Podcast profile
By a16z crypto, Robert Hackett, Sonal Chokshi
The a16z crypto show explores how decentralized networks are reshaping money, ownership, and the architecture of the internet.
Latest episode
1 hr 15 min
Topics
Cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, tokens, markets, custody, and digital-asset infrastructure.
Blockchain architecture, smart contracts, consensus, protocols, and decentralized applications.
Coordination, consistency, messaging, storage, and computation across networked systems.
Formats
Host-led conversation where a guest supplies most of the subject matter.
Interpretation, opinion, debate, review, and analytical discussion.
Audience level
Assumes basic technology literacy and familiarity with common products, roles, and terminology.
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Episodes shown — 10 of 25
More than 30 years ago, Gödel Prize Winner Noam Nisan helped develop a proof technique that he never expected anyone to use in the real world. At the center of that breakthrough was the sum-check protocol — an elegant technique that emerged from Noam Nisan’s early work on interactive proofs.
How can you prove that something is true without revealing why it is true? That question gave rise to zero-knowledge proofs, one of the most important breakthroughs in modern cryptography.
a16z Cofounder and General Partner Marc Andreessen and a16z crypto Founder and Managing Partner Chris Dixon on why the CLARITY ACT matters. Congress is debating once-in-a-generation market structure legislation that could determine where financial and internet infrastructure gets built.
For the first time, companies can treat AI token spending almost like headcount: allocate more money, deploy more intelligence, and potentially get more work done. That shift could change much more than engineering productivity.
Before the internet could become a place to bank or transact, it needed a way for strangers to know who they were talking to, and whether a message could be trusted. Turing Award winners Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman helped invent it.
Long before onchain markets made mechanism design a daily engineering problem, Nobel Prize winner Paul Milgrom was asking how prices actually form — and how better auction rules could reshape actual markets.
Long before crypto made coordination programmable, Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth was designing markets where coordination could save lives.
Before blockchains could reach consensus, Leslie Lamport had to define what agreement even meant when computers fail, lie, or disappear.
Every blockchain today leans on replication ideas worked out in the 1980s, by a Turing Award winner who wasn’t thinking about how it might apply to money at all.
Bitcoin often gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t. The problem was named decades earlier — in the world of distributed computing — and researchers spent years studying how machines could reach agreement even when some participants were faulty, adversarial, or corrupt.