Katie Haun
Founder & CEO, Haun Ventures. On 2 shows, 6 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderexecutiveother@katie_haun ↗LinkedIn ↗haun.co/team/katie-haun ↗Wikipedia ↗YouTube ↗Instagram ↗
Katie Haun is the founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, a venture capital firm investing across digital assets and web3. Previously, she served as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and spent over a decade as a U.S. Department of Justice federal prosecutor leading cyber and crypto investigations.
2shows
6appearances
50statements
33resolved
23supported
1contradicted
70%fully supported
19said about them ↓ Everything Katie Haun said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Katie Haun admits the majority of ICOs are frauds or scams
“Look, initial coin offerings or ICOs, I'll be the first to tell you, there is a tremendous amount the majority of them are, seem to be, Frauds or scams.”
Haun: Gensler targeted compliant crypto firms while ignoring complete disasters
“Gary Gensler basically picked what should have been the best companies in crypto, the poster children for compliance, and brought enforcement actions against them, and then the complete spectacular disasters didn't bring anything, so until after the fact.”
Haun: Crypto market structure bill would have prevented past industry blowups
“The irony is if you would have had the market structure bill, you wouldn't have had a lot of the blowups that you had. In the past several years in this industry.”
Haun: U.S. government is not actively trying to trap ICO projects
“I do want to dispel the notion that the government is sitting there trying to trap, you know, an ICO project or a cryptocurrency project and saying, aha, we got you. That's just not the case. The fact of the matter is the government doesn't hurt for business w…”
Haun: Criminals serve as early adopters and beta testers for tech innovations
“I mean, they're the best beta testers of new technologies in many ways. And that's been true, not just of cryptocurrencies, right? That's been true of all kinds of things. If you think of cell phones, if you think of email, social media, the internet, and just…”
Haun: Blockchain technology itself has never been hacked, unlike crypto exchanges
“And we, blockchain's never been hacked. Some of the cryptocurrency exchanges have been hacked. You know, Mt. Gox, Coincheck more recently, Bitfinex, and others. But the blockchain itself has never yet been hacked.”
Haun prosecuted Wells Fargo executives for stealing from deceased customers
“When I was a prosecutor, I prosecuted Wells Fargo's executives for taking dead people's accounts and draining them of money. They basically found out who hadn't used their account for, you know, many years, and then they would drain the money to their own pers…”
Haun: Moving offshore will not protect crypto startups serving US consumers
“Well, I don't think they should wait, but I think they should have common sense and good judgment, and one of the red flags I see sometimes is, you know, and they'll publicly state, oh, we're moving offshore so that we don't have to comply with these laws that…”
Haun: Regulators won't prioritize crypto startups making best-effort compliance attempts
“Just try, and I think that those cases where people are demonstrating best efforts are not going to be the vehicles that the government regulators are going to want to choose.”
Haun: DOJ asked her to help shut down Bitcoin in 2012
“So for me, my story was in 2012, I actually was asked by the Justice Department to help shut down and prosecute Bitcoin.”
Blockchain transparency caught corrupt federal agents who stole Silk Road Bitcoin
“And I'm here to tell you that without it, we never would have caught these guys. In fact, without the blockchain, they would have still been sitting in the federal government today instead of in the federal penitentiary.”
Darknet Bitcoin transactions dropped from 30% in 2012 to under 1%
“In 2012, 30% of Bitcoin transaction value was associated with dark net markets like Alphabay or Silk Road, but by 2018, that number is down to less than one percent.”
Katie Haun concedes Bitcoin's main use is not peer-to-peer payments
“Satoshi's white paper says it's an electronic peer-to-peer cashless system for payments. Right. For payments, and I would grant you that it's right now, it's main use is, it's certainly not that.”
Katie Haun says Secret Service lacks resources for $100,000 counterfeiting cases
“The Secret Service in particular is an agency so strapped that I can't tell you how many counterfeiters we could never prosecute. You know, it's such a small fraction of cases that you really have a Secret Service agent. It has to be a mass scale counterfeit. …”
Katie Haun notes JPMorgan partnered with Zcash despite Jamie Dimon's comments
“JP Morgan was inking in a huge deal with Zcash. Zcash the privacy coin. So it's not that JP Morgan completely thought cryptocurrency, there was no there. They were doing a partnership with Zcash.”
Haun: NFTs will render traditional creator email mailing lists obsolete
“I'm all of a sudden thinking no more mailing lists, right? Like there's no need for that. No need for spam email. Because it allows people to interact, these creators to interact directly with their fans or people who want to use these products and services.”
Haun: Undisclosed government enforcement actions against crypto projects are coming
“So I think there are things in the space that we're not yet aware of, the public's not yet aware of, that will be coming.”
DOJ tasked prosecutor Katie Haun with shutting down Bitcoin in 2012
“The first time I ever heard the word Bitcoin was back in 2012 when I was a federal prosecutor at the US Department of Justice. And I heard the word Bitcoin because I was asked to prepare an investigation and a case against it and to help shut it down.”
Katie Haun: Shutting down Bitcoin is like shutting down the internet
“This was one of the early misconceptions out there about cryptocurrency, that you could shut something down like Bitcoin. That would be like saying, let's go shut down cash or the internet. Not only not possible, but also not desirable.”
Katie Haun: Cryptocurrency's complete anonymity is a myth
“Myths like cryptocurrency is just completely anonymous, so really it's only useful for criminals and money launderers. Now, how do I know that's just a myth? Well, I spent over a decade as a federal prosecutor, and during that time, I put murderers, organized …”
Secret Service agent Sean Bridges stole 21,000 Bitcoin from Silk Road
“Sean Bridges had also been at that proffer session where Curtis had turned over his password and computer and credentials, and that night, Sean Bridges went home using Curtis Green's computer, username, credentials, and password, and drained Silk Road accounts…”
Robert Mueller traced Bitcoin payments to Russian GRU operatives
“In fact, even special counsel Robert Mueller traced Bitcoin payments to Russian GRU operatives in the election interference case.”
Katie Haun says most of the 1,600+ cryptocurrencies are untrustworthy
“I think, you know, it's not just governments that could create untrustable cryptocurrency. I think there are a lot of untrustable cryptocurrencies out there right now. Obviously there are over 1600, I think maybe even more, but at 1.1600, and I certainly would…”
The other half of the tape: Katie Haun's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 16 times in 7 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Paul Krugman 3Sonal Chokshi 1Linda Xie 1Chris Dixon 1Arianna Simpson 1Ali Yahya 1
Statements about Katie Haun, by other people (3)
Paul Krugman calls Katie Haun's defense of crypto the best he's heard
“And this was the best, far and away the best defense of crypto that I've heard.”
Haun: The DOJ asked her to prepare a case against Bitcoin
“And I was a federal prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice at that time. And I was asked to prepare a case against Bitcoin.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 8
TBPN 8
2025 8 mentions in 1 episode
2019 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Katie's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Haun Ventures | 5 | 46 | 70% 23/33 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| TBPNLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Haun Ventures | 1 | 4 | — | full record on TBPN → |