Why a16z Doubled Down on Crypto - Guy Wuollet
- a16z’s $2.2 billion fifth crypto fund is a countercyclical bet that crypto is already “winning,” even while native sentiment remains depressed. Guy Wuollet points to stablecoin adoption, dramatically better infrastructure, the GENIUS Act, possible CLARITY passage, and positive movement around perps as evidence that on-chain finance is approaching an inflection point.
- Crypto’s talent bottleneck has shifted from computer science to distribution and financial product design. Wuollet concedes that many researchers have developed “AI psychosis,” but argues that “the question is not a technical one anymore. It’s a go-to-market challenge” — increasingly addressed by founders leaving banks, asset managers, and fintech companies.
- Speculation has not disappeared; it has concentrated in higher-quality assets and products. Growth in Hyperliquid’s RWA perps and demand for tokenized stocks suggest users increasingly prefer globally accessible equities, commodities, and other recognizable exposures over “the next marginal food token.”
- Stablecoins could become the funding base for a new on-chain credit architecture. Wuollet sees savings balances seeking yield converging with a private-credit market that needs new technical solutions, potentially making vaults a new structure for connecting global capital with lending opportunities.
- AI strengthens crypto’s relative moat while creating markets crypto is suited to build. “You can’t vibe code USDC. You can’t vibe code a liquidity network effect,” Wuollet argues; meanwhile, financing GPUs, hedging compute demand, and creating energy or model-token derivatives all fit a global, 24/7 on-chain system.
- a16z’s discipline is to back exceptional people early and measurable product-market fit later, not chase whichever theme currently has momentum. Prediction markets fit the broader thesis because they let people trade a precise belief directly, while the fund’s closing posture is deliberately contrarian: “Common sense will not achieve great things. Simply become insane and desperate.”
1. a16z sees an inflection point hiding beneath crypto’s depression
Thread Guy set the countercyclical frame: Dragonfly’s $700 million fund had seemed “heroic,” while a16z has now announced its fifth crypto fund at $2.2 billion. Wuollet’s shorthand response: “We’re back, baby.”
Wuollet’s core claim is that “crypto as a space is winning”: stablecoin adoption is rising, infrastructure has improved drastically in price and performance, the GENIUS Act has passed, CLARITY might follow, and recent CFTC developments have improved the position of perps.
The intended end state extends beyond token speculation. Wuollet wants on-chain finance to merge with Wall Street while taking savings, investing, credit, and lending products to billions of people who still lack basic financial services.
2. The next crypto talent wave comes from finance, not protocol research
The host’s challenge was blunt: crypto once attracted the sharpest young technical talent, but AI now offers more venture funding, faster exits, and the excitement that crypto previously monopolized.
Wuollet conceded that the computer-science researcher who built crypto’s performant infrastructure has “adopted AI psychosis.” Yet finance moving on-chain is no longer mainly a technical problem; it requires customer understanding and go-to-market ability, drawing senior talent from fintechs, banks, and asset managers.
His Manhattan metaphor captures the convergence: “You have DeFi coming from Brooklyn to SoHo and you have TradFi coming from FiDi to SoHo.” In his formulation, “Wall Street is coming towards crypto” through both products and people.
3. Speculation is migrating toward globally useful assets
The host’s pushback — worth keeping: crypto obtained a friendly administration, ETFs, a passed road for tokenization, stablecoin legislation, and prospective market-structure clarity, yet its on-chain cohort still felt close to depression because volatility and new speculative experiments had faded.
Wuollet rejected the premise that speculation vanished: it “concentrated.” Hyperliquid’s growth in RWA perps signals demand for higher-quality exposures; however entertaining the DeFi food-token era was, a commodity perp may simply be more valuable than “the next marginal food token.”
This maturation follows Chris Dixon’s framing that “the next big thing will look like a toy.” DeFi spent years as that toy; now it is taking itself more seriously and gaining credibility as a distribution layer for investing and trading products.
Global access is the mechanism. Users outside the US often cannot reach American equities or other desirable assets unless they are wealthy, making tokenized stocks and on-chain perps more than conveniences. Wuollet described this as a two-way street: bringing higher-quality assets to crypto while using crypto as a distribution mechanism for new investing and trading products.
Rising stablecoin balances then create demand for yield, with vaults potentially connecting that capital to an evolving private-credit market. Wuollet situated the transition historically: direct bank lending was more common before the global financial crisis; private credit expanded afterward partly because borrowers wanted direct lender relationships and partly because of Basel III and related regulation.
4. Crypto could become the financial layer for AI infrastructure
Wuollet’s defense against AI displacement rests on network effects. AI may let someone “vibe code in a weekend” a better SaaS product, weakening conventional software retention, but “you can’t vibe code USDC” or reproduce an established liquidity network.
AI’s largest constraints, in his view, are compute, energy, silicon, and chips — problems of capital formation as much as technology. Existing spot markets are limited and derivatives remain immature.
Crypto’s role is to finance long-tail GPU purchases beyond the Magnificent 7, hedge token demand, and create derivatives tied to compute or specific model tokens. Because those markets are global and operate continuously, Wuollet expects much of this infrastructure to be “built on chain by default,” with new markets potentially leapfrogging existing financial structures in the way parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia moved directly from cash payments to touchless payments.
5. People, prediction markets, and persistence anchor the deployment strategy
Wuollet admitted he prefers periods when his work is less fashionable, when people may be “a little depressed or stressed” and attention has moved elsewhere. a16z’s framework is straightforward: back “the very best founders” early, then double down at the growth stage when metrics demonstrate product-market fit.
He also distinguished the opportunity from “cryptocurrency” narrowly understood: much of it lies in building new markets and infrastructure to serve finance, rather than new currencies or forms of money.
Prediction markets fit a world of increasing financialization, although Wuollet gave an honest non-answer on numerical TAM. Their advantage is legibility: instead of guessing how a specific prediction, such as an invasion of Cuba, might ripple through equities, a trader can express that prediction directly.
The institutional lineage is long-cycle by design: a16z’s crypto focus began with Chris Dixon’s 2013 Coinbase investment, its first dedicated crypto fund followed in 2018, and Wuollet joined on December 1, 2020 — Bitcoin’s first new all-time high since the prior cycle.
His closing message borrowed from the Hagakure: “The way of the samurai is in desperateness. 10 men or more cannot kill such a man. Common sense will not achieve great things. Simply become insane and desperate.” Crypto may not be the hottest topic, but a16z is channeling that intensity toward transforming traditional finance and building better financial services globally.
Full transcript
And boom. Guy, it’s an absolute pleasure to meet you, man. Welcome to the stream.
Thanks so much. Excited to be here.
Yeah, excited to have you. Look, I’ll give you quick context on the stream and who’s watching, because I think it might be helpful. I’m Thread Guy. It’s great to meet you. This is primarily, historically, a crypto stream. All we talked about was crypto up through October—probably mid-October—and I woke up and was like, “What are we going to talk about on stream for 3 hours every day for the next 6 months?”
So we spent a lot of time talking about AI, equities, geopolitics, because I had a little geopolitical commentator arc there, and everything in between. That’s actually seeming quite helpful now that, over the last week, crypto has some juice.
Your announcement comes at a really cool time, man. Congratulations. Crypto is obviously, as you know, pretty depressed. I think I had Haseeb on about 2 months ago when they announced their $700 million fund, which was heroic. It was like, “Oh my God, how did Dragonfly figure out how to get $700 million?”
Then Haun announced $1 billion, and you guys just announced $2.2 billion, which is a monster.
We’re back, baby.
Good to have you on today in particular. I’m excited to talk to you. So, quick intro on me, quick lore. Hit us with something real quick on what you guys just announced and who you are.
Yeah, we just announced the fifth crypto fund. I’m one of the general partners here at a16z crypto. We invest in anything and everything related to blockchains.
In spite of the news and sentiment, maybe not everyone has had the same level of excitement that we have. I think we’re not only at an interesting inflection point for blockchains, but we’re getting most of what we want. In fact, I would argue that crypto as a space is winning.
We’ve had incredible positive improvements in terms of stablecoin adoption. Infrastructure has gotten drastically better in both price and performance over the last couple of years. We’ve had incredible regulatory shifts in Washington, specifically first with the passage of the GENIUS Act. Now it seems like we’re on the cusp of the CLARITY Act potentially passing, which I think would be very meaningful and potentially unlock the rest of the market.
A lot of what is working today, I think, is stablecoins, which are obviously benefiting from the regulation. Then also perpetuals, which I think are in a much better position today than they were a couple of years ago. Some of the news from the CFTC there has been very positive.
I think we’re pretty fired up both about on-chain finance merging with Wall Street and about bringing financial services—starting with stablecoins and savings accounts, but migrating over time to investing products, credit, lending—to the entire world.
These are things we probably take for granted. You and I maybe have a bank and a brokerage that are doing a good job. Mine could certainly use some improvement.
Yeah.
But there are still billions of people who lack basic financial services. If we do nothing else as a space, I’m excited to bring parity to that world for all people.
I mean this very generously, but how did a16z convince LPs to give you guys $2.2 billion in this market for crypto?
I would say Chris Dixon’s charisma. And then maybe my good looks.
[Laughter.]
On a serious note, how do you deploy that? How do you approach deploying that, especially right now?
One of the things I asked Cobie when he came on the stream a week ago was that, when I first got into crypto in 2020, prior to that I was an internet reseller, a streetwear kid. I followed the dropshipping crowd into sports cars and NFTs and then into crypto.
It felt like the bleeding edge of talent. If you were young, in your 20s, smart, and sharp, you were just in crypto. You would go to crypto. It was a natural move. I think that was the case from maybe 2020 to 2024.
Somewhere in there, there was a shift. The foundational tech just became AI, right? All the talent that can raise more venture in AI, that can maybe make more money, that can exit faster in AI—there was just a shift.
Since then, it feels like we’ve had a talent problem. What’s the new hot thing people are excited about that isn’t AI? Prediction markets are a massive one. Polymarket in the back—shout-out to Polymarket and Shayne Coplan. Some generational founders there.
Moving forward, how do you deploy it, and what is it going to take to get the new cohort of talent back into crypto? Are they here?
Yes, I think the new core cohort of talent is certainly here. I’ll agree with you: we have to acknowledge that a lot of the infrastructure in crypto that has become so impressive and performant was built by, let’s call them, computer science researchers.
That person has definitely adopted AI psychosis. They’re spending 18 hours a day in Claude Code. I don’t know if your friends are the same as my friends, but I think it’s almost become an idle game, in the sense of something like Clash of Clans, where you’re now timing your sleep schedule around when the agent will complete its task.
I take nothing away from that. I think the improvements in AI are incredible and will lead to massive productivity growth.
But I really think the question, or challenge, for crypto to go through an annealing process with finance—and for finance to move on-chain—is not a technical one anymore. It’s a go-to-market challenge. It’s an understanding of what the customer really wants.
A lot of the founders we’ve worked with recently, a couple of whom we haven’t announced yet and whom we’re excited to announce in the coming months and weeks, are coming from fintech companies, leaving senior roles at banks or asset managers.
I would really say Wall Street is coming toward crypto. Wall Street is moving on-chain, both literally in the products they’re building and in the people who are migrating physically from FiDi to SoHo in New York.
That’s the talent pipeline. People are moving slightly north in Manhattan. You have DeFi coming from Brooklyn to SoHo, and you have TradFi coming from FiDi to SoHo.
You know, one of the things that’s so bizarre about the last—I don’t know, maybe post-ETF and then really post-Trump coin—is that everything you could ever want in crypto as a crypto trader, speculator, builder, or participant has happened, right?
You have a pro-crypto administration, Gensler is out, and you have a pro-crypto SEC. ETFs are passing. All these financial vehicles are passing. The road for tokenization is passed, and the GENIUS Act—with stablecoins—and the CLARITY Act are hopefully soon going to be passed.
You have what feels like as close to depression as you could among the on-chain cohort, while people a little bit further out are like, “Oh my God, this crypto thing is awesome. This is a better vehicle than what we have in TradFi.”
It’s ironic that the part that’s been missing from the crypto equation is the speculative part, which has been the main driver for crypto up to this point. Volatility is suppressed, things moving on-chain are kind of post-meme coins, and new fun experiments on-chain are sort of nonexistent.
My question for you is maybe a tough one to answer, but outside of tokenization and stablecoins, what do you believe in and what are you excited about in the future of crypto?
Absolutely. I would also say the speculation has not gone away. The speculation has just maybe been evenly distributed previously, and now it’s concentrated. You have 2 logos behind you, and I think maybe those are excellent explanations for why people think the speculation is gone.
If you look at Hyperliquid over the last year, the significant growth in RWA perpetuals is really signaling that when people are interested in investing, they want high-quality assets. As fun as the DeFi food-coin era was, I think you would say buying something like a commodity perpetual is probably a higher-quality asset than the next marginal food token.
Yeah. Great take. Great take.
So I think, in many ways, DeFi has been—in the words of Chris on our team—the next big thing will look like a toy. For several years, DeFi was a toy, and now I think we’re taking ourselves more seriously and being taken more seriously by the rest of the world.
To answer your question directly: what, other than stablecoins and tokenization, is interesting?
I would say, one, I’m very interested in offering better investing and trading products to people, especially outside the US. We take for granted the ability to access American capital markets and make reasonable investments.
I think part of the reason you see so much interest in, for example, RWA perpetuals or tokenized stocks is that not everyone has access to these assets globally. In fact, it’s quite hard to access them if you’re not a very wealthy person in a developing country.
Then I would say, two: if we think about what is really working today in crypto, most of it is a second-order effect of stablecoins or perps.
Yep.
And the increasing growth in stablecoin issuance is starting to build a whole new product market. I think especially with the desire for stablecoins, which are really being used for savings in many cases today, people are looking for higher yield or more interesting investment opportunities, moving toward vaults as a new market structure for credit.
Pre-global financial crisis, you had a lot of direct bank lending. After the global financial crisis, you saw the rise of private credit, which I think was both an interest in having a direct relationship with your lender, but also certainly a result of Basel III and some of the regulations.
Now, I think you see private credit going through an interesting transition period. I'm not the best person to speak to that, but if you look at the news, maybe you'll see one or two articles that will do it justice. I think there's a really interesting convergence between a very high number of dollars in stablecoins sitting on-chain that want credit opportunities, and a credit market structure and ecosystem that is looking for new technical solutions to some of their existing problems. So that, I think, is very interesting to me.
And then I think crypto is great at building new markets, and we obviously need new markets for compute and energy. What is the biggest bottleneck to building AGI and having it solve all of our problems? I think the simple answer is that we do not have enough energy, and we certainly do not have enough silicon and enough chips.
The market structure there, I think, is relatively immature. You have some spot markets and very immature derivative markets. I think a lot of what we'll work on in the coming years will be to build leapfrog financial markets, where compute and energy don't trade in the same way that we trade existing equities or commodities now, but will in fact be default on-chain, much the same way you saw throughout Latin America and Southeast Asia going directly from cash payments to touchless.
So, that may be too much, but we're generally very excited.
I'll come back to the AI take in a second. A good point you make about Hyperliquid is that you have to watch how well South Korean stocks have done. I spent some time looking into other emerging markets, and what you don't realize, living in America and being born in America, is how incredibly efficient and innovative the American stock market is, and how every other emerging market just isn't.
You also realize how hard it is to get exposure to a lot of these assets. For me, with Hyperliquid, it was always like, man, I don't want an off-ramp to Robinhood to buy stocks. This Hyperliquid thing is cool. But for the rest of the world, it's like, no, you actually just cannot trade this stuff anywhere, really, other than on-chain with tokenized stocks and Hyperliquid.
It also adds access to this pool of liquidity, which is the rest of the world, right? People want exposure to this because their currency sucks and their stock markets suck, and they can't get it because of geographical blockers. Now they have access through Hyperliquid. I think that's an underrated part of Hyperliquid for sure: on-chain perps.
Absolutely. Yeah, I think this is just as true for equities. You've seen Ethena do really well with the cash-and-carry trade. If you come from a crypto background, you're maybe unfamiliar with the real cash-and-carry trade, which has been very successful.
I think this is a two-way street: trying to bring higher asset quality to crypto, and then using crypto as a distribution mechanism for new sorts of investing and trading products.
Can you expand a little bit on your take of why and how crypto doesn't get lost in the AI explosion? Where does it find itself in that stack?
What do you mean by “gets lost”?
I don't know. How does crypto exist and benefit, and not get opportunity-costed out from all of the excitement happening in AI? And can you talk a little bit about the on-chain compute market concept?
Yeah, I think the whole world is going through the process of re-rating how business works and how assets should be priced in a world of AI, and you certainly see that in public markets.
A lot of that question is now: if you can vibe-code in a weekend a software product that is better than what you're currently using as an enterprise, maybe your retention or your ability to continue to grow as a SaaS company is really curtailed.
Thankfully, almost every successful project in crypto is a network-effects business. You can't vibe-code USDC. You can't vibe-code a liquidity network effect. These are enduring moats that almost every company outside of crypto would love to have.
When something really works in crypto, it is enduring and has very strong defensibility, which is, in many ways, the parallel or mirror image of what you've seen for a lot of successful AI companies, where the growth rates are astronomical, but there are a lot of questions about how things develop in the fullness of time.
To speak to your specific question, I think the big bottleneck for AI progress today is compute and energy. I would argue this is as much a capital formation problem as it is a technology problem.
I think the one thing crypto is really good at is finance and coordination. When I think about trying to figure out the right way to finance, especially in the long tail as opposed to the Magnificent 7 companies, GPU purchases, being able to hedge token demand, and being able to buy derivatives on compute or on tokens from specific models themselves, I think a lot of that work, at least from the folks we're talking with, is just going to be built on-chain by default.
These are markets that are global, more efficient in many cases, and accessible 24/7, the same way compute is. If you believe in AI dominating productivity and our world, then I think you have to believe in a financial system that looks a lot like the one that we've built on-chain. So that, I think, is where these two trends come together.
It's a fun, sort of new take. There's a relatively new set of problems that wasn't as prominent 5 years ago, definitely not 10 years ago, that crypto is uniquely positioned to solve—problems you wouldn't have thought about in the 2020 cycle, at least not the way that you are right now, I would imagine.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's a fun take. You're obviously a really smart guy, and I would imagine you get a ton of deals, term sheets, and evaluations that cross your table. I always think about this as a trader: you are programmed to follow the hot ball of money, whether you like it or not.
You can only hold out from late 2020 to 2025 in crypto, crypto, crypto before you're like, all right, everything that has the word AI in the stock market is limit-up every single day. You get trained to follow the hot ball of money, and in venture that's probably not the most profitable strategy, right?
You guys just raised $2 million, doubling down when things are quiet and slow. How do you not get FOMO and distracted by what's happening in AI, and really ground yourself in the opportunity that exists within cryptocurrency?
I think it's interesting that you used the word “cryptocurrency” at the end, because a lot of the opportunity is not in building new currencies or new forms of money, but in building new markets and infrastructure to serve finance.
The new markets, yeah.
I think AI is certainly interesting and compelling, but if you look on a relative basis, there's an incredible opportunity today presented by perhaps exactly what you're saying: a lot of people are maybe a little depressed or stressed, and everyone is doing forex in the rest of the market and world.
Maybe it's just my personality or my inclination, but I enjoy and appreciate the time when the work I'm focused on is less popular, as opposed to being the talk of the town.
I also think the simple answer is that we have a pretty straightforward investment framework, which is to try to back the very best founders at an early stage, and then to double down on products and companies that clearly have product-market fit at the growth stage. It's much more of a metrics-based evaluation.
But really, venture capital is a people and talent business, and so it's very hard to be FOMO'd into an idea. It's very easy to want to work with a fantastic person over the course of a decade or more.
It's a beautiful take. We touched on some of these new vehicles. I have Polymarket sitting in the background.
Prediction markets has been one of the hot—I mean, one of the hottest stories of the last 3, 4, 5 years, really, especially as of recent last year. How big is the TAM on prediction markets? How big could Polymarket get and grow from here, from a users, a volume, and an assets-traded perspective?
That's a very hard question to answer numerically. I think, in terms of trend, I very much believe in a world of increasing financialization and increasingly expressing your beliefs or opinions about the world as an individual through trading, so to speak. I think a lot of this is not a crypto-specific trend, but manifests in crypto itself because blockchains are excellent at building new markets.
You saw retail participation in the stock market, I think, double, if I recall correctly, from before to after COVID. A really simple way to understand prediction markets is that if you have a very specific belief about the world, in theory you could express that by investing in equities. But oftentimes, as maybe you well know, it's hard to predict how your very specific belief about the world will express itself in asset prices.
It's much easier or more legible to say, well, I believe we're going to invade Cuba—which, no comment on—but I think it's very hard to predict whether or not the invasion of Cuba will ripple out into certain equities. It's much simpler to say, I have a very specific prediction about the world and I can express that. I think if prediction markets continue to grow the way they have been, the TAM there will certainly be much larger than it is today.
Can you give me some of the lore on a16z? I just saw the round announcement and assumed that everybody knows the story and what you guys hit on, what you missed on, and how you got here. Then I realized I don't even really know the story, and so I figured I should probably ask. What have just been the highs and the lows of the journey with a16z? Huge wins, huge losses, euphoric points, depressing points. Give us something.
Yeah, I mean, by personality, I'm less of a work-so-hard-it's-over kind of guy. I'm kind of a steady, steady, boring guy. I feel like we would have fun because I would mellow you out.
We would balance, yes.
a16z was started by Ben and Marc—Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen—back in the late 2010s with the idea of building a venture capital fund for founders. The idea is we build a product and founders buy the product with their company equity, as opposed to being a firm that sits and separates itself and wants to dictate top-down how companies should work.
The original idea was to try to work with visionary technical founders from hopefully as early as possible, but if we make a mistake, at later stages as well, and then support them with everything outside of their core business. Things like research, engineering, legal, go-to-market, talent, and so on and so forth.
The crypto focus at the firm really started back in 2013, when Chris Dixon led the investment in Coinbase. We put together the first crypto fund back in 2018. Today we're announcing our fifth crypto fund, which is $2.2 billion. It's certainly been an interesting time.
Myself personally, I joined our team back in December of 2020, actually December 1st, 2020. That was the first new all-time high for Bitcoin since the prior cycle.
That is a lot.
A very serendipitous time to start.
And you know, it has not been a boring five and a half or so years. But you know, I’m really much more excited, I think, about the next five or 10 years and the opportunity we have in front of us.
That was incredible. Thank you for the lore. What a 5, 6 years. You joined at a wild time. And yeah, congratulations again on the fund. Is there any sort of closing statement or anything you want to leave the people with? Some optimism that you want to leave the increasingly optimistic, for lack of a better word, traders and crypto participants in the audience with? It's been a tough 6 months.
Yeah, that's fair. I was reading the Book of the Samurai the other day, the Hagakure, and there's a quote that has stuck with me: The way of the samurai is in desperateness. 10 men or more cannot kill such a man. Common sense will not achieve great things. Simply become insane and desperate.
That's kind of the energy we're channeling. Crypto's maybe not the hottest topic on the planet right now, but I think we have an incredible opportunity to build better financial services for all people globally and just help transform how traditional finance works today.
I'm very thankful for the people on our team and the founders we're already working with. If you're watching out there and you're building a transformational project within crypto, I'd love to talk to you.
That was beautiful. Guy, absolute pleasure. Congratulations again. It was great to talk to you. I appreciate you coming on, and maybe next Bitcoin all-time high we'll bring you on for part 2.
Absolutely.