a16z crypto biz dev + "Greta's Husband" + girl dad
Joined July 2017
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Pyrs Carvolth retweeted
This is an incredibly prescient move. Opening the aperture of the fund's mandate will allow @cdixon @eddylazzarin @guywuolletjr @liz_harkavy to support founders developing AI native products and networks - including those that enable machines and agents to transact in stablecoins and access deeper capital markets via onchain financial products, as well as many other genuinely original types of companies, both software and hardware. The space has changed a lot since I started working in crypto in 2016. Every day I meet great founders using crypto under the hood but not marketing their companies as such. I worked with Chris for almost 4 years and can confidently say he is an exceptional thinker and investor. Once in a generation. I predict that within a year or two a16z frontier's portfolio will include all of the important emerging companies powering the machine age.
Pyrs Carvolth retweeted
“The next big thing will start out looking like a toy.” -Chris Dixon, 2010
Chris is an OG American Dynamism investor. An OG VR investor. An OG robotics investor. The OG crypto investor.
Finally, an OG Fund, only for originals.
@meigga doing work for the greater good with this piece - and getting this right is critical to scaling onchain finance!
One of the core challenges that traditional financial institutions face when growing adoption of their crypto-related products has been the ability to reach KYCed customers who want to purchase these products. However, onchain KYC itself has not fully been solved.
I did a deep dive of current onchain KYC solutions, along with corresponding regulatory frameworks, alongside my @a16zcrypto partner @MicheleKorver. We also discuss the forthcoming Know Your Agent (KYA) landscape and emerging solutions.
Pyrs Carvolth retweeted
While I’m disappointed by today’s Senate vote, it doesn’t change the fact that crypto’s fundamentals are stronger than ever.
Billions of dollars are moving onchain, leading payments companies and financial institutions are adopting blockchain technology, and entrepreneurs around the world are building new financial products that bring money into the internet age.
Our work in DC is far from over. We’ll keep working for clear rules that protect consumers and let entrepreneurs build.
Pyrs Carvolth retweeted
Politics or policy?
@pmarca and @cdixon cut through the noise on all things CLARITY, from ethics, to sanctions, to yield.
Truth be told, CLARITY is the most bipartisan and sophisticated approach that’s ever been proposed for regulating crypto. Time to lock it in.
Crypto is at a pivotal moment.
As Congress debates landmark market structure legislation, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon discuss the decisions that could shape where the next generation of financial infrastructure is built, and whether the United States remains the global leader in crypto innovation:
00:00 Intro
05:31 From crypto subculture to financial infrastructure
08:37 Why crypto needs rules now
12:20 The regulatory war on crypto
15:41 How CLARITY could prevent another FTX
22:42 Why criminals using crypto may be easier to catch
26:20 Privacy, blockchains, and the invention of HTTPS
30:41 Government ethics and crypto
34:52 The banking lobby’s stablecoin fight
37:05 Why every major bank is building on blockchains
41:04 Developer liability as a killshot
45:23 How CLARITY provides oversight
49:30 What happens if CLARITY fails?
50:50 Regulation vs. innovation
54:12 Why America should lead
55:36 What CLARITY could unlock
@pmarca @cdixon @rhackett
Pyrs Carvolth retweeted
Fidelity urges Senate passage of the CLARITY Act. The time is now for clear rules of the road that are essential to strengthening investor confidence, providing certainty for market participants, and reinforcing U.S. leadership in global digital asset markets.
Pyrs Carvolth retweeted
The most blatant lie about CLARITY is that it undermines national security and law enforcement.
The truth is that it undeniably strengthens both.
That’s good policy and it’s actually what the industry wants—US builders lose when crypto is used for crime.
🚨NEWS: The National Fraternal Order of Police, one of the key law enforcement groups involved in negotiations over the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, is now backing the latest version of the Clarity Act, saying revised BRCA language addresses its previous concerns and preserves law enforcement’s ability to investigate crypto crimes.
The BRCA remained unchanged in the latest version of the bill released Wednesday, so it’s unclear what changes the group is referencing.
The question isn’t whether innovation will happen, it’s where it will happen. CLARITY is a chance for the U.S. to lead.
The world runs on credit. But its markets still rely on fragmented, outdated infrastructure. @Morpho Midnight is a major step toward the open credit network. 🦋
Morpho Midnight is live.
This is our most ambitious step yet, introducing what onchain finance was missing: giving the users the ability to set their rates and terms.
Midnight opens up many possibilities for fintechs, institutions, and credit desks alike, offering a level of customization, predictability and control that has never been possible before onchain.
This new protocol brings us closer to building the open credit network for the world, and bringing the $200 trillion global credit market onchain. It enables new kinds of markets, which attract new assets and new distributors. Those attract new curators, and new curators bring in even more loans, creating a flywheel that drive onchain credit forward.
Let’s fly 🦋
Two things can be true:
(1) Decentralization matters; and
(2) TradFi institutions aren't currently prioritizing decentralization
We didn’t say decentralization stopped mattering. We said that institutions are adopting specific primitives today because they fit within their operating constraints. We also said that permissionless networks remain a thing worth building long-term and that CLARITY would open the door for more financial institutions to use them. But as it currently stands, these are two different opportunities on two different time horizons that builders shouldn’t conflate and should approach eyes wide open. Part of having a GTM strategy is knowing who your customers are and what your customers want.
Good lord. It turns out that a16z, the same people who told us "Why Decentralized Matters" 8 years ago, now don't think it matters.
Sure, they hedge by making a meek "parallel path" argument between actual DeFi and whatever the suits are doing, but the fact that they now take all this "enterprise blockchain" nonsense seriously tells me they've lost faith.
Or rather they believe decentralization matters for DePIN that enables DeSci for agentic inference, but not for finance. "Peer to Peer Electronic Cash" breaking up Wall Street is now a bridge too far!
Allow me to reframe what is actually happening with TradFi adoption of blockchain: the rent seeking intermediaries for whom friction and delays is a primary source of profits are not into actual crypto (shocking, I know). They prefer fake crypto, because it allows them to hijack the narrative, delay progress, and use lawfare in Washington to kill true innovation.
This isn't some conspiracy theory. The very same banks who are lobbying to kill stablecoins as I type are claiming to use fake internal blockchains to offer services they could have rolled out 20 years ago using SQL.
Also, the same HFT trading firms who have been lobbying to kill DeFi for years are the biggest holders of dubious coins tied to "permissioned networks" supposedly used by COBOL jockeys to do post trade settlement. Before that, they used fax machines.
None of this should come as a surprise. Incumbents fight change. Highly regulated incumbebts who haven't had to innovate for decades fight the hardest.
What does come as a surprise is that the smartest VCs out there (and I mean this genuinely) are falling for their slight of hand.
No wonder this industry is in such a low place. Our once fearless leaders are full of doubt and bending the knee to archaic orgs like...SWIFT?
Like, it took the Society over a decade to try to move cross-border payments that take 3 days to a new messaging standard, but a16z thinks they'll build a viable "blockchain" for real-time payments soon.
Sigh.
Since they end their article with advice for founders, I am going to do the same: Proof of Authority is not a viable consensus mechanism, inside a bank or on CNBC. Neither is Proof of Press Release.
A founder who doesn't think the institutions of tomorrow will be fundamentally different from the dominant ones today proably shouldn't be one.
We often hear that TradFi is "skeptical" of blockchains and DeFi... in reality it's just discipline. These institutions aren't waiting to believe in the tech. They're just telling us a COGS story. @cc_crowley and I talk about the near-term vs. long-term opportunity in programmable financial infrastructure 👇
Capital Markets players are adopting exactly the primitives that improve unit economics: atomic settlement, programmable money, tokenized collateral. Decentralization, the part with no line item, maybe gets left behind?
CLARITY would be a real step toward the "elegant convergence" everyone predicts. But there's a long window where the short game and the long game both matter. Not competing bets, but parallel ones.
Near-term, builders can help institutions adopt the primitives that move more capital onchain. Long-term, an open system continues to evolve and push the innovations that may eventually subsume the old system.
@a16zcrypto
a16zcrypto.com/posts/article…
🇰🇷 South Korea is one of crypto's largest retail markets, and now it's one of our largest institutional markets. Banks, card networks, and major Korean internet platforms are already building.
New from @sungmo_apac16z , providing you the field guide (link below).
Pyrs Carvolth retweeted
Today, we're announcing our Series Seed funding of $33M led by @a16zcrypto
Pyrs Carvolth retweeted
Ressentiment — when the weak, who cannot bear to compare themselves to the strong, take out their envy on them by redefining strength as morally wicked and weakness as honorable, humble, and good.
Ressentiment feeds our society's corrosive impulse to limit its own potential. The weak drag down those who are strong—along with everyone else—so that we may all share in equal mediocrity. "Equality of outcome," as the socialists say.
Ressentiment is the cultural inferiority complex from which the Socialist-Woke mind virus spreads. It's why we are afraid of successful entrepreneurs and gifted students in schools. They force into view the uncomfortable truth that some individuals are uniquely capable of greatness.
The fallacy is the belief that it's a zero-sum game, that one person's success necessarily comes at the expense of another's. There may be no cultural mindset that is more destructive to civilization.
