a16z crypto

We've raised $2.2B in committed capital to invest in the next generation of crypto. Announcing Crypto Fund 5

The Senate Banking Committee released the latest draft of the CLARITY Act last night. The draft has significantly improved since January and reflects years of bipartisan negotiations. It’s time to get this passed. This bill safeguards consumers, includes important developer protections, and gives crypto entrepreneurs the regulatory clarity they need to build here in the U.S. We’re thankful for the hard work of the Senate Banking Committee and their staff. We urge Senators on both sides to move quickly to advance it out of Committee, to the Senate floor, and ultimately be signed into law by the President.

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Simply become insane and desperate.

@guywuolletjr 🫡

"Last year alone, stablecoins accounted for $9 trillion in annual transactions, putting them in the same league as Visa and PayPal" Today we're investing $75M in the ARC token, the asset powering Circle's new chain built for institutional finance.

"A very resourceful engineer can now do a lot of product management and a lot of design if they're just willing to do the work and use AI." @alive_eth on AI collapsing the PM, designer, and engineer roles into one: "One thing that we're seeing is the blending of the roles of the product manager, the designer, and the engineer, where every one of those three believe that they can do the job of the other two. Marc Andreessen actually referred to this as the Mexican standoff between the three." @alive_eth @unchained_pod @laurashin

"Crypto as a space is winning." — @guywuolletjr ✅ Stablecoin adoption ✅ Infrastructure is faster and cheaper ✅ GENIUS passed (with CLARITY next?) ✅ Wall Street coming onchain ⬜️ Sentiment catching up @notthreadguy

"We're as close as we've ever been to getting it passed." @milesjennings on CLARITY

Tokenized “real-world” assets (RWAs) have surged 10x in two years, now topping $30B — with nearly half held in U.S. Treasury debt. The growth reflects rising institutional demand to put traditional financial instruments onchain, from government bonds and commodities to equities and private credit. While U.S. Treasuries dominate today, the asset class is broadening, with more categories gaining meaningful share in recent quarters. Note: RWAs are traditional financial instruments such as government bonds, commodities, and equities that are represented onchain as tokens.

A few years ago: 10-14 transactions per second. Now: any amount of money, anywhere in the world, in under a second, for under a penny. @alive_eth on @mts_live explaining why crypto is breaking out of its niche and becoming mainstream financial infrastructure.

Wall Street is (I suspect somewhat unknowingly) inheriting crypto’s biggest superpower, the same one that software has had for decades: composability. @guywuolletjr

"Agents will become economic actors. They will become first-class members of the financial system." @alive_eth 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_pod @laurashin

"Most of finance isn’t actually digital in the way we believe it to be. That's now changing."

Notes from our Crypto Fund 5 conversation: 1. Successful founders in this next era will tend to be product-focused, go-to-market-focused, and pragmatic rather than ideological. 2. The goal: get a billion people onchain through stocks, bonds, stablecoins, and remittances. Once they're onboarded to the infrastructure, adjacent services can follow naturally. 3. We don't have a global financial network. We have a patchwork of small networks glued together by humans and legacy processes. Stablecoins are global from day one: the WhatsApp moment for money. 4. Stablecoins are leading crypto's mainstream traction. ~$300B issued, transaction volume approaching major payment network levels, and growth uncorrelated with trading. 5. The Genius Act gave stablecoins a regulatory framework, and unlocked builder energy overnight. The Clarity Act (or SEC/CFTC rulemaking) could do the same for the rest of crypto. 6. Crypto is winning the revolution, now it's time to govern. That means working with the system, not overthrowing it. 7, A growing share of transactions (potentially the majority) will be done by AI agents, not humans. If you tell one to save you money on your monthly spending, it will use whatever software does that, and it won't care what gets disintermediated. 8, You cannot vibe code USDC or Hyperliquid. Network-effects businesses are the one thing the model companies can't easily replicate. 9. Privacy may be the most durable moat in crypto. Once an application's state is encrypted, it can't be trivially forked to another chain. Switching costs return. 10. If every human on earth gains access to a dollar-denominated, stablecoin-powered account, that alone would be a generational upgrade to the global financial system.

Chris Dixon on why crypto matters more in an AI era

"I think it was maybe @hosseeb who was tweeting that if you revived Satoshi and said, 'Is a stablecoin a cypherpunk product?' I think the answer would have to absolutely be yes. I think we're letting perfect be the enemy of good." @guywuolletjr on @therollupco: "It's very easy to say we're not making progress at the rate we'd want. I think we're actually getting a lot of what we would've wanted five or 10 years ago." "We wake up every morning and I feel like I'm winning. To parrot the Jensen quote, I did not wake up this morning a loser, and I think too many people in crypto have a bit of that mindset today. If there's one message I'd like to convey it's that I feel like we're winning."

With our new Agentic Banking system, enterprises and institutions get strict guardrails, audit trails, and multi-rail settlement engines.

@arjunkhemani @alive_eth 🫡 based @alive_eth

.@alive_eth: “Privacy is the most important feature that really has been an afterthought for most of the space up until very recently. The reason for that is likely that people were solving some of the other harder technical problems or the initial technical problems that needed to be solved in order for us to just have blockchains that scale, and privacy is the next thing to go after. But the state of the world today is that most blockchains are almost entirely public and transparent, which means that every transaction, everything that happens on a blockchain, is entirely visible to anyone who cares to look. And the reality is that there is no way that blockchains and crypto will become mainstream if that is what the technology requires. It’s inconceivable to imagine that you would have your salary be entirely visible to everyone. And if that’s the case, then you wouldn’t ever be paid in crypto, because you wouldn’t ever want that to be the case. Or it’s also impossible to imagine that a company’s bank balance sheet and transactions will also be entirely public and transparent. So privacy is essential in order for crypto to really break out and become mainstream, especially as it makes inroads into institutional use cases.”