All 34 Crypto & Web3 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.
Compute is becoming a major productive asset class with hundreds of billions in GPU inventory generating cash flows, but financial markets remain fragmented and inefficient. The argument: build a compute prime broker—standardizing physical capacity delivery first, then layering financial instruments and crypto-based collateralization to enable producers and consumers to hedge price and availability risks across a long tail of heterogeneous demand.
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.
The DUNA (decentralized unincorporated nonprofit association) represents a watershed moment in organizational law—for the first time, internet-scale decentralized networks can operate as legally recognized entities with limited liability, closing a gap that forced crypto projects into regulatory limbo or offshore workarounds.
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.
Three strategic acquirers paid over $3B for stablecoin operators across the US, UK, and Singapore since 2024, signaling a proven exit market. With stablecoin volumes approaching Visa-scale and regulation clarifying, the author predicts a wave of exits for infrastructure players and derivative business models globally.
A16Z Crypto (30) · Fintech Ruminations (5) · Multicoin Capital (4) · USV (3) · A16Z (3) · Lightspeed Venture Partners (1) · Tomasz Tunguz (1) · Into the Metaverse (1) · Alex Lazarow (1) · Chamath Palihapitiya (1)
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