a16z Partner: Still Adhering to Long-Termism in Crypto Investments, Believing Other Categories of Apps Will Emerge After Blockchain Finance Becomes Widespread

Odaily News a16z partner and a16z crypto lead Chris Dixon published an article titled "The Long Game in Crypto" on social media, stating: There is a prevailing narrative that non-financial use cases for crypto are dead. Some also claim that the "read-write-own" model has failed. These conclusions both misunderstand the core idea and misjudge the stage of development we are in.

We are currently in the financial era of blockchain. But the core idea was never that all crypto applications would emerge simultaneously, nor that finance wouldn't come first. The core idea has always been that blockchains introduce a new primitive — the ability to coordinate people and capital at internet scale, with ownership baked directly into the system.

Finance is the area where this primitive most naturally proves its value, which is why we often list finance as the primary example of productive token use cases. Finance is not separate from the broader vision; it is part of it. It is the foundation and testing ground for everything else.

At a16z and a16z crypto, we take the long view: our fund structures are designed for cycles longer than 10 years because building new industries takes time — the order of operations matters.

Infrastructure and distribution networks often precede new application categories. The internet didn't start with social media, streaming, or online communities; it started with packet switching, TCP/IP, and basic connectivity. It was only after hundreds of millions of people came online that entirely new cultural and economic categories emerged. Crypto is likely to follow a similar path. A reasonable speculation is: we need to get hundreds of millions of people on-chain first through financial applications like payments, stablecoins, savings, and DeFi, before we can see meaningful adoption in media, gaming, AI, or other potentially more distant fields. Many applications rely on wallets, identity, liquidity, and trust mechanisms that are already in place.

This is why a16z has spent over five years working hard to promote the establishment of a clear regulatory framework for tokens. Great endeavors take time. The breakthroughs we see in AI today are the result of decades of hard work by brilliant people. Building new technological systems is a marathon, and this is what a marathon looks like in practice: long periods of groundwork, followed by sharp inflection points. It is the chaotic years that make the clarity of the future possible.