Chris Dixon

Ron has been there for so long for so many of us. We all love him and hope for a fast and healthy recovery.

Congress has worked tirelessly to give builders the rules they need. It’s time for members of the Senate on both sides to hammer out the final details of the Clarity Act. When rules are defined, both consumers and entrepreneurs win.  The GENIUS Act unlocked stablecoin innovation. The Clarity Act can do the same across crypto.

Sam Broner says that stablecoins are just the first step. "If stablecoins win, everybody succeeds. Once I'm paying every day, there's a lot of services that want to move onchain due to that gravity." "Identity is the most obvious. Then social networks begin to form on top of that. Then so do customer to merchant relationships." "As you begin to move payments onchain a lot of additional things begin to quickly follow, and those opportunities are potentially even bigger and more creative than just the simple payments, just the simple exchange." @SamBroner

Honored to be named to the @CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee. Thank you @ChairmanSelig and look forward to working alongside @passalacqua_mj and this impressive group to help the CFTC develop clear rules of the road for crypto founders.

The internet made information global. Crypto is doing the same for money. I discuss how stablecoins bring the internet's original vision to finance, and this important “WhatsApp moment” in the @FT. ft.com/content/7b604d…

Excited to share that I’m joining @a16zcrypto as an Investment Partner, focused crypto x fintech, payments, and onchain finance. This comes after two incredible years at @Visa helping shape our stablecoin strategy and leading onchain data efforts. Deeply grateful to @cuysheffield for his mentorship and leadership. Huge thanks to @cdixon , @AliYahya, @guywuolletjr, @eddylazzarin , and the entire a16z crypto team for the opportunity. If you’re building in the space, I’d love to connect.

1/ LayerZero is launching a new blockchain and on the SNARK-proving front it's powered by Jolt. Benchmark we’re proud of: ~1.6 billion 64-bit RISC-V cycles proved/sec on 64 GPUs, with plenty of room for more speedups. x.com/a16zcrypto/sta…

People wildly underestimate how damaging bad regulation is to innovation. The lack of clear rules in crypto didn't just slow progress—it fundamentally distorted what got built, who benefited, and how markets functioned. Specifically: 1⃣Anti-Transparency—The weaponization of US securities laws meant that transparency became a liability. Builders were told to avoid speaking openly and plainly about their systems, economics, or roadmaps. They were told to avoid marketing altogether. How can startups succeed when they can’t talk about what they’re building? The forced opacity in crypto undermined trust, slowed adoption, complicated partnerships, and prevented the ecosystem from maturing as other tech sectors do. Innovation doesn’t thrive in the dark. 2⃣Adverse Selection—In an enforcement-by-ambiguity regime, trust in the rule of law diminishes. The result is the creation of powerful short term incentives for value extraction. Careful, good-faith builders moved slowly and deliberately, trying not to cross any lines, but would still get targeted by regulators. Meanwhile, profiteers moved quickly to capture attention, capital, and users, and then would disappear before the regulators knew what happened. Naturally, products were optimized for greed and product market fit became an afterthought. That's unsustainable for any industry, not just crypto. When regulations incentivize bad outcomes over good, that’s exactly what happens. 3⃣Structural Contortions—When no one is playing by the same rules, the lowest common denominator becomes the default. Shortcuts to decentralization, dubious Cayman Island foundation structures, token distributions optimized for legal superstition, and governance systems excluding the people actually building all became the norm. These contortions eroded all of crypto’s strengths—openness, decentralization, and shared ownership—and made the alignment of incentives impossible. Innovation doesn’t happen without incentive alignment. 4⃣Inefficient Markets—Capital efficiency and rational pricing don't emerge organically in distorted markets. Crypto might be the largest experiment ever to demonstrate that without a baseline regulatory framework, markets drift towards vibes over fundamentals. They become less rational, not more. The disastrous U.S. regulatory approach is what drove cycles of memecoins and nihilism instead of innovation. Markets need rules. ———— Given the above, what’s striking, is not that crypto hasn’t yet delivered on expectations. What’s striking is that it made it to this point, where it sits on the precipice of overcoming all of these distortions. The GENIUS Act has already legitimized dollars onchain. Project Crypto at the SEC and CFTC are legitimizing securities, derivatives, and other assets onchain. And the CLARITY Act will legitimize the building of the blockchain networks that underpin all of these and other use cases. With CLARITY, builders can speak plainly. Economic models can be pursued. Roadmaps can be published. Governance can include builders. And guardrails against profiteers, rugpulling, and self-dealing become the norm. Innovation can happen without distortion. CLARITY doesn’t guarantee success. But it does create the world’s first regulatory framework for building open networks rather than companies—It creates a legal architecture that finally matches crypto’s technical architecture. Once that happens, crypto can finally use its strengths at scale. In that world, crypto's opportunity looks a lot more obvious.

Making the uses of money 1,000x cheaper, faster, and more programmable unlocks a massive new design space. This leap is similar to the one from the postal service to the internet, which unlocked multi-trillion dollar companies like Google and Amazon. It’s a failure of imagination to think that all that crypto has to offer is “finance, but faster.” Quantity has a quality all of its own.

The Senate Agriculture Committee advancing a large portion of crypto market structure legislation is a big step forward. The vote wasn’t bipartisan this time, but the momentum is clearly there, with both parties working together to get a comprehensive bill done. As with any major legislation, the details will evolve as the bill moves through Congress. This progress is significant, but we can’t wait any longer. Builders and users need lasting legislation and long-term certainty. It’s time for policymakers on both sides to come together to finish this bill and make sure the U.S. remains the leader in crypto.

Our special 100th episode with @cdixon and @palmerluckey is live. They cover crypto, banking, and stablecoins, as well as modern warfare, defense technology, the U.S.–China technology race, AI and manufacturing, and the next frontiers of innovation — from fusion to quantum computing. Reminder: "We just have to do things."

A huge thank you to @ariannasimpson for all that she’s done for @a16zcrypto. Arianna was an early crypto believer, starting a crypto fund before most people thought it was real. She then joined our team and made many great investments over the last 6 years. She will no doubt build a very successful fund and we look forward to investing alongside her.

Grateful to Dan Romero, Varun Srinivasan, and the team for a five-year partnership building Farcaster. Looking forward to what they do next, and to seeing the Neynar team take on stewardship of the protocol.

Crypto builders need clear rules of the road. Over the past five years, Republicans, Democrats, and the Trump Administration have worked closely with members across the crypto industry to protect decentralization, support developers, and give entrepreneurs a fair shot. ​At its core, this bill does that. It’s not perfect, and changes are needed before it becomes law. But now is the time to move the CLARITY Act forward if we want the U.S. to remain the best place in the world to build the future of crypto.

At Andreessen Horowitz, we just raised over $15B. With these new funds including American Dynamism ($1.176B), Apps ($1.7B), Bio + Health ($700M), Infrastructure ($1.7B), Growth ($6.75B), and other venture strategies ($3B), we raised over 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025. Why did we raise the money and how do we plan to invest it? Read more from Ben Horowitz: a16z.news/p/we-raised-15…