a16z crypto show

Episodet

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  The 'Useless' Theory Behind Modern SNARKs (ft. Gödel Prize Winner Noam Nisan) 13.08.2026 1h 15min

  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 breakthrough was the sum-check protocol — an elegant technique that emerged from Noam Nisan’s early work on interactive proofs. At the time, even Nisan assumed ideas like these were far too theoretical to become practical technology. Today, sum-check sits at the heart of some of the fastest modern SNARKs, proof systems that are increasingly important to blockchains and verifiable computation.
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  How Zero-Knowledge Proofs Were Invented (ft. Co-Inventor and Turing Award Winner Shafi Goldwasser) 10.08.2026 57min

  How can you prove that something is true without revealing why it is true? What began as an attempt to solve a seemingly playful problem — playing poker securely over the telephone — ultimately changed how computer scientists think about proofs, privacy, and verification. In this episode of First Principles, Turing Award–winning cryptographer Shafi Goldwasser joins a16z crypto Head of Research Tim Roughgarden and Research Partner Justin Thaler to tell the origin story of zero-knowledge proofs and interactive proof systems.
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  Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon: Why America Needs CLARITY 01.08.2026 58min

  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-a-generation market structure legislation that could determine where financial and internet infrastructure gets built. Chris and Marc join host Robert Hackett to discuss why regulatory clarity matters, what the current policy environment has cost the United States, and what is at stake for developers, entrepreneurs, consumers, and the country’s technological leadership.
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  How AI is Changing the Way We Build Companies (ft. Guy Wuollet and Noah Citron) 27.07.2026 58min

  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 shift could change much more than engineering productivity. It could reshape how companies form, how teams are managed, how businesses are financed, and who is best positioned to build them. In this episode, a16z crypto General Partner Guy Wuollet and Head of Engineering Noah Citron join host Robert Hackett to explore the economics of the AI-native company.
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  The Story Behind RSA: The Invention That Secured the Internet (ft. Turing Award Winner Ron Rivest) 24.07.2026 54min

  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. Turing Award winners Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman helped invent it. In this episode of First Principles, Rivest tells the story of how they developed RSA, the first practical public-key cryptosystem. Their breakthrough made it possible to encrypt information, verify identities, and authenticate messages across an open network without requiring participants to meet or exchange a secret in advance — laying essential groundwork for the secure internet and, decades later, blockchains.
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  Why auction design matters (ft. Nobel economist Paul Milgrom) 17.07.2026 1h 18min

  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 auction rules could reshape actual markets.
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  Why markets fail — and how to fix them (ft. Nobel economist Alvin Roth) 14.07.2026 1h 25min

  Long before crypto made coordination programmable, Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth was designing markets where coordination could save lives. In this episode of First Principles, Roth tells the story of how he helped build systems for some of the hardest matching problems in the world, from where doctors train and where students go to school to how kidney donors can reach the patients who need them.
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  Leslie Lamport on the Science of Distributed Systems 25.06.2026 36min

  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 Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology, Turing Award-winning computer scientist Leslie Lamport joins Tim Roughgarden Head of Research at a16z crypto and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, and a16z crypto Research Partner Ittai Abraham to trace the ideas that helped define modern distributed computing.
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  Before Blockchains, There Was State Machine Replication (ft. Barbara Liskov and Tim Roughgarden) 22.06.2026 35min

  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 this episode of First Principles, a16z crypto Head of Research and Columbia professor Tim Roughgarden speaks with Barbara Liskov, MIT professor, Turing Award winner, and one of the most influential computer scientists in programming languages, data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing. a16z crypto research partner Ittai Abraham joins the conversation.
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  How Bitcoin Rewired a Classic Computer Science Problem (ft. Tim Roughgarden and Ittai Abraham) 22.06.2026 20min

  Bitcoin often gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t. The problem was named decades earlier — in the world of distributed computing — and researchers spent years studying how machines could reach agreement even when some participants were faulty, adversarial, or corrupt. What Bitcoin did was something different: It solved a classic Byzantine agreement problem in a radically new, permissionless setting. And it took the research world years to fully recognize what Satoshi had done.
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  How Stablecoins Are Reconfiguring the Financial System | ft. Eddy Lazzarin and Sonal Chokshi 12.06.2026 1h 20min

  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 Partner, to break down why crypto is entering a completely different phase and what gets built once the rules finally catch up to the technology.
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  The Real Reason Behind Most DeFi Hacks 13.05.2026 35min

  Following major DeFi exploits, a16z crypto GP Eddy Lazzarin and security engineer Matt Gleason break down the recent surge in crypto hacks. Their argument: AI isn't creating new vulnerabilities—it's making existing ones easier to exploit. They explore whether defenders can evolve as fast as attackers, the role of geopolitics in cyber activity, and what users can do to stay safe online.
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  We Raised $2.2B. Here’s Why. 05.05.2026 1h

  a16z crypto is announcing Fund 5: $2.2B to back the founders building the next era of crypto. All four GPs — Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, Guy Wuollet, and Eddy Lazzarin — join Robert Hackett to discuss why now, what's changed, and where it's all headed: from regulatory clarity and stablecoins, to AI agents, programmable money, and the infrastructure defining crypto's next chapter.
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  The end of ads? AI agents are about to change how we buy 27.04.2026 57min

  Agents can now browse, decide, and buy on your behalf. So what happens to the internet's business model? Sam Ragsdale (founder & CEO of Merit Systems) joins a16z crypto's Eddy Lazzarin, Noah Levine, and Robert Hackett to unpack the open agentic commerce stack — from the headless merchant thesis to stablecoins vs. credit cards, and why the web's economic contract is quietly breaking.
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  Why AI is so centralized: How it's built, who controls it, and what comes next 22.04.2026 17min

  Gensyn cofounders Ben Fielding and Harry Grieve join us to discuss why AI’s infrastructure problem runs deeper than most people think. They explain how today’s AI ecosystem depends on a highly centralized stack of data and compute, why that matters, and what it would take to rebuild AI as open, decentralized infrastructure. Along the way, they cover how AI models are trained, why crypto may be essential to the future of AI coordination, and the rise of autonomous AI agents with onchain identities.
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  How Bots, Deepfakes and AI Agents Are Forcing a New Internet Identity Layer 17.04.2026 42min

  Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg speak with Alex Blania of Tools for Humanity about World and the growing need for proof of human verification online. They discuss the challenge of proving human uniqueness at scale, the privacy model behind World ID, and why platforms from social media to dating apps to video conferencing may soon need stronger ways to verify that users are real people.
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  How DeFi lending actually works (with Paul Frambot, cofounder and CEO of Morpho Labs) 08.04.2026 18min

  Morpho cofounder and CEO Paul Frambot joins us to discuss how onchain lending could change the future of finance. He explains what Morpho does, the biggest misconception in DeFi lending, why institutions are starting to pay attention, and how open blockchain infrastructure could make lending markets more transparent, competitive, and efficient. Paul also shares his longer-term view of a financial system with broader access to capital and more customizable financial products.
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  Why Solana keeps getting faster — and what's next (ft. Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder) 03.04.2026 18min

  Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito, joins us to talk about why he believes the future of finance is moving onchain — and how his team is helping make that possible on Solana. He explains what Jito does, why Solana’s speed and low transaction costs create both opportunity and complexity, and how Jito has become critical infrastructure for the network. Lucas also reflects on doubling down on Solana during the bear market, the company’s lean approach to building, and his broader vision for a more accessible financial system.
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  Vitalik Buterin vs Beff Jezos: AI Acceleration Debate (E/acc vs D/acc) 25.03.2026 1h 37min

  In this episode, Vitalik Buterin, Guillaume Verdon (“Beff Jezos”) debate two competing visions for the future of AI: e/acc, which argues for pushing progress forward as quickly as possible, and d/acc, which calls for accelerating more carefully to avoid concentration of power and loss of control. They discuss whether acceleration can be steered, the risks and tradeoffs of increasingly powerful AI systems, the importance of open source and decentralization, and the role crypto may play as a trust layer between humans and AI.
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  AI Is Changing the Internet. What Does It Mean for Creators? (with Justin and Michael Blau) 17.03.2026 37min

  Justin (CEO, Bond) and Michael Blau(Head of Product, Bond) break down why the creator economy is broken — and how crypto might fix it. They discuss Bond, a new model where fans stake money to support creators, eliminating subscriptions while preserving direct relationships. We cover the gap between creators and fans, why past crypto models failed (speculation vs. true support), how stablecoins enable global products, and what happens to creativity when AI makes content abundant. Plus: why copyright might disappear, what magic teaches about originality, and why NFTs represent true digital ownership despite the hype cycles.