Jesse Walden, partner at a16z Crypto, discusses how token alignment creates deep psychological connection between users and decentralized networks.
Insight
Walden: General base-layer protocols must ossify to foster developer trust
“The more general the service of a crypto network, the more it should be ossified. So again, coming back to this, IP is ossified, Bitcoin has ossified, maybe a general computation substrate is better ossified because it lends itself to the trust that the develo…”
Insight
Walden: Algorithmic stablecoins lack collateral and rely solely on market belief
“What's critical here is, like, there's no collateral backing this. There's nothing behind it. It's just people's belief that it will stabilize itself based on this adjusting supply and demand.”
Insight
Walden: NFTs act as canonical identifiers linking arbitrary metadata to digital assets
“NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are an embodiment of the same idea, where you have a canonical identifier for a thing. It could be an image, a song, you know, a you know, anything, literally anything. And hooked to it is metadata, and the metadata is arbitrary, and…”
Opinion
Walden: Blockchain streaming networks are fundamentally better for creators
“This is, I think, fundamentally better for creators than the way things work today, where it's like this very clunky manual process where you have to coordinate all of these relationships in, in contracts, and there's tons of middlemen and lawyer fees, and lik…”
Opinion
Walden: Blockchain projects should not compete directly with Spotify
“I wouldn't encourage, you know, blockchain projects that want to go and compete with Spotify directly, but there's this new territory that's opened up to figure out new sort of modes of creative expression that benefit from these properties, and hopefully we'l…”
Insight
Walden: Releasing half-baked, compelling ideas works best in open source
“One of the amazing properties of open source is that someone can put an idea out there and then galvanize developers to finish the idea, and that's in fact one of the features of open source that you know, you get, and it gets to this idea that Dennis talked a…”