a16z crypto show
The a16z crypto show explores how decentralized networks are reshaping money, ownership, and the architecture of the internet. We go beyond the hype to look at what’s actually working, what isn’t, and what comes next as crypto continues to go mainstream and blockchains become core infrastructure. Each episode features conversations with founders, engineers, economists, policymakers, and researchers building at the frontier of finance, payments, AI, and distributed systems. We cover stablecoins and global payments, the tokenization of "real-world" assets, decentralized physical infrastructure, network design and governance, and the practical tradeoffs behind decentralization — along with lessons from past technology shifts. Produced and hosted by the a16z crypto team, the show combines reporting, analysis, and first-principles thinking to explain how crypto intersects with the economy and society — and why it matters now. Learn more at a16zcrypto.com. *** Posts should not be considered investment advice or an advertisement for investment services. Reposts of third-party content are not attributable to a16z; see disclosures for more information: https://a16z.com/disclosures/.
Episodes
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 P...
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 Roughgard...
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 Ab...
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 abstracti...
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, permissi...
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 f...
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 a...
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 ...
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...
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 unu...
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...
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 t...
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 dow...
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 Je...
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,...
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 f...
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 ...
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:
...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, ...
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 miss...
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