a16z crypto show

Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire joins a16z crypto founder and founding partner Chris Dixon for a conversation about stablecoins, Circle’s Arc blockchain, and what happens when programmable money meets increasingly capable machines.

Drawing on decades of building and investing through changes in internet technology, Jeremy and Chris reflect on how far crypto has come, what still stands between it and mainstream adoption, and why its most compelling applications may look unfamiliar today.

Highlights
00:00 Intro
01:00 Circle’s original vision for programmable money
06:22 Why institutions started taking stablecoins seriously
11:07 Building a global financial network
14:05 What gives a stablecoin its moat?
19:05 Is crypto still waiting for its iPhone moment?
25:35 Crypto’s growing adoption beyond speculation
27:18 From making existing things better to creating entirely new markets
32:06 The weirdest experiments being built on Arc
36:09 What happens when AI hires AI
37:12 Why the next big thing starts out looking like a toy
38:12 Can blockchains counter AI’s centralizing tendencies?
39:47 How Arc balances openness and accountability
43:32 What the machine economy could look like in five years

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This content is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not necessarily reflect the views of a16z or its affiliates. For important disclosures, see https://a16z.com/disclosures/

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Guy Wuollet thinks crypto will have succeeded when we stop calling it crypto. Financial services will simply run on blockchains, much as other businesses now run on the internet. What will it take to get there?

In this conversation with Robert Hackett, the a16z crypto general partner explains where he sees opportunities to build, from stablecoin payments and perpetual futures to new markets for energy and compute. They discuss what tokenization changes for Wall Street, why faster and cheaper blockchains make different businesses possible, and how crypto’s cypherpunk roots fit with its growing commercial adoption.

Guy also shares his path from a16z intern to general partner, including a research project to build a decentralized internet service provider. Along the way, he explains how he evaluates founders, why early token liquidity doesn’t change his investment horizon, and what he looks for in people who want to spend decades building a company. Plus, oil painting and some strongly held opinions about how pants should fit.

Highlights
00:00 A preview of the conversation
00:52 From a16z intern to crypto general partner
11:51 Bitcoin and Guy’s cypherpunk roots
14:34 From technological revolution to practical products
19:28 Why timing matters for crypto adoption
23:31 Token launches, liquidity, and going public
28:20 Backing founders for the long term
31:39 How Guy evaluates founders
36:21 Where Guy sees opportunities in crypto
38:42 New markets for energy and compute
39:49 Stablecoins and finance’s digital transformation
43:29 Why perpetual futures are gaining traction
45:26 What tokenization changes for Wall Street
49:04 Oil painting and the pleasure of making things
51:02 Guy’s smallest hill to die on

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This content is for informational purposes only and is not investment, business, legal, or tax advice. See https://a16z.com/disclosures for important information.

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More than 30 years ago, Gödel Prize Winner Noam Nisan helped develop a proof technique that he never expected anyone to use in the real world. 

At the center of that breakthrough was the sum-check protocol — an elegant technique that emerged from Noam Nisan’s early work on interactive proofs. At the time, even Nisan assumed ideas like these were far too theoretical to become practical technology. Today, sum-check sits at the heart of some of the fastest modern SNARKs, proof systems that are increasingly important to blockchains and verifiable computation. 

In this episode of First Principles, a16z crypto Head of Research Tim Roughgarden and research partner Justin Thaler sit down with Noam Nisan to trace the unlikely journey from theory to infrastructure. They explore how interaction and randomness changed the very definition of a mathematical proof; the deceptively simple “two into one” insight behind sum-check; the rapid sequence of discoveries that culminated in IP = PSPACE; and why Justin believes sum-check may be close to the optimal tool for building practical SNARKs. 

But Nisan’s career also tells a broader story about how research responds to technological change. When the web arrived in the 1990s, he deliberately left a field in which he was already a leading researcher to understand a new problem: How do you get independent actors on the internet to cooperate when they have different incentives? That question helped give rise to algorithmic game theory — and, decades later, brought Nisan back to questions around blockchain fees, token economics, and protocol design. 

Highlights 

0:00 — Intro 
1:28 — Noam Nisan and the origins of verifiable computation 
2:58 — Why Noam Nisan left complexity theory 
7:52 — POPcorn, distributed computing, and early blockchain-like ideas 
11:10 — The birth of algorithmic game theory 
16:14 — Justin Thaler discovers the sum-check protocol 
25:05 — From arithmetization to LFKN 
27:06 — The story behind IP = PSPACE 
30:40 — Why sum-check matters for modern SNARKs 
31:15 — What is a SNARK? 
38:52 — The key idea behind sum-check: turning two into one 
44:03 — When SNARKs went from theory to practice 
46:03 — Why blockchains were the breakthrough use case 
50:36 — Noam Nisan’s move into blockchain economics 
56:15 — EIP-1559, transaction fees, and efficient blockspace 
1:02:07 — From theoretical computer science to real-world systems 
1:08:49 — Boiling down the sum-check protocol: Two become one 
1:10:58 — Is the sum-check protocol optimal? 

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How can you prove that something is true without revealing why it is true? 

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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

Links

Why Bitcoin matters: https://a16z.com/why-bitcoin-matters/

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto

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

Links:

Guy Wuollet: https://x.com/guywuolletjr

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 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

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/

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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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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”

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

Follow a16z crypto

X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto

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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

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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 

About First Principles 

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. 

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