to even notice Satoshi had solved it. A new series hosted by Tim Roughgarden, with Ittai Abraham. 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 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
a16z crypto95,353 Aufrufe • vor 29 Tagen
First Principles Ep. 3 with Leslie Lamport Before blockchains could reach consensus, Leslie Lamport had to define what agreement even meant when computers fail, lie, or disappear. Hosted by Tim Roughgarden with Ittai Abraham. 00:00 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
a16z crypto61,616 Aufrufe • vor 23 Tagen
"It's a wonderful time to be a pragmatist building onchain." Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, Eddy Lazzarin, and Guy Wuollet on Crypto Fund 5, where crypto is right now, and where it's heading next. 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 Chris Dixon Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ Guy Wuollet Robert Hackett
a16z crypto171,311 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
. Robert Hackett on why the "autonomous" in DAO finally works: “People would talk about it as a group chat with a bank account. But they had higher aspirations than that: maybe you could have an internet-native organization where people all over the world coordinate via decentralized protocols.” “AI is now able to digest and ingest tons of information and help people make better decisions. It’s completely game-changing.” “Let the machines take care of the stuff that humans frankly don’t want to deal with.” MTS Gabriel
a16z crypto33,259 Aufrufe • vor 16 Tagen
"And then along came blockchains." Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov on how PBFT — practical Byzantine fault tolerance, now foundational to modern consensus — started as a PhD student answering a DARPA RFP: "I had a student, Miguel Castro, who was looking for a PhD thesis, and I suggested to Miguel that he look at the RFPs that DARPA had put out … He found an RFP that was looking for ways to handle the malicious attacks that were going on on the internet." "When Miguel and I finished the work on practical Byzantine fault tolerance, we thought that at some point people would start to use this. … It was a delay of about 10 years before people started to use it."
a16z crypto34,706 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
First Principles Ep. 2 w/ Barbara Liskov Every blockchain alive 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. Hosted by Tim Roughgarden with Ittai Abraham. 00:00 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
a16z crypto53,397 Aufrufe • vor 28 Tagen
“You’ve just been told you have superpowers.” AI agents are starting to feel like coworkers. The cost of automation is collapsing. So what happens to jobs? To startups? To crypto? We break down the new paper “Some Simple Economics of AGI” with coauthor Christian Catalini, including: • Why verification becomes the bottleneck • Practical advice for early- and late-career builders • The risk of a hollow economy, and the path to an augmented one • Why crypto may be essential infrastructure for identity, provenance, and trust In conversation with Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ and Robert Hackett. Full episode ↓
a16z crypto205,289 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Crypto has been walled off from the real economy for years. That's changing. Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ joins Sonal Chokshi and Robert Hackett to break down why crypto is entering a completely different phase, and what gets built once the rules finally catch up to the technology. 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 01:03:15 The exuberant adoption phase of AI 01:14:38 Being "pro–AI psychosis"
a16z crypto51,462 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
E/ACC vs. D/ACC: THE DEBATE vitalik.eth thinks slowing down AGI by four years is worth it. Beff (e/acc) thinks that's exponential opportunity cost. They debated it live, moderated by Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ and Shaw (spirit/acc). 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
a16z crypto144,519 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
“There needs to be guardrails. There needs to be rules in place.” Robert Hackett on why the CLARITY Act matters for crypto: “These markets are substantial. They’re worth trillions of dollars. It’s not like a small little weird phenomenon anymore. These are global massive markets, and they require regulation and rules just like other markets do.” “There’s capital on the sidelines just waiting for the green light, to deploy and to modernize.” Gabriel MTS
a16z crypto23,643 Aufrufe • vor 18 Tagen
"When social media first started rising, we didn't necessarily realize how much of that was actually just foundational infrastructure for the future of humanity.” Ben Fielding of gensyn on why AI is about to repeat the mistake social media made, and how we can still fix it: "This isn't just a product that you chat with. It's actually new fundamental infrastructure for humanity, and we should build that learning from the lessons from before. If we let a single company build AI, they hold an enormous amount of power in the world." "If you actually distribute that out and provide it in a kind of sovereign way — it's on all of our own devices and we own it — then actually you steer the world in a very different social direction."
a16z crypto78,712 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
"The magic of tokens that's not really viable for stocks is that you could keep minting on the other side... totally decoupled from the fees coming in." Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ on the buy-and-burn vs. mint-and-spend, and the lever token networks have that equity doesn't: "The idea of the buy and burn is that you take revenue in one side, you charge whatever you can get away with in terms of your price. You take that revenue and use it to burn the token... reducing its supply, which helps it appreciate." "The mirror of the buy and burn is the mint and spend. And this is where you are minting tokens out of nowhere to pay for whatever you need for growth or for network activities." "You can keep pulling in fees and test your ability to charge in the market while completely separately scaling your spending in order to facilitate the most growth." "In stocks, you can't pay an onboarding bonus to Uber drivers or whatever with your stock... To pay for growth, a conventional company has to do it in a very indirect way. They have to sell the equity to an investor in a private round to get cash to spend on growth. But this allows you to circumvent that completely."
a16z crypto25,281 Aufrufe • vor 26 Tagen
“Crypto is a technology for trust.” A helpful frame from Sreeram Kannan on why AI needs crypto. As agents become more capable, they’ll need ways to hold money, follow rules, show their work, and prove what happened. Crypto is AI's missing trust layer. Full convo with Robert Hackett below. A few highlights: 00:33 — Sreeram's transition from academia to startup founder 02:20 — On EigenCloud and decentralized applications 05:42 — The AI x crypto convergence 08:15 — The future of sovereign AI agents 10:16 — The role of humans in a world of autonomous agents
a16z crypto49,930 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Agents can now do almost anything a human can do with a computer. So what happens when they start spending money on your behalf? Eddy Lazzarin ☀️, Sam Ragsdale, 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? 35:15 – Stablecoins vs. credit cards 41:54 – Sam's bear case on interchange 49:11 – The killer app for agentic commerce
a16z crypto56,385 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
"Agents will become economic actors. They will become first-class members of the financial system." on why AI agents need crypto rails: "There are all sorts of financial behaviors that they'll be able to engage in that they currently cannot, and it's inconceivable to imagine that all of that is gonna happen on ACH and wire transfers and the traditional payments rails that we rely on today." "Crypto, on the other hand, is internet native, it's fully programmable, it's instantly settled, it's global from day one. It is the perfect fit from a technological standpoint for AI agents as a way of bringing agents into the financial world." Unchained Laura Shin
a16z crypto46,612 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten