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

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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

Follow a16z crypto for more...
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
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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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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)

Follow a16z crypto for more...

X: https://x.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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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

Follow a16z crypto for more...

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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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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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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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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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