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a16z Frontier
@a16zfrontier
Outliers welcome
Posts are not investment advice or an ad for investment services. See 👇
Joined June 2022
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1.6M Followers
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The biggest risk is not being ambitious enough.
https://t.co/pQssLkjGX8
Stripe uses stablecoins. Wall Street is tokenizing assets.
@cdixon says crypto used to be its own world. The lines got blurrier when more companies — and not just "crypto companies" — started building on it.
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: https://t.co/Vpb9eJsdTZ
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see https://t.co/nX2FtaLE06 for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at https://t.co/A9eTFq6Xbx.
AI broke the "covenant" between the internet's distribution side and its content side.
@cdixon on what this means: painful in the near term for businesses that depend on clicks, but an opportunity for entrepreneurs to rethink how the web works from first principles.
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: https://t.co/Vpb9eJsdTZ
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see https://t.co/nX2FtaLE06 for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at https://t.co/A9eTFq6Xbx.
"We want to err on the side of being too early."
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: https://t.co/Vpb9eJsdTZ
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see https://t.co/nX2FtaLE06 for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at https://t.co/A9eTFq6Xbx.
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see https://t.co/CrY32IX80W for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at https://t.co/MKyxGhkxQL.
The biggest risk is not being ambitious enough.
https://t.co/pQssLkjGX8
Chris Dixon on the "second-order effects" behind a16z's early bets on Oculus, drones, and crypto:
"I joined the firm in 2013. I talked to Marc and Ben, and I said, 'Hey, I wanna do this crazy stuff,' and they were like, 'Great.'"
"That led to a couple of themes at the time, and they're all kind of what I would call kinda second-order effects. You had smartphones obviously start in 2007, and by 2013 had gotten mainstream, and there were all these kind of first-order effects like building apps on top."
"But a second-order effect was that you had the components of smartphones. You had sensors and chips getting better and better, and maybe people could repurpose those in different ways."
"We invested in Oculus as an example, and that was really kind of a reconfigured smartphone. Skydio, that was one of our investments from back then that was, at the beginning, kind of a reconfigured smartphone."
"Crypto, I think at the time was kind of a downstream effect to me of sort of the open-source software movement morphing into services and also kind of a result of social media where you could have these communities form without mainstream acceptance and coalesce around these blockchains."
@cdixon
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: https://t.co/Vpb9eJsdTZ
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see https://t.co/nX2FtaLE06 for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at https://t.co/A9eTFq6Xbx.
The SEC's initial proposal for Reg Crypto Assets was an important first step towards creating a clear fundraising pathway for builders of blockchain networks.
Yesterday, @a16zcrypto submitted recommendations to make that pathway more useful and durable.
The @USOCC released its final rule implementing the GENIUS Act requirements for payment stablecoin issuers under its purview. Thank you to @USComptroller Gould and the OCC for their leadership in advancing GENIUS implementation.
CCI appreciates that the OCC carefully considered public comments, including ours. The final rule follows the language of the GENIUS Act by eliminating the rebuttable presumption regarding rewards arrangements between issuers and affiliates or third parties. CCI looks forward to reviewing the final rule more closely.
A few reflections on the lattice vs. hash-only debate that our recent Aerie post sparked:
1. Cryptographic ossification for blockchains was never safe. Until the day we know with certainty that P ≠ NP, that finding short vectors in lattices is intractable, that Keccak effectively behaves like a random oracle in deployed SNARKs, and that every single bug has been eliminated from our codebases, blockchains cannot ossify. That is simply not how safe systems are built. Issues will arise, and the system will have to respond.
It’s a double standard to reject lattices because blockchains are hard to upgrade if lattices break, while counting on upgrades if AI breaks your hash function or finds a critical zkVM bug.
The best counterargument is that hash-only designs are more agile: if your hash function breaks, just swap out the hash. But we must aspire to a higher level of agility than this. Indeed, as I cover next, if SNARK recursion itself turns out to degrade security, the proposed hash-only blockchain designs would need to be rethought from the ground up.
2. The real security debate is not lattices vs. hashes — it is lattices vs. building everything on SNARK recursion. That’s because “hash-only” is not really hash-only: it rests on hashes plus the soundness of deep SNARK recursion. Ethereum’s roadmap relies on exactly that: hash-based aggregation needs recursion to keep up with a slot’s worth of signatures, and EIP-8288 would send other signature schemes and users’ own proofs through the same recursive pipeline. In contrast, Aerie proves a slot’s worth of signatures on one laptop without any recursion.
All deployed post-quantum SNARKs rely on the Random Oracle Methodology (via Fiat–Shamir) to establish their security. This is an idealization we know fails in the real world: we have explicit counterexamples where “SNARKs” coming out of this methodology are totally insecure when instantiated with any concrete hash function.
We generally ignore these counterexamples in part because they only arise when proving contrived, self-referential statements about the very hash function used by the SNARK verifier.
But proving statements about the verifier’s own hash function is the exact thing you do in SNARK recursion. That’s why the security of recursive SNARKs can’t be established even in the random oracle model.
On top of that, the standard security proofs for recursion (in other models) suffer an “extractor runtime” blowup that is exponential in the recursion depth, suggesting that security may degrade as more recursion is applied. Yet Ethereum’s own EIP-8288 enables unlimited-depth recursion, even as it lists soundness of recursive SNARKs as a trust assumption. Proofs in more idealized models avoid the blowup, but they mainly tell us that an attack on SNARK recursion would have to exploit the concrete hash function, which is exactly what the Fiat–Shamir attacks above do.
To be clear, we don’t know of any outright attacks on SNARK recursion, and I very much hope it is secure. But some of us who have studied the question have a lingering sense that an attack may be possible in some settings. And if AI is going to supercharge cryptanalysis, there is no reason to expect it to spare Fiat–Shamir for SNARKs, let alone SNARK recursion, both of which have had far less scrutiny than lattices.
So, I do not concede that a “recursion everywhere” hash-only approach is clearly more conservative than one built on standard lattice assumptions.
3. “Just wrap everything in a hash-based SNARK” (like EIP-8288) faces challenges.
Aggregating signatures and proofs off-chain into a single block-level proof is a powerful design independent of the hash-only vs. lattice debate, and I am not telling people to avoid it. But claiming, as Vitalik Buterin did this week, that users can run whatever cryptography they want locally and wrap it in a client-side leanVM proof glosses over major hurdles.
For example, leanVM today is a minimal VM designed almost entirely to prove hash-based signatures and recursion, not general-purpose computation. And binary-field SNARKs like leanVM remain slow at proving the integer multiplications that lattice cryptography does en masse.
I am optimistic that many of these zkVM challenges can be met (including via my own work, binary-field Twist and Shout, which are now implemented in Magnetar). But regardless, if lattices can make aggregation simpler and faster, then they should be leveraged. We need to be agile no matter what.
4. For chains whose reason for existence is privacy, I truly struggle to understand the pushback. Public-key encryption (and fast single-server PIR) cannot be built from hashes alone, at least not in any black-box way. If lattices break, it is going to be very, very hard for these chains to provide acceptable levels of privacy and functionality. For a project whose entire reason for existence is privacy, a loss of confidentiality is an existential failure. Next to that, a second signature upgrade (after the first one, from elliptic curves alone to, hopefully, a hybrid lattice scheme) is easy.
Summary: We don’t know for sure what is secure and what isn’t. We are all weighing unquantifiable risks against each other, and we do not need to agree on a total order on them. But hash-only solutions face many open engineering challenges, and they are not more “conservative” in the way some have argued. Some of those challenges are entirely prosaic and have nothing to do with bugs or cryptography, like hardware support for custom schemes whose hash function is still undecided. I hope we can overcome those challenges within the appropriate timelines, but they must be acknowledged and portrayed realistically.
Overall, cryptographic agility and defense in depth (e.g., hybrid signatures) are the answer, which is why we are building both lattice-Jolt and hash-Jolt. In practice, the positions are less polarized than social media discourse suggests: for example, StarkWare is working to make Falcon verification cheap (https://t.co/FM68hmkqRx), which is great to see.
Here is the (apparently) controversial take I am sticking to: Conditioned on agility, whenever lattices make systems simpler or more functional, we should embrace them rather than default to “hash-only” designs. Lattices are what the rest of the world will depend on, with decades of study and hardening behind them, and at the system level, less functional often means less secure. Where hash-only designs are just as simple and functional, by all means use them.
@TheStalwart if anyone needs a refresher...
https://t.co/0BeEmdWMq3
Perps have become one of crypto’s most-traded products.
@guywuolletjr and @jay_drainjr explain where they came from, how they work, and why more of the market is moving onchain.
The countdown begins: Zero mainnet and lzATLAS go live on November 30.
This is a must listen
Great panel with @brian__foster and @MuyaoShen at @money2020.
It’s about bringing finance onto the internet. A lot of finance still runs on Excel spreadsheets, and it’s no longer about tradfi or DeFi, it’s about making finance move at the speed of the internet.
On the crypto side we have to update the words we use to meet traditional finance where they are. DeFi and decentralization doesn’t mean a ton yet but reducing counter party risk does.
It was great to be onstage at Money2020 to help that translation process.
Every day, 10 to 15 people make their first $20K on @whop. Today, Lightspark powers a new way for them to cash out instantly to their bank accounts.
what is cryptographic agility and why does it matter?
.@circle set out to put dollars on the internet and make them work everywhere. Now @jerallaire thinks the main users of that infrastructure could be machines.
He joins @cdixon to talk about what comes after digital dollars, and what the agent economy needs when software can earn, spend, and hire.
Highlights:
1:58 Circle’s original vision for programmable money
7:19 Why institutions started taking stablecoins seriously
12:04 Learnings from building a global financial network
15:03 What gives a stablecoin its moat?
26:28 Crypto’s growing adoption in the shadow of AI
28:11 From making existing things better to creating entirely new markets
32:59 The weirdest experiments being built on Arc
37:02 What happens when AI hires AI
38:04 Why the next big thing starts out looking like a toy
39:05 Can blockchains counter AI’s centralizing tendencies?
44:01 What the machine economy could look like in five years
Check out the full article here:
https://t.co/Bp4t5gdOJi
The case for lattices 👇
I wonder how many good ideas we dismiss because they are not "practical".
There is value in pushing the frontier for its own sake. It's exciting and motivating to work on (and also great marketing).
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