A16z Crypto Founder: My Perspective on the Blockchain World

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Author: Chris Dixon

Translation: Jiahui, ChainCatcher

It’s very popular now to claim that “non-financial use cases of cryptocurrency are dead.” Some also argue that the “read, write, own” model has failed. These conclusions both misunderstand the topic and misjudge the stage we’re in.

We are clearly in the financial era of blockchain. But the core idea has never been that all crypto applications will emerge simultaneously, nor that finance won’t be the first to arrive. 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 intelligences.)

Finance is the most natural domain to demonstrate this primitive, which is why we often mention financial uses first when listing productive token applications. Finance is not separate from a broader discussion; 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 very beginning. Many of our investments are explicitly focused on finance: 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 other categories to develop sooner or later.

At a16z and a16z crypto, we play the long game: our fund structure targets cycles of 10 years or more 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 critical. Infrastructure and distribution often come before new application categories emerge. The internet didn’t start 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 new cultural and economic categories emerge.

Cryptocurrency may be no different. We likely need to first onboard hundreds of millions of people through financial applications like payments, stablecoins, savings, and DeFi, before we see meaningful adoption in media, gaming, AI, or other more distant fields. Many applications depend on wallets, identity verification, liquidity, and trust that are already in place.

There are other factors as well. One of the core advantages of cryptocurrency is the ability to grant community ownership through tokens. But years of scams, extraction behaviors, and regulatory crackdowns have severely eroded trust in tokens. This may also be one reason for the recent market downturn. In a cynical environment, it’s hard to build a truly owner-driven community.

Policy is a missing link

That’s why we’ve spent over five years pushing for clear regulatory frameworks around tokens. Good policies can do two things simultaneously: provide builders with a clear roadmap and establish risk-based guardrails to protect consumers and build market trust. Market structure legislation like the CLARITY Act will introduce disclosure and transparency standards to prevent “exit scams” and self-dealing—standards that are routine in other markets but have long been absent in crypto.

Progress in policy on emerging technologies 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 the broader audience, and offering a grounded way to think about how this technology evolves over time. We often hear that this framework is very useful for decision-makers in Washington, D.C. Years of education, debate, and refinement can quietly accumulate in the background, only to surface instantly when political or institutional windows open.

The strong reaction to GENIUS has validated this theory. Almost overnight, stablecoins shifted from being viewed with suspicion to being recognized as legitimate by finance, tech, and government. This shift seemed sudden, but it was the result of years of effort by builders, policymakers, and advocates coming together at the right moment. I expected a positive response, but the speed and scale of adoption surprised even me. This makes me optimistic about market structure legislation, which, on a macro level, will serve a similar role for other categories of tokens as GENIUS did for stablecoins.

What does playing the long game look like?

Great achievements take time. The recent breakthroughs in AI are thanks to the decades of hard work by talented people. (The first paper on neural networks was published in 1943.) The internet traces back to the 1960s, and commercial internet became possible because of visionary builders and thoughtful policy actions in the 1990s. Building new technological systems is a long-term game—this is what long-term play looks like in practice: long foundational work 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 can be chaotic and frustrating, but it’s essential work.

It’s during those chaotic years that the later brilliance becomes inevitable.