a16z Frontier show

The first network effect was a phone call (ft. James Gleick)

James Gleick — acclaimed science writer and bestselling author of Chaos: Making a New Science as well as biographies on polymaths Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman — joins

What Comes After Stablecoins? (ft. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire and Chris Dixon)

Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire joins a16z crypto founder and founding partner Chris Dixon for a conversation about stablecoins, Circle’s Arc blockchain, and wha

How Crypto Is Rebuilding Finance From First Principles

Guy Wuollet thinks crypto will have succeeded when we stop calling it crypto. Financial services will simply run on blockchains, much as other businesses now run on the i

The 'Useless' Theory Behind Modern SNARKs (ft. Gödel Prize Winner Noam Nisan)

More than 30 years ago, Gödel Prize Winner Noam Nisan helped develop a proof technique that he never expected anyone to use in the real world.  At the center of that bre

How Zero-Knowledge Proofs Were Invented (ft. Co-Inventor and Turing Award Winner Shafi Goldwasser)

How can you prove that something is true without revealing why it is true?  That question gave rise to zero-knowledge proofs, one of the most important breakthroughs in

Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon: Why America Needs CLARITY

a16z Cofounder and General Partner Marc Andreessen and a16z crypto Founder and Managing Partner Chris Dixon on why the CLARITY ACT matters. Congress is debating once-in-

How AI is Changing the Way We Build Companies (ft. Guy Wuollet and Noah Citron)

For the first time, companies can treat AI token spending almost like headcount: allocate more money, deploy more intelligence, and potentially get more work done. That

The Story Behind RSA: The Invention That Secured the Internet (ft. Turing Award Winner Ron Rivest)

Before the internet could become a place to bank or transact, it needed a way for strangers to know who they were talking to, and whether a message could be trusted. Tur

Why auction design matters (ft. Nobel economist Paul Milgrom)

Long before onchain markets made mechanism design a daily engineering problem, Nobel Prize winner Paul Milgrom was asking how prices actually form — and how better auctio

Why markets fail — and how to fix them (ft. Nobel economist Alvin Roth)

Long before crypto made coordination programmable, Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth was designing markets where coordination could save lives.  In this episode of First Pri

Leslie Lamport on the Science of Distributed Systems

Before blockchains could reach consensus, Leslie Lamport had to define what agreement even meant when computers fail, lie, or disappear.  In this episode of First Princi

Before Blockchains, There Was State Machine Replication (ft. Barbara Liskov and Tim Roughgarden)

Every blockchain today leans on replication ideas worked out in the 1980s, by a Turing Award winner who wasn’t thinking about how it might apply to money at all.  In thi

How Bitcoin Rewired a Classic Computer Science Problem (ft. Tim Roughgarden and Ittai Abraham)

Bitcoin often gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t.  The problem was named decades earlier — in the world of distributed computing — and researche

How Stablecoins Are Reconfiguring the Financial System | ft. Eddy Lazzarin and Sonal Chokshi

Crypto has been walled off from the real economy for years — that's changing.  Sonal Chokshi and Robert Hackett sit down with Eddy Lazzarin, a16z crypto's newest General

The Real Reason Behind Most DeFi Hacks

Following a string of major DeFi exploits, we unpack what’s driving the recent rise in hacks across crypto. a16z crypto GP Eddy Lazzarin and security engineer Matt Gleas

We Raised $2.2B. Here’s Why.

We're announcing a16z crypto's Fund 5: $2.2B in committed capital to back the startups and founders who are building the next era of crypto. All four GPs sat down to talk

The end of ads? AI agents are about to change how we buy

Agents can now do almost anything a human can do with a computer. So what happens when they start spending money on your behalf? Sam Ragsdale (founder and CEO of Merit S

Why AI is so centralized: How it's built, who controls it, and what comes next

A few big companies control most of the infrastructure behind AI. Most people experience AI through a wide range of different apps that actually depend on a deeply centr

How Bots, Deepfakes and AI Agents Are Forcing a New Internet Identity Layer

The internet already has a bot problem — and it's just getting worse. a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg speak with Alex Blania of Tools for Humanity. World is build

How DeFi lending actually works (with Paul Frambot, cofounder and CEO of Morpho Labs)

What if the future of lending doesn’t need banks at all? Paul Frambot, cofounder and CEO of Morpho, explains what it means to build lending infrastructure without banks,