crypto

“And I believe that we're seeing, within months, this third phase of wealth moving into crypto, which will be traditional LPs and investors finding managers they trust, like us, to basically move large amounts of exposure into crypto. And that will, you know, c…”

“We originally had set up mines, we had invested in a few companies, and we're kind of long-term holders of crypto.”

“It's the incumbents who control the centralized distribution channels today, like Apple and Google.”

“So the companies that I mentioned, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, they're incredible. And will continue to be for quite some time. It's not like they're going to be affected by the rise of crypto in the short term.”

“I believe that governance is where most of the value is going to accrue in crypto at the end of the day, precisely because of what Kyle pointed out, features, functionality can be copied, and the thing that you can't copy is a community, and the thing that Kee…”

“And so now the value in crypto is no longer in the data itself, and ultimately that's for the long term, that's what's going to commoditize the web incumbents that we have today.”

“And so I think, actually, in practice, what's going to happen is the government will clean up Our understanding of where those lines are, and once we have that regulatory certainty, we'll actually create even more investment and more innovation, because then e…”

“The real risk, in my opinion, therefore, is not that the government bans this stuff. I think the real risk, actually, is that nefarious governments fully, fully embrace it.”

“And if you look at the way that the U S government in particular, I think has handled crypto. I think they've been very nuanced and sophisticated in their handling of this.”

“We don't think it should be unregulated. We think it should be regulated.”

“These cycles really come and go, and ultimately you want to build something that lasts throughout this entire period. So by not getting super distracted by things that, you know, if you review and doesn't seem like something that's going to actually stay aroun…”

“The way I view it is that crypto and decentralized exchanges give people the option to use them, so not everyone has to be their own bank.”

“So crypto is by far the most globalized The tech revolution or boom we've seen in my mind to date”

“What crypto really fundamentally is that when you really strip it all away, it is that secure ability to have secure, decentralized, private memory and secure decentralized private identity.”

“Now, some of the biggest opportunities in mobile have probably been picked over, but right now, just wait, this whole wave of crypto that's coming is going to change the game yet again.”

“So right now, if you ask me, I'm spending most of my time learning about crypto and DeFi than anything else.”

“And for the first time ever last March, I went negative cash and I went big into the market and big into crypto.”

“Myself have been kind of hooked on crypto ever since. And convinced that, you know, it's one of the best risk-adjusted bets you can make anywhere in the world.”

“We stayed for years on the sidelines on crypto, and we made it in 2020, and this is a company that we were disciplined, and we kept on following for years despite that prior rounds we had passed, and then after our first investment a few weeks ago, we doubled …”

“Seeing some of my classmates end up going to Yahoo, end up going to Netscape, end up going to some other internet startups, It's kind of like what you see with crypto today, and you just see, wow, anything's possible”

“To some extent, it's been indiscriminate, and there can, you know, there's likely to be a pullback. Now, let me not say, unless anyone thinks that, that a pullback means an end, because I think I've tried to stress that there's real value being created There i…”

“When a payment system gets to scale, it's in everybody's interest that that system is operationally resilient, that it's well grounded, and that it's as efficient as possible. And in all of those respects, it becomes more and more difficult at large scale for …”

“A lot of the people who have made the most money from NFTs are probably the people who are already made a lot of money from crypto, for example, right?”

“You know, I think what we're also going to see is investment time horizons. I'm going to leave crypto and web three aside because that occupies its own unique space, but just Kind of like non-crypto, non-web three venture. I think you're going to see deploymen…”

“With the crypto stuff, I don't own a lot of it. I'm a big investor in Genies, which is, you know, a company here in the States that everything from intelligent emojis to NFT and sort of web three O stuff. But I haven't gone deeply into the crypto stuff just be…”

“Crypto is also going to eat capital markets, right, which is the deployment of money and the deployment of capital. And if crypto is going to eat capital markets, it's going to eat venture capital.”

“There's a lot of nuance here, and I think we're still very early. So I wouldn't FOMO in. I wouldn't worry about missing it. I would be very deliberate about sort of cost averaging in over a couple of cycles. I don't think people need to freak out about it beca…”

“Like, if a VC firm that feels like, They missed out on the last wave of crypto for the last four years comes in and is starting to buy logos. Then they're going to overpay because their motivations are not just that they want to do the investment at a fair pri…”

“I'm biased because I'm really, really bullish on finance and intersection of tech as one of those big platform shifts with crypto, but also broadly financial services.”

“Crypto is not An inflation hedge , it's still a risk asset”

“This goes to show that crypto is not an inflation hedge. It's still a risk asset have been marked down dramatically.”

“The extent to which you're at the furthest end of the spectrum in terms of risk tends to have a larger effect on the value, at least in temporary terms for those risk assets. You could crypto various DeFi applications in that camp. They've had a very large run…”

“I was one of the first to like boohoo crypto. You know, some of it's unwell, but like I said, like, I can't be involved in a bunch of stuff where like, I think more than three quarters of it is scammy.”

“I have a feeling that just like AI and other things, it will take quite a long while, but it's going to be, there is a chance that it becomes a fundamental part of the infrastructure just further down that it actually powers a lot of things and is very valuabl…”

“You can actually accomplish, I'd say, kind of, 90, 95% of what crypto wants and what people want by actually building this from scratch, by actually looking at the protocol layer and not getting distracted by how it's been implemented.”

“Yeah, I mean, look, if you live in a dollar denominated country, it probably wasn't a very good hedge, but There are many other countries where there's an amazing hedge, right? So, like, I mean, there are other countries that, whose currencies have, you know, …”

“But in crypto, it feels like there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of building, there's a lot of things and this new cycle, you know, feels like the beginning of that, it feels very similarly to me, where we are in crypto today, feels very similar to me where …”

“And I said the best time to have been in crypto was January, 2009. And that was when the Bitcoin network launched. And the second best time is January of 2023.”

“I think it'll be a blip in the long term, and it'll be a blip, you know, much like, you know, web van imploding, or a flooz.com, or whatever, you know, pick your favorite .com, you know, thing that imploded.”

“And so I have seen in the last few years a willingness to dig into crypto in a way that is profoundly different than in the past, where regulators might have had a more limited interaction with companies. I think they truly understood that they needed to under…”

“I don't think we're there yet on any use case, frankly. That I think will have longevity in the market, but I do think the underlying technology is super important to experiment with and to explore new ways of building financial rails”

“Regulators, I've been impressed with how up to speed they've gotten on crypto, and they've really taken time to learn about it.”

“Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's that large a part of the crypto ecosystem. When the ecosystem is fueling speculation, or when the objective is the circumvention of legitimate government regulation or tax obligations, that's where I become more skeptical abo…”

“People wanted me to write about crypto, and I was kind of just like, ah, I don't know. This is, it's like this hasn't proven yet to be a huge part of the future, and if not, then it just seems so boring to write about.”

“And this is just the beginning. You'll see this trend just accelerating, I think, over the next five, 10 years when you start thinking about open banking, when you start thinking about the uses of crypto, when you start thinking about how, what AI could do in …”

“Like, I genuinely believe and still believe that, you know, crypto is the most important social technology of our lifetime.”

“It's kind of a big unknown secret. You know, unspoken secret, I should say in, in crypto, like how many people actually get hacked and no one really talks about it”

“AI is something that can actually change consumers' lives. Things that could not be delivered because it took too many human hours, that was too expensive, are now conceivably being delivered for fractions of the cost.”

“And I would actually argue probably on an absolute dollars basis, crypto has shown that the demand for speculation globally is much larger than people previously thought. And the manifestations and forms in which people want it are broader and more varied than…”

“I personally think, you know, he's going to be leaning into crypto in a big way in 24, 24, that's my prediction, but we'll see.”

“There will effectively be You know, set of service providers or companies that obfuscate away. Frankly, a lot of the complexity that still exists there with crypto and in Bitcoin, we talk about, you know, having to, these clunky long addresses that are necessa…”

“Two years ago everyone wanted to do lots of late stage and solo capitalists and crypto, and then, you know, a year later they all think it's dead and don't want to do that ever again. I think most of those things will come back.”

“We are, we don't pivot at A-Six-Z, like we've never pivoted. We have all, you know, we've done AI for 10, since I've been at the firm, since 2013, we've done blockchain, crypto consistently, we've done bio, we've done SaaS, we've done video games.”

“The establishment banking, you know, the big banks hate crypto, the big tech companies hate crypto.”

“I think, you know, I'd like their setbacks, like in, in crypto, the stuff that happened two years ago with FTX and a bunch of scandals, I think, set back the space a couple, you know, maybe a couple of years.”

“We were trying to squint and figure out who was going to be the champion and was going to lead us to the promised land of being excited about crypto, and none of us could do it.”

“I also think crypto did us dirty in this kind of front, which is like, it made all technology feel like hype. And it emphasized again, short buck return.”

“The idea, like, from what I understand, microstrategy is effectively issuing debt to buy, to go in the market and buy more To go to buy more like crypto and they just keep doing it. But if that reverses, eventually got paid on the debt. I don't know. It just s…”

“Not bearish on crypto, but, like, I think it reminds me a little bit of the tulip craze that you can't actually use crypto to go buy, like, when you could, if I could go buy a Tesla with crypto, it'd be amazing. If I could go to Amazon and use Bitcoin, it'd be…”

“While for us, a movement like crypto is a diversification strategy, it's an asset class, for a big part of the world, it is a way to survive and live.”

“But I think all of crypto is a little fraud.”

“For the majority of people, they don't know shit about stocks. They don't know shit about crypto. It's the same. It's a gamble.”

“I never got crypto. I still don't get crypto... It still feels like a Ponzi scheme to me, which I know it makes me an old fogey, but I don't get it.”

“There's a few things that I'll never touch. I'll never touch crypto. I'm not getting into whether I believe in crypto or not. I think it has huge use cases, but I think it's best left to the crypto funds. Consumer hardware is tough because of various, various …”

“I think there's been a lot of positive movement on regulatory clarity but at the same time, I think that sentiment for crypto has also gone down significantly from the general public.”