All 27 Banking & Capital Markets posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
Blockchains eliminate the historical supply constraints on financial markets—listing gatekeepers and geographic fragmentation—enabling permissionless creation of both new risk units and novel transfer mechanisms, from prediction markets to perpetual futures on alternative assets.
Blockchains remove historical supply constraints on financial markets by enabling permissionless issuance and global distribution, unlocking an explosion of net new markets—both novel risk units (prediction markets, memecoins, RWAs) and new transfer mechanisms (AMMs, perps, binary contracts)—that will capture significant value.
As real-world assets move onchain, DeFi primitives designed for volatile cryptoassets will give way to new infrastructure—CLOBs, fixed-rate lending, options, dark pools, and portfolio margin—that better serve lower-volatility, institutional-grade assets and unlock orders of magnitude more financial activity per dollar deployed.
As blockchain throughput becomes commoditized, financial markets need stronger guarantees: predictable transaction inclusion and ordering, resilience against gatekeepers, and pre-execution privacy. A16Z Crypto examines what protocol designers must solve for blockchains to serve as core financial infrastructure.
Traditional finance institutions are adopting blockchain technology selectively—not to embrace DeFi, but to optimize costs, settlement, and control. The result will be permissioned institutional infrastructure alongside open networks, each reinforcing the other rather than one replacing the other.
Market structure has transformed radically since 1960—from rail-heavy industrials to tech dominance, with trading costs collapsing and information symmetry improving. Despite more data availability, beating markets remains hard because the structural edge has vanished.
Interest rates lack a historical 'normal'—they've swung wildly across decades. The abrupt shift from ZIRP to 4–5% rates has crushed housing affordability and economic activity (20% of GDP) despite earlier predictions of crisis, raising questions about policymakers' transition planning.
Higher interest rates create both winners (savers, retirees, cash-rich companies) and losers (homebuyers, renters, small businesses); the author argues the damage outweighs benefits, particularly through a "higher rates, higher rent doom loop" that risks rekindling inflation.
A Wealth of Common Sense (16) · A16Z Crypto (11) · Net Interest (8) · Conor Witt (3) · Newcomer (2) · Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (2) · Lightspeed Venture Partners (1) · Tomasz Tunguz (1) · Turner Novak (1) · Multicoin Capital (1)
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