Crypto Experts Explain Stablecoins & the Future Financial System w/ Ali Yahya & Arianna Simpson

Crypto can help decentralize the power structures that are emerging in AI. Chris always talks about, “Do you want to be the indie band, or do you want to play the Super Bowl, the mega-stadium?” I think stablecoins really have the ability to appeal to a much broader audience. There’s something like $16 trillion in volume on stablecoins per year. I actually think it’s a great time for folks to be building token networks. Crypto is a fundamentally radical set of technologies that is very hard for incumbent players to adopt and run with, precisely because it is so fundamentally disruptive to the way they do things.

Ali, Arianna, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Great to be here.

I’m excited to do a deep dive with you on where we’re at right now in the space. Crypto is a space where people have long been excited about the vision and the potential, and people have also long been skeptical about the use cases—what’s happening and what’s actually working. So here we are in May 2025. Why don’t you give us some context on what’s actually worked so far, or what’s working right now? Maybe, Ali, why don’t you start off?

Sure, happy to. It’s quite interesting because if you go back all the way to 2009, when the original Bitcoin white paper was published, one of the first few lines of the paper describes Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system—a payment system—which was the original vision behind what a blockchain could do. It’s really taken us 15 or 16 years to get to a point where the technology is mature enough to actually make that a reality.

This is now manifesting with stablecoins. Some of the big issues that Bitcoin had, which made it impossible for Bitcoin to become that peer-to-peer electronic payment system, were, first, that it was extremely inefficient and very slow. It still is, and therefore it has become more of a store-of-value system as opposed to stablecoins. Second, Bitcoin is not a stable unit of account, so it’s very hard to use it for payments.

Since then, one of the big things that has happened is that the infrastructure has matured tremendously. We’re now at a level where a transaction of any amount of money can be done for less than a penny in cost and in under a second, roughly. Those numbers are approximate, but that finally makes something like a peer-to-peer transaction of a few dollars viable on the blockchain.

That, combined with the regulatory clarity we’re having now under the new administration, makes stablecoins something that’s really beginning to happen. That’s perhaps the biggest thing going on in the crypto world at the moment: stablecoins are beginning to gain real traction.

There’s something like $16 trillion in volume on stablecoins per year, and many traditional financial institutions are beginning to use stablecoins to rip out a lot of the back end of their financial systems. These are fintech companies—think Stripe, think Revolut, think Robinhood. Some companies in the traditional financial system that rely heavily on the traditional system are now realizing that stablecoins are a much better way to do things.

That’s the biggest thing going on, and we believe it will likely lead to a cascading trend of adoption. Once stablecoins become more of a mainstay of the way the financial system works, that opens the door for many of the other, more advanced and futuristic ideas that crypto has introduced, like DeFi, to begin gaining adoption as well. I think that, as a result, will lead to all the other things we believe crypto can offer really starting to ramp up.

One interesting thing, though, is that stablecoins—at least those of us who are in the industry full-time have been thinking about them for years and years. I remember talking about them in 2017 and 2018. There was always a narrative about them being useful for remittances or in countries that have had hyperinflation.

For those countries, Bitcoin is a better store of value than their native currencies because sometimes it goes up, unlike those currencies, which only go down. But it’s not ideal because, as Ali mentioned, it’s not a stable unit of account. It’s interesting to see that even though this has been talked about for years, it’s now really having its moment.

To Ali’s point, a big part of why that’s happening is that the infrastructure has evolved to a point where you can now efficiently move money without having to spend a huge amount of money to move it, among other things. I think that’s why we’re starting to really see it shine now.

I would also add that it’s intersecting in interesting ways with other trends. We’re still super early in this, but there’s obviously a lot of talk about AI and agents. If you want to dispatch your agent to transact on your behalf, you can’t really give it your bank account or your credit card. Instead, you can give it your crypto wallet.

This interplay of agents buying or spending money on behalf of their users with stablecoins is a really interesting theme that we’re starting to explore.

To that point, it’s kind of ridiculous to think about the way the financial system works today. Even a normal domestic financial transaction, where you go to a coffee shop and buy a coffee with a credit card, involves the point of sale, the payment processor, the issuing bank, the acquiring bank, and the credit card network. Each of these intermediaries takes a cut—a fee on the transaction—to add up to something like multiple percentage points on the transaction.

That’s the case in a domestic transaction. If the transaction happens to be international, then that entire stack of participants and intermediaries gets duplicated and mirrored on the other side, to the point that any kind of financial transaction across borders is insane in terms of its inefficiency. It can take up to 3 to 7 days to move money from one country to another, and it can cost up to 10% of the transaction to do it.

When you have a technology that can move an arbitrary amount of money from anywhere in the world to any other place in the world for under a penny and in under a second, that truly is transformative. It’ll be very disruptive to the way the financial system works.

To Arianna’s point about AI agents, it’s inconceivable that a human who wants to participate in the financial system would have to go through all of that inefficiency and deal with all of these arcane human intermediaries, some of which aren’t even really automated. That’s inconceivable, and the only real way to bring millions, or potentially billions or more, of AI agents online into the financial system is through a technology that’s fully based on software and as efficient as the crypto rails that are now available and can be used.

Say more about some of the use cases that stablecoins are currently enabling. Is it mostly at an institutional level? Is it at a consumer level? What are the common interactions people are having with stablecoins right now?

I think it’s both. It depends on what markets you’re talking about. There’s a company in our current accelerator batch called ZAR, which is operating in Pakistan. They’re creating a network of small shops. If you’ve been to Africa or elsewhere, you’ve seen these little mobile-money kiosks where you can put money on your phone and do that sort of thing.

They’re using that network to create a way for people to come in, deposit their local currency, and get stablecoins. Then they’re building a whole suite of financial services around this as the atomic unit.

A lot of countries have unstable currencies or other financial issues, so holding dollars—or the equivalent in stablecoins—is very appealing. They immediately understand the value of this and are attracted to using it.

I think it goes from that all the way through to banks and financial institutions. In many cases, there’s been an interest in crypto, and some banks and financial institutions have wanted to get involved, but it’s been very unclear how they could do it. That’s largely because of the lack of regulatory clarity, but also because crypto can be a little scary. It hasn’t always been obvious for them to see a path: How do we get involved? What’s the way we can bring this to our consumers?

Stablecoins are a baby step in that sense. It’s much clearer what the value proposition is, and it’s a nonspeculative use case. I think it’s a good entry point for some of these larger institutions.

Ali, why don’t you give us a brief overview to help us understand the stablecoin landscape—what big companies or types of companies have emerged or will emerge as a result of it, what it means for the broader crypto startup ecosystem, and how it impacts it?

Right now, at the center of all the action are the stablecoin issuers. Two of the major ones are USDC, which is created by a consortium between Coinbase and Circle, and Tether. Both of these are the two biggest issuers of stablecoins today.

Both stablecoins operate on top of blockchains. So another important piece of the stack is the infrastructure on top of which some of these stablecoins operate. Then you have a collection of companies at the periphery that generally help connect the crypto world to the external world. That would include wallets and some of the fintech companies that are using blockchain technology as the backend but have a frontend that looks more like a Web2-type frontend and doesn't expose the crypto aspects to the end user as much. All those players will be part of the story as well.

One of the things that we talk a ton about is what this stack will look like end to end as the space evolves. One of the exciting things that we're hoping will happen soon is that we'll get legislation that sets the rules of the road for stablecoins and for what is required for an issuer to create a stablecoin. What kind of collateral is needed for a stablecoin to be compliant?

We strongly believe it'll likely happen this year. It will, to some extent, commoditize the issuance layer because it'll be easier for new issuers to emerge and create their own stablecoins that are also USD-denominated, to the point that those new stablecoins are somewhat fungible and interchangeable with USDC and Tether. If all of them are compliant, then you can trust that all of them are likely to be ultimately redeemable for a dollar and equally trustworthy.

That means issuers may no longer be the ones that capture all the value the way that they do now. Instead, a lot of the value might be captured by some of the other layers. For example, the infrastructure is likely to capture a lot of the value because a lot of the activity—a lot of these stablecoin transactions—happens on blockchains like Solana, Ethereum, Sui, and a number of other important Layer 1 blockchains. All of those require payment of gas for those transactions. Those blockchains are likely to be important players in the way that this unfolds.

Then I think the other end of the stack will be the endpoint: the user, the interface that connects this whole crypto world to the end user. Wallets will likely be important. One of our portfolio companies, Phantom, is likely to be well positioned as a gateway or an interface for people to interact with stablecoins and get exposure to U.S. dollars, regardless of where they may be. So that's maybe a bit of a layout for what the ecosystem looks like at the moment.

It seems like for years there's been this question of what's going to make it so that there are hundreds of millions of users—or a billion users. I'm not sure what it is at the moment across all of crypto. People have asked before: What's the iPhone moment? What's the product that everyone's going to be using that's also a platform for everything? Is it stablecoins or something else? How do we think about that?

I think the odds are good that stablecoins are that thing. I also don't think that there necessarily needs to be one thing. We mentioned AI; Ali has made some investments in that category, and we've done some as a team. I think there are going to be different waves that bring in different users.

A while ago, Web3 games were a big entry point. Now it's AI and stablecoins. I think the users do come in waves. A lot of it tracks the cycles that we see every couple of years in crypto. Chris always talks about, “Do you want to be an indie band, or do you want to play at the Super Bowl or the megastadium?” Stablecoins really have the ability to appeal to a much broader audience because, as we said, it's just a use case that makes sense. It's pretty clear what the value proposition is, so it appeals to a broader audience.

Yeah, in part also because it addresses a very real pain point. Whether it be people in third-world countries that want exposure to the dollar because their local currency may not be as reliable, people who want to move money between borders—we talked about how that can be extremely inefficient—or even companies that want to move money across borders, they still have to deal with all that inefficiency. Stablecoins are apparently already being used by companies like SpaceX for treasury management, to move money from one country to another in a way that's much more efficient.

Yeah, I believe they were using Bridge, which Stripe has now acquired. I mean, it's interesting: Stripe Sessions, their big conference, was all about stablecoins. So many of the talk tracks last week were about that, and I think it's really indicative of the fact that this is permeating not just crypto companies but more broadly.

The other necessary element, in addition to the infrastructure improvements and all that, is that now we have a friendlier regulatory regime, which is interested in seeing these kinds of things flourish.

One thing I've always appreciated about crypto investing is that you guys, as domain experts, don't just need to understand the technology, which is complex enough in itself. You also need to understand the policy regime, law, monetary policy, economics, foreign policy, and how all these things are intersecting with crypto startups.

Well, I'm certainly not the domain expert on some of the policy stuff, but we've assembled a super-strong team who's been very involved in D.C. and trying to push the ball forward for the whole industry.

You mentioned Stripe getting deeply involved in crypto. It's interesting because people often contrast it with AI and say, “Hey, AI is mostly a sustaining innovation,” and that, of course, there are massive companies that have been formed, but a lot of the gains have gone to the biggest companies. Whereas crypto is mostly a startup, though some bigger companies are getting involved too.

It's funny: Maybe Facebook was just a few years too early. If they launched Libra in a more friendly regime, might that have worked? How do you think about the startup-versus-incumbent distinction in the space?

Yeah, crypto is a fundamentally radical set of technologies that is very hard for incumbent players to adopt and run with, precisely because it is so fundamentally disruptive to the way that they do things.

I was at Google a while back. I was at Google X, working on a robotics project, but I was already very interested in crypto. Google X is supposed to be the moonshot factory, super innovative and open to new ideas, and open to starting new companies, but they don't want new ideas. I tried at Facebook, by the way—same thing. Google would not touch crypto with a 10-foot pole unless it was something very vanilla, like, “We will run a node,” or whatever.

Were they like, “This makes no sense,” or were they like, “It's evil”?

I think they fundamentally didn't get it. They were afraid about the optics, the regulatory association with it, and the reputational consequences. Also, the whole Web3 vision—the vision of decentralizing web services, which is, I think, the most futuristic vision for crypto—is fundamentally disruptive to the way that these companies work.

These are centralized companies that make money and have power precisely by virtue of being so centralized. If you build something like a social network that's fully decentralized and has no core central company—no monopolistic tech giant worth $44 billion that controls what recommendation algorithm is used, who gets to follow whom, all of the data, and the social graph itself—then a company no longer has a business model, right?

It's a very different business model to build a social network that's decentralized in the way that, say, a company like Farcaster currently is. For a company like Facebook, or Google in its own way, to decentralize itself and truly embrace crypto with arms wide open, it would have to cannibalize its own business model.

I think that's actually becoming true for AI as well. I think it was very true that AI was a sustaining innovation before, but it's gotten so powerful that there are many elements of it that are disruptive. If Google wanted to really embrace AI, it would have to replace search.

Search. Yeah, exactly.

With an AI, with an LLM, instead of its current model. Of course, that's a hard thing for it to do given that it's the insanely profitable business model that it currently has.

Yeah. Is that still the vision—that we'll have decentralized social networks and decentralized marketplaces? Or where are we on that vision? What are the bottlenecks to networks at scale that are truly decentralized and competing with some of the centralized ones? Is it technological, or is it that people just don't really care about this in the same way? Why hasn't it happened yet?

I think it's mostly a consumer preference issue. Some of the products have gotten really good. Farcaster, for example, has a very good product experience, but it's challenging to get people to switch because the reason you're on a social network is for the graph, and it's difficult to export an entire graph.

Users are accustomed to being the product. If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. In many cases, consumers are used to that experience. Ads are annoying, but they're not necessarily that bad, so people accept them and don't think too much about it.

This is interesting because if you look at all of the big social networks, none of them have been started in the last decade. That's not true just of crypto; it's true in general. It's very difficult to get over the hurdle of reaching a critical mass whereby people actually say, “Oh, I'm in the network, and I'm going to stay in the network.”

It's not just a crypto thing. It's difficult nowadays. People only have so much attention, and with the networks that exist, most of the attention span has already been captured. I think we may need to see some of the existing ones falter before there's enough room for some of the new ones to really take hold. But we'll see.

We used to believe that these ideas and these companies would be the first to gain adoption. That was largely because all of the financial use cases—the DeFi use cases, even the stablecoin use cases—were illegal, as was the case under the previous administration. It felt to us like the more innocuous-seeming social network and gaming use cases would be more likely to gain adoption, and that would be the gateway for other things to eventually become legitimate and gain regulatory acceptance.

Now that the regulatory landscape has shifted so much, to the point at which it's a much friendlier landscape, we have all these traditional financial institutions getting involved, and stablecoins are really having a moment. Combined with the infrastructure clicking into place, it's now much clearer that the more financial use cases are likely to happen first. Those will act as a legitimizing force for the rest of the space, and then the consumer use cases, which we still believe in, will take longer.

It's very hard to get those things right. The bar that a consumer has for the quality of a consumer-facing application is extremely high, and crypto has not yet figured out all of the UX challenges. The seamlessness and usability challenges of crypto are still nascent on that front, so it'll take longer for all of those things to get resolved.

In the meantime, we have all these other financial use cases, which I think will solidify the technology, legitimize the space for a broader group of people, and get more entrepreneurs to come into the space.

On the point of the attention span, or lack thereof, of consumers, it's interesting when you see a new network created around an area that doesn't already have somebody in the non-Web3 world occupying it. A good example of this is Blackbird, which is a network for restaurant lovers. You can think about it as Amex points for restaurants.

They're occupying a space that nobody really owns right now. The credit card companies kind of do, but it's still a so-so experience at best. When you have a great entrepreneur who is really deep in restaurant technology, like Ben Leventhal, the founder, tackling a problem like that and bringing a consumer Web2 experience while using Web3 to allow the restaurants and consumers to actually have ownership in the network—which wouldn't be possible in a Web2 context—it's pretty interesting.

You couldn't really give people the same ownership if you look at platforms like Uber Eats or DoorDash. The restaurants have to work with them because their margins are so slim, and they need as much volume as they can get. But it's not great because the platforms are, in many cases, quite extractive and dig deeper into the restaurants' margins.

If you're using stablecoin payments to bring down transaction costs and also giving restaurants actual ownership in the network, thereby helping their bottom line, it's really interesting.

Ali, let's go a bit deeper on AI and the intersection between AI and crypto. What's working there, or where are you most excited?

Peter Thiel had this tongue-in-cheek line back in 2018, which I think rings true: AI is communist and crypto is libertarian. The meta point is that these 2 technologies are very different from one another, and in many ways, they're counterweights for each other. There are many ways in which they're intersecting, and we can talk through a few of them.

One of the most important ways is that AI is creating an overabundance of media and human-looking entities that can pretend to be human, as well as deepfakes of video or audio that seem very human. It's hard to know whether you're looking at something that's real or something that's purely generated.

Crypto happens to be a really good technology to help authenticate media or authenticate data in general. One of the ways in which these 2 worlds will collide is that there are crypto projects working on, among many other things, proof of humanity. That would allow anyone—a user on the internet—to prove that they actually are human, so that anyone on the other end can know that they're interacting with a human and not an AI bot or an AI agent.

Worldcoin is one of these companies and one of our portfolio companies. They've built an orb that uses biometric information and zero-knowledge proofs to keep all of the biometric data private. The data itself never leaves the orb. Only a code, or a cryptographic object derived from the biometric data, ever leaves the orb. From that cryptographic object, it's not possible to infer anything about the biometric data itself.

It's a technology that allows anyone to prove their humanity on the internet. There was that famous line in the ’90s that, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. That's very true now, in 2025: on the internet, nobody knows you're human. You could be anything. You could be a dog, or an AI agent, or anything else.

That's one way that cryptography and blockchains will help deal with the immensity and abundance of signal and noise that AI will generate.

Another big one is that crypto can help decentralize the power structures that are emerging in AI. At the moment, it seems like there will be a small number of very powerful players in the AI world. Even though it's unclear whether there are things like network effects that drive defensibility, there are just a handful of really powerful players in the space, at least at the model layer—OpenAI and the other big companies that build foundation models.

Crypto offers an alternative for creating AI systems that are more decentralized. An example of this is a company called Gensyn, which is also in our portfolio. It builds a kind of marketplace for compute. Someone on one side of the marketplace can provide their idle GPU capacity to the network, and someone on the other side, who might want to use the GPU compute for training a model or doing inference on a model, can make use of all of that compute through the network.

The network manages all of these heterogeneous computational resources to create something that feels like a unified cloud on which you can run machine learning and AI workloads. It does that in a way that's fully decentralized, not controlled by a single company, and could actually be more efficient than a cloud by virtue of using capacity that otherwise would just go idle and unused.

It's capacity that's locked away in all these pockets that are far removed from one another, rather than being in one particular data center. There are many hard technical challenges to get there, but a lot of smart people are working toward figuring that out, and we're very optimistic that it will happen.

It'll also allow machine learning workloads to run in a way that's verifiable. This way, you don't have to trust a centralized company, like Facebook or one of the social media companies, that the machine learning model—the AI model—that they're running for, say, a recommendation algorithm is unbiased or has particular properties.

You can actually, with cryptography, verify that those things are the case and that these things are executed in a way that’s correct. You can use some of these decentralized systems for that as well.

The final one, which I think is the most futuristic and the most challenging, is having crypto help AI figure out the new business models for the internet. One of the issues that AI will create with the current business models of the internet is that right now, the way the internet works is that you have an aggregator, like a search engine, driving traffic to creators of media—say, someone who has written a blog post or someone who has a page that has content. There are ads as the business model that mediates that whole interaction. That entire business model goes away if you just have an AI that gives you the answer you’re looking for.

So instead of doing a search on Google, getting exposed to a bunch of ads, clicking through to a website, and having all of those parties be happy because the business model includes all of them, now you just interact with an LLM and get the answer immediately. You never click through to the final page, and you never get exposed to an ad. That completely changes the way that the internet works. We’re going to need new business models for the internet if that’s the case.

One idea is that, through a lot of these research efforts to figure out attribution in the training of a machine-learning model, you could determine what pieces of data contributed to a particular output. If you’re asking an LLM a question, you want to know what pieces of data used to train that LLM contributed to the answer that the LLM ultimately gives you. If you could know that, then you could come up with a business model that rewards the people who originally contributed that data. Crypto could be part of that.

There are open problems on both sides. You have to figure out this attribution challenge in the AI world, and there are people working on that problem. Then there’s a challenge on the crypto side: How do you build a network that can use that information to compensate all of the parties involved in having the AI actually give you what you ultimately want?

Fascinating. Are the big labs interested in crypto? Do they need to be interested in crypto for this to happen, or is this largely coming from startups? Sam Altman, of course, at OpenAI, but also with Worldcoin, has some familiarity. What can you say about this?

For the most part, I don’t think so. The AI labs are just running with AI, and there’s so much that’s exciting in that world that crypto doesn’t really factor in at all. But there are crypto companies that are very interested in AI and are thinking about the ways in which crypto will ultimately make a difference in that world.

The company I mentioned, Gensyn, for example, has founders who are very deep in AI. They have an AI background, but they also happen to have a deep commitment to building things as open-source networks that are ultimately decentralized. They’re among the few people who really do straddle both worlds.

Zooming out a little bit, what are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about the space right now? Maybe Arianna, starting with you.

For the last few years, it’s been really challenging to launch a token network in the United States in particular because there was a lack of clear legislation. There were also very aggressive folks in several agencies working on essentially not allowing entrepreneurs to launch networks. That applied to entrepreneurs who were very well-meaning and very much wanted to do things by the book.

One of the challenges was that people obviously didn’t want to end up in legal trouble, and therefore, in many cases, they pulled back their plans on that front, which really impeded their progress on the product side as well. They couldn’t really build their vision because I think tokens are part and parcel of what’s valuable and interesting about crypto. If you remove that piece, it doesn’t make any sense.

The misconception, perhaps, is that the situation is very different now. We have a much friendlier administration in place, and we have a very different situation in terms of the leadership of these agencies. I actually think it’s a great time for people to be building token networks, and I think that message hasn’t necessarily fully made it out there. I’m hopeful that more entrepreneurs realize that the situation is again very different from what it was just a few months ago and start to come back in force.

I completely agree with that. I think another big one is that, outside of our immediate circles—if you go outside of the world of tech—it’s shocking to me that people continue to think of crypto as just a thing that’s supposed to be money, or they think of a blockchain as a ledger for money.

I think that misconception comes from Bitcoin: Bitcoin tried to be money and only money, and it wasn’t really trying to be anything else. The misconception is that Ethereum is like Bitcoin, and that Ethereum is actually the silver to Bitcoin’s gold—that all crypto really is is just another attempt to do what Bitcoin did.

The fact that Ethereum is fundamentally different from Bitcoin is still not widely understood. Ethereum is actually a kind of computer where you can build all sorts of different applications, and the software that runs on top of that computer has unique properties that no other software has ever had.

These programs that run on a blockchain like Ethereum have a life of their own. They’re programs that can make commitments that no one has to trust anyone to believe in. They’re essentially free from interference by anyone, including the people who originally wrote the program. That’s a very unique property that no other kind of software has.

It’s a kind of technology that inverts the power relationship between the software and the hardware. Historically, the hardware has always had power over the software, because whoever controls the hardware can turn off the software or change it in some way. In crypto, with blockchains, the hardware is a commodity. The people who run the miners, for example, or validators in the blockchain context, don’t have any power over the software that runs on top.

That’s what makes a blockchain unique, and that’s what makes it capable of doing so much more than just money. You can build far more sophisticated primitives. Stablecoins are the first thing, but the things that come after—things like DeFi, where you can build much more sophisticated financial primitives on-chain, or some of these other, more futuristic ideas, where you can do AI, you can do DePIN, and you can do consumer-facing applications like decentralized social networks—all of that relies on the properties of a blockchain computer that’s not just a ledger. It’s a full-on computer on which you can build applications.

Maybe, Ali, can you give a bit of an update on the smart-contract-platform wars as an outsider, or someone who’s paid attention at certain times and not at certain times? What I’ve heard or gleaned is that Bitcoin, as you mentioned, has tried to be money, but there’s a bit of a Bitcoin-builder movement. I’m not sure if that’s led to anything particularly meaningful in the space.

My understanding is that Ethereum has tried to optimize across multiple dimensions, both trying to be money and trying to be the base layer for a decentralized internet, and has committed to decentralization in a way that some people think is at the sacrifice of usability, whereas Solana hasn’t had the same commitments to decentralization and is really optimized for usability.

First, is that a fair characterization, or how would you edit the characterization? And second, how has this all played out? Where are we right now on that landscape?

That’s actually a really good characterization. The way that I would break things down is that there’s a very large and multidimensional trade-off space, and it’s very hard for any one system to cover the entire space. It makes sense that you’d end up with different systems specialized for different things and, as a result, having different use cases and different value propositions.

Bitcoin, I think, has been extremely successful at becoming a kind of digital gold. It’s been extremely volatile, but I think there’s this belief—there’s a memetic value—that Bitcoin is, in the long term, a pretty good store of value that will be around for a very, very long time. It’s not going anywhere and will have properties that are desirable and aren’t provided by other things, like fiat or gold itself.

It’s funny. It’s only been around for less than 20 years, but in my head, I sort of treat it as gold. It’s like it’s going to be there forever.

Exactly.

Exactly. So, it’s really succeeded at that, and I think some of the things that have helped it succeed are the fact that it is so hard to change, the fact that it is so simple, and the fact that you can’t do that much with it. Those things are disadvantages in some contexts, but they’re real advantages when trying to solve for that particular thing.

Then there are all the other smart contract platforms that are trying to do much more and are trying to be computers. Ethereum lands in some part of the trade-off space here where it really optimizes for decentralization. It is fully decentralized, and so it’s hard for Ethereum to change quickly because there are a lot of stakeholders and a lot of people who want to be able to influence its direction.

The choices that it has made have made it a pretty good platform for some of the higher-stakes DeFi applications, or for, for example, the issuance of new assets on Ethereum. That might be the default simply because it’s been around the longest, and its high level of decentralization makes it very suitable for that.

Then there are blockchains like Solana and Sui, which are extremely high-performance. They are very well suited for transactions, payments, and things that do require that level of performance. If you wanted to build something like the Nasdaq exchange on-chain, there’s no way you’re doing that on Ethereum L1. You probably need a blockchain with the level of performance that Solana, Sui, or some of the other, more modern blockchains have.

I expect that each of these ecosystems will likely find its niche. The future is obviously very uncertain, and there’s all this talk about how maybe Solana will eat Ethereum’s lunch. That’s a possibility, but it’s still wide open, is basically what you’re saying.

Yeah, it’s wide open, and there are a lot of ways in which it could play out.

Yeah. So, Arianna, I want to double-click on your point about the misconception in terms of how the policy regime has changed. If you look at the Novi/Libra project—it had 7 different names, so whichever one you want to use—that was something that could have been incredibly interesting because you have Facebook, now Meta, with such an enormous distribution network. It already has all the users, and integrating payments into that via crypto made all the sense in the world.

Obviously, they were told in no uncertain terms that was not something they could proceed with, and unfortunately, the whole project kind of died on the vine.

I will say it went on to flourish in other forms because we’re investors in Mysten Labs, and they spun out of there. There have actually been a number of great teams who came from there, so I think the diaspora of talent has continued to fight the good fight and build. But in general, that’s another project that, as it was initially conceived, had to die on the vine because of that.

Yeah. I think, as investors, it’s not necessarily our job to envision what is possible, but rather to recognize it when we see it. I’m personally very excited to see what entrepreneurs come up with in the next couple of years, now that we have a new opportunity space.