a16z crypto
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We back bold entrepreneurs building the next internet. Posts are not investment advice or an advertisement for investment services. See https://t.co/CrY32IX80W 👇
Videos
"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 Ali Yahya Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ Guy Wuollet Robert Hackett
a16z crypto167,459 Aufrufe • vor 29 Tagen
Is crypto entering its collared shirt era? Guy Wuollet says yes.
a16z crypto27,086 Aufrufe • vor 6 Tagen
The headlines after a DeFi hack tend to blame decentralization. Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ makes the case for the opposite read: "Of the hacks that I looked most closely at over the last 30 days, many of them would've been mitigated by more decentralization, not less. In other words, the decentralization part wasn't the bug. The bug was that they were unexpectedly more centralized than many people believed." "With almost every crypto adjacent hack I've seen, the response has something to do with let's get more parties involved and decentralized and remove single points of failure." "We have not learned that decentralization is bad. What we've learned is that inadvertent single points of failure is bad, which is a thing that we've always known. In its ideal form, DeFi is still more secure."
a16z crypto21,307 Aufrufe • vor 5 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 crypto48,091 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
"Satya Nadella was asked in a podcast: is AI kind of like its own species? He laughs and says no, because at the end, an AI cannot own property, cannot take liabilities, cannot enter into contracts, cannot start companies. But that's exactly what a blockchain is intended for." Blockchains change that. Sreeram Kannan on self-sovereign AI: "A program can own property and take limited liabilities. It can start companies, DAOs. You can have a fully self-sovereign intelligence that comes packaged with a unit of money, it goes and does work and earns money — whether as an influencer, as a scientist, as a programmer, as a teacher." "It does those jobs and earns money and uses that money to fund its future training and improvement. This is a very sci-fi forward view. But I'm talking about less than a three year time horizon to this happening."
a16z crypto20,589 Aufrufe • vor 6 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 crypto204,622 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Most people think agentic commerce = ChatGPT buying you sneakers. The bigger opportunity is headless merchants. Noah Levine on Tokenized Podcast: "We see a much bigger opportunity: the next class of developers who maybe have never written a line of code in their life but are coming to this through something like Claude Code or Codex. They're gonna wanna get access to a bunch of different developer tools. "Because they're maybe building a project on a weekend, they wanna buy things on a per usage basis. And oftentimes their agents are going to ultimately be the actor that's buying. "There's gonna be a whole new class of what we're calling headless merchants — presented as an endpoint rather than a website with a sales team and long-term contract agreements."
a16z crypto33,010 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
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 crypto143,721 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
"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 crypto77,890 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
"Agents will become economic actors. They will become first-class members of the financial system." Ali Yahya 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 crypto45,076 Aufrufe • vor 27 Tagen
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 crypto55,055 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Programmable intelligence needs programmable institutions. Sreeram Kannan on the AI x crypto intersection: "AI is just programmable intelligence. If you have programmable intelligence, you can't work with soft, squishy, legal, slow regulated institutions." "We believe that this intersection — that programmable intelligence needs programmable institutions, smart contracts, and the ability to engage in contracts, own property — all of these things are really powerful."
a16z crypto18,789 Aufrufe • vor 12 Tagen
!["I think [AI agents] may be the only actors that we trust with our assets and the only actors that are capable of generating meaningful return on our assets." Sean Neville, cofounder of Catena, makes the case for an agent-native internet built on stablecoin rails: "Once we have stablecoins and we have the ability to represent dollars on internet rails, what kind of new opportunities does that unlock? At the same time we were contemplating that, you could see clearly the web, the internet itself, is going agent-native." "As AI actors become economic participants, they will ultimately be the primary dominant economic participants in the world for all kinds of activities, payments, and otherwise." "Flash forward in a few years, I think they may be the only actors that we trust with our assets and the only actors that are capable of generating meaningful return on our assets."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2057104169920860167/amplify_video_thumb/2057103899501395969/img/S4Mxm_ZFXfaCLzg5.jpg)
"I think [AI agents] may be the only actors that we trust with our assets and the only actors that are capable of generating meaningful return on our assets." Sean Neville, cofounder of Catena, makes the case for an agent-native internet built on stablecoin rails: "Once we have stablecoins and we have the ability to represent dollars on internet rails, what kind of new opportunities does that unlock? At the same time we were contemplating that, you could see clearly the web, the internet itself, is going agent-native." "As AI actors become economic participants, they will ultimately be the primary dominant economic participants in the world for all kinds of activities, payments, and otherwise." "Flash forward in a few years, I think they may be the only actors that we trust with our assets and the only actors that are capable of generating meaningful return on our assets."
a16z crypto21,197 Aufrufe • vor 14 Tagen
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's making existing weaknesses easier to identify and exploit. The question is whether defenders can evolve as quickly as attackers. 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 Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ Robert Hackett
a16z crypto29,222 Aufrufe • vor 21 Tagen
Guy Wuollet on why crypto is an overlooked place to build in the age of AI: "You cannot vibe code USDC. You cannot have a weekend project and end up building something like a Hyperliquid." "The things we're building onchain today, I believe will be long-term enduring networks that have broad societal impact." "Whereas if you're interested in building a short-term project or pure software, I think there's the obvious question of why does that not get eclipsed by one of the large model companies in a couple of years." Guy Wuollet
a16z crypto34,619 Aufrufe • vor 29 Tagen
Ali Yahya on how the crypto founder archetype has shifted: “There’s a strong sense that in order for crypto to succeed, it has to work with the system as opposed to trying to overthrow it.” “The vibe back when I joined was very cypherpunk and anarchic. Code as law was better than government law, and we would ultimately build a parallel financial system that would wholly replace the existing one.” “The most successful founders in this next era are gonna be the ones that are much more product focused, much more go-to-market focused, and also more pragmatic rather than ideological.” Ali Yahya
a16z crypto32,932 Aufrufe • vor 29 Tagen
$0.30 of every $2 coffee goes to intermediaries, not the shop. Sam Broner on how stablecoins fix that:
a16z crypto61,347 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
