a16z Crypto Founder: The Blockchain World I See

Author: Chris Dixon

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

It has become popular to claim that "the non-financial use cases of cryptocurrency are dead." Some also assert that the "read, write, own" model has failed. These conclusions misunderstand the topic and misjudge the stage we are in.

We are clearly in the financial era of blockchain. But the core idea has never been that all crypto applications would emerge simultaneously, nor that finance would not come first. The core idea has always been, and still is, that blockchain introduces a new primitive: the ability to coordinate people and capital at internet scale, embedding ownership directly into the system. (And increasingly used to coordinate AI agents.)

Finance is the most natural domain for this primitive to prove itself, which is why we often mention finance first when listing productive uses of tokens. Finance is not separate from the larger narrative; it is part of it. It is the foundation and testing ground for everything else.

This belief has guided our work at a16z crypto from the beginning. Many of our investments are explicitly targeted at the financial sector: Coinbase, Maker, Compound, Uniswap, and Morpho are among them. As I wrote in my book: "Blockchain networks can transform financial infrastructure into a public good, evolving the internet from mere information transfer to value transfer." We anticipated that finance would play a significant role early on and continue to expect that other categories will eventually follow.

At a16z and a16z crypto, we are playing a long game: our fund structure targets a cycle of over 10 years because building new industries takes time.

Order of Operations is Crucial

So, why haven't non-financial use cases taken off yet?

First, the order of operations is crucial. Infrastructure and distribution often precede the emergence of new application categories. The internet did not begin with social media, streaming, or online communities; it began with packet switching, TCP/IP protocols, and basic connectivity. Only after hundreds of millions of people were online did entirely new cultural and economic categories emerge.

Cryptocurrency may not be an exception. We likely need to onboard hundreds of millions of people through financial applications like payments, stablecoins, savings, and DeFi before we can see meaningful adoption in media, gaming, AI, or other more distant fields. Many applications rely on already established wallets, identity verification, liquidity, and trust.

There are other factors. One of the core advantages of cryptocurrency is the ability to give communities ownership through tokens. However, years of scams, exploitation, and regulatory crackdowns have severely eroded trust in tokens. This may also be one of the reasons for the recent market downturn. In a cynical environment, it is difficult to build a true community of owners.

Policy is the Missing Piece

This is why we have spent over five years advocating for a clear regulatory framework around tokens. Good policy can achieve two things: it provides builders with a clear roadmap and establishes risk-based guardrails to protect consumers and build market trust. Market structure legislation like the CLARITY Act will introduce disclosure and transparency standards to guard against "rug pulls" and self-dealing—standards that are routine in other markets but have long been absent in cryptocurrency.

When it comes to emerging technologies, progress on the policy front is often slow and incremental… until suddenly a qualitative change occurs. Much of our work over the years (including my book) has focused on contributing to this foundation: explaining the benefits of cryptocurrency and blockchain to policymakers and a broader audience, and providing a grounded way to think about the evolution of this technology over time. We often hear that this framework is useful for decision-makers in Washington, D.C. Years of education, debate, and refinement can quietly accumulate in the background, and then suddenly surface when a political or institutional window opens.

The strong reaction to GENIUS strongly validates this theory. Almost overnight, stablecoins transformed from suspicious to legitimate in the eyes of finance, technology, and government. This shift seems sudden, but it is the result of builders, policymakers, and advocates coming together at the right moment after years of effort. I anticipated a positive response, but the speed and scale of the technology's adoption surprised even me. This makes me optimistic about market structure legislation, as it will play the same role for other categories of tokens that GENIUS has played for stablecoins.

What the Long Game Looks Like

Great things take time. The AI breakthroughs we see today are the result of decades of hard work by talented individuals. (The first paper on neural networks was published in 1943.) The internet can be traced back to the 1960s, and the commercial internet became possible because of visionary builders and thoughtful policy actions in the 1990s. Building new technological systems is a long game, and this is what the long game looks like in practice: long-term groundwork followed by a sharp inflection point.

If you want to work in a more mature industry, that's fine. If you want to build a new industry from scratch, it may be chaotic and frustrating, but it is important work.

It is those chaotic years that lead to the brilliance we take for granted later.