Crypto Fund 5: We Raised $2.2B. Here’s Why.
5/7/20261 hr 2 min
Robert Hackett speaks with the general partners at a16z crypto about the launch of their fifth crypto fund and the current state of the industry. They reflect on how crypto has evolved from an ideological movement into a more pragmatic, product-focused ecosystem, shaped by real-world use cases and increasing regulatory clarity.
The conversation covers the rise of stablecoins, onchain finance, and new market infrastructure, as well as the growing overlap between crypto and AI. The group also discusses how founders are shifting toward building products that work within existing systems, rather than attempting to replace them, and why this moment may represent a new phase of mainstream adoption.
They also look ahead to what success looks like for the next generation of crypto companies, from onboarding billions of users to enabling AI agents as economic actors, and the role crypto could play in shaping more open, decentralized systems in an increasingly consolidated technology landscape.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsRobert Hackett· Host0:00
The most successful founders in this next era are gonna be the ones that are much more product-focused, much more go-to-market focused, and also more pragmatic rather than ideological. There's a strong sense that in order for crypto to succeed, it has to work with the system as opposed to trying to overthrow it.
Chris Dixon· Guest0:15
What we found in crypto is that finance is, for a bunch of reasons, kind of a low-hanging fruit. One kind of mental model that I have is we try to get a billion people into sort of being almost daily users of blockchains through stocks and bonds and stablecoins and payments and remittances and so forth. Once you have people onboarded, they've used the infrastructure, the wallets and so forth, it's natural at that point to offer adjacent services.
Guy Wuollet· Guest0:37
There's a big difference between the theoretical or the intellectual and the practical, and it's a wonderful time to be a pragmatist building on chain.
Speaker 30:43
What does it take for a new technology to move from ideology to infrastructure? For years, crypto was framed as a revolution, a way to rebuild financial systems from the ground up. But today, the trajectory looks different. The most meaningful progress is happening where crypto meets the real world: payments, markets, and financial infrastructure that people will actually use. At the same time, new forces are emerging. Regulatory clarity is opening the door for builders, while AI is reshaping how software and even economic activity itself gets created and executed. The question now is not whether crypto can replace the system, but how it integrates with it and what that unlocks. Here, the a16z