Podcast
a16z crypto show
Hosted by a16z crypto, Robert Hackett, Sonal Chokshi · EN
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.
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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/.
34episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Why markets fail — and how to fix them (ft. Nobel economist Alvin Roth)
1w ago01:25:25Tap to summarizeLong 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 04:18 The economist as engineer 08:09 When theory meets the real world 07:02 Fixing the medical residency match 15:32 Why markets unravel 18:22 Redesigning NYC high school admissions 28:05 The hidden problem of congestion 34:47 How kidney exchange saves lives 45:26 How the internet changed market design 48:25 Airbnb, Uber and smarter marketplaces 51:28 Repugnant transactions and moral economics 53:32 When markets need social support 54:32 The unexpected effects of criminalizing surrogacy 01:04:58 Preference signals and the job market 01:18:53 A broken market: resettling refugees and other migrants Hear more from: Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden Scott Kominers: https://twitter.com/skominers Follow a16z crypto: X: https://twitter.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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →Leslie Lamport on the Science of Distributed Systems
4w ago00:36:22Tap to summarizeBefore 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 02:52 – Why concurrent systems are surprisingly tricky 04:40 – The origins of the bakery algorithm 07:37 – What does it mean for a protocol to be “correct”? 12:03 – The origins of the Byzantine Generals problem — and what happens when some computers fail 17:49 – How Paxos emerged from an attempted impossibility proof 23:47 – Why theory and practice need each other 33:48 – Government funding, DARPA, and the long arc of foundational research 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. Hear more from: Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden Ittai Abraham: https://twitter.com/ittaia Follow a16z crypto: X: https://twitter.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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →Before Blockchains, There Was State Machine Replication (ft. Barbara Liskov and Tim Roughgarden)
4w ago00:35:46Tap to summarizeEvery 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 abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing. a16z crypto research partner Ittai Abraham joins the conversation. The discussion traces Liskov’s path from programming languages and modularity to distributed systems research; from CLU and Argus to viewstamped replication; and from benign failures to Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, or PBFT — a protocol family whose ideas now shape many modern blockchain systems. Liskov explains why modularity matters, how systems researchers thought about replication in the 1980s, why view changes were such a key idea, and how PBFT extended earlier work to handle malicious behavior on the internet. The conversation also explores the bridge between theory and practice, the importance of proofs and specifications, and why the next generation of systems research may be reshaped by AI. 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 behind 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. Highlights: 00:00 Intro: How do systems stay reliable when parts fail? 01:18 Barbara Liskov’s path from programming languages to distributed systems 05:45 Why modularity is “everything” 07:22 The replication problem: keeping data available across many machines 09:58 Viewstamped replication and the “ledger” before blockchains 16:32 Why good research starts with what you don’t understand 18:10 Leslie Lamport, Paxos, and the inevitability of ideas in the right time, in the right place 21:48 Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance: what changes when replicas can lie 19:35 How PBFT bridged theory and practical systems 22:38 Why you should never trust an individual replica 28:39 Why blockchains are state machine replication in the wild 31:27 AI, verification, and the future of computer science Follow: Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden Ittai Abraham: https://twitter.com/ittaia Follow a16z crypto: X: https://twitter.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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →How Bitcoin Rewired a Classic Computer Science Problem (ft. Tim Roughgarden and Ittai Abraham)
4w ago00:20:00Tap to summarizeBitcoin 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, permissionless setting. And it took the research world years to fully recognize what Satoshi had done. In this episode of First Principles, a16z crypto Head of Research and Columbia professor Tim Roughgarden is joined by a16z crypto research partner Ittai Abraham — one of the world’s leading researchers in Byzantine agreement and consensus protocols, a founding member of VMware’s blockchain project, and founder of the technical blog Decentralized Thoughts — to unpack the scientific roots of blockchain consensus. Together, Tim and Ittai trace the line from classic distributed systems research to Bitcoin, proof-of-stake, Tendermint, Casper, DAG-based protocols, Solana’s Alpenglow, and the modern race for higher throughput and lower latency. Along the way, they explain why concepts like Byzantine fault tolerance, state machine replication, safety, liveness, and partial synchrony are not just academic abstractions — they are the language and design principles behind today’s blockchain protocols. This conversation kicks off First Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology — a special, limited series from a16z crypto on the scientific ideas behind modern computing — especially blockchains — told through conversations with the pioneers who helped create them, including Barbara Liskov, Leslie Lamport, and more. Hosted by Tim Roughgarden, the series explores the foundational concepts behind distributed systems and consensus protocols; economics, mechanism and market design; and cryptography, from digital signatures to zero knowledge. People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and behind blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, told by the people who helped build it. Highlights 00:00 Introduction to First Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology 00:56 Why consensus matters for blockchains 02:30 Byzantine agreement: The old computer science problem Bitcoin made practical 04:34 Blockchains as a shared system of record: State machine replication and blockchain state 06:41 How two research worlds — distributed computing and crypto — began to converge 07:49 Proof of work vs. proof of stake 09:27 Why Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake took years 11:08 When crypto rediscovered decades of distributed systems research 11:50 Why BFT became practical 12:49 Throughput, latency, and modern consensus design 14:05 DAG-based protocols and faster blockchains 15:25 Peace time vs. war time: why modern blockchains need two modes 16:47 Theory, practice, and the future of blockchain research Follow: Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden Ittai Abraham: https://twitter.com/ittaia Follow a16z crypto: X: https://twitter.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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →How Stablecoins Are Reconfiguring the Financial System | ft. Eddy Lazzarin and Sonal Chokshi
Jun 1201:20:18Tap to summarizeCrypto 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 for crypto founders - the difference between a network token and a security, and why it needs to be written into law - why stablecoins are crypto's first real killer app and how the rest of the economy is reconfiguring around them - how tokens let builders decouple pricing from growth in a way stocks never could - why 97.8% of the value created in capitalism leaks out, and what that means for anyone trying to capture any of it Highlights: 00:00 Intro 01:25 What it means to be a GP 02:00 Consensus vs. non-consensus bets 04:27 Network tokens and the CLARITY Act 09:35 Revenue, value capture, and network-token business models 21:18 Stablecoins as crypto’s first killer app 28:52 Engineer-philosopher mindset 39:04 Intellectual influences 52:40 Eddy’s path to crypto 1:03:15 The exuberant adoption phase of AI 1:14:38 Being "pro–AI psychosis" Follow: Eddy Lazzarin: https://twitter.com/eddylazzarin Sonal Chokshi: https://twitter.com/smc90 Robert Hackett: https://twitter.com/rhackett Follow a16z crypto: X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →The Real Reason Behind Most DeFi Hacks
May 1300:35:28Tap to summarizeFollowing 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 also cover: - why “AI-powered hacking” is difficult to measure - how geopolitical tensions may be influencing cyber activity - why defenders should be aggressively stress-testing their own systems - how AI could eventually outperform humans at resisting social engineering - what users can do today to protect themselves online Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:57 - The surge, explained 01:37 - Did attackers use AI 04:19 - How AI can help defend against attacks 09:16 - The doomsday marketing debate 17:17 - DeFi transparency: opportunities and challenges 21:00 - Social engineering and how to stay safe Follow along here: Eddy Lazzarin: https://twitter.com/eddylazzarin Robert Hackett: https://twitter.com/rhackett Matt Gleason: https://twitter.com/mg_486662 Follow a16z crypto: X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →We Raised $2.2B. Here’s Why.
May 501:00:31Tap to summarizeWe'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 Follow a16z crypto: X: https://x.com/a16zcrypto 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →The end of ads? AI agents are about to change how we buy
Apr 2700:57:09Tap to summarizeAgents 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 Follow a16z crypto: /a16zcrypto Subscribe for more news and updates: a16zcrypto.substack.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →Why AI is so centralized: How it's built, who controls it, and what comes next
Apr 2200:17:23Tap to summarizeA 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 Subscribe for more news and updates: a16zcrypto.substack.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcribe →How Bots, Deepfakes and AI Agents Are Forcing a New Internet Identity Layer
Apr 1700:42:13Tap to summarizeThe 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... 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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