On May 30, Andreessen, who spoke on the Bankless podcast with investing partner and colleague Chris Dixon, remarked that increased acceptance and a bustle of work in Web3 looks very similar to the frenzy of activity that characterised his early years in tech. He compares Web3 and its underlying blockchain technology to the early internet’s emergence. Andreessen emphasised that he would not make such a broad comparison on the spur of the moment. He remarked:
“This is the only time I’ve ever said this [Web3] is like the internet. If you go back through all my historical statements, one could imagine that with my experience I could have said this like 48 times. I’ve never made a comparison before.”
He went on to say:
“I’ve never said it about any other kind of technology, because I just wanted people to know like I don’t take the comparison lightly.”
While crypto fans have frequently drawn comparisons between the adoption route of blockchain technology and the early internet (much to the displeasure of crypto opponents), Andreessen’s front-line experience gives him unique credibility to make such claims.
He explained that the present Web3 environment is attracting the world’s brightest minds:
“The easiest way to think about it is, when you get something like this that has a movement, that has this sort of collective effect and has a movement behind it, and is attracting many of the world’s smartest people to work on it, basically the criticisms play out differently than the critics think.”
In response to the “long list” of accusations made against crypto and digital assets, Web3 entrepreneurs see these “issues” as possibilities. According to Andreessen:
“The critics make this long list of all of the problems, but you’re getting these genius engineers and entrepreneurs [who] flood into the space. What happens is, they look at that list of problems as a list of opportunities”
He added:
“It’d be like if you had a house project [that] was going sideways and you got all these complaints, and then all of the world’s best architects and master builders showed up the next day to fix your house. All of a sudden you’ve got the best house in the world. This can actually happen.”
According to Andreessen, Web3 is the internet’s “missing link,” providing trust, sovereignty, and financial usefulness to the ecosystem. He emphasised:
“We were…missing trust, authority, permission. We were missing the ability to transact with people for trusted relationships, transact, send money, store money, and then have all the other economic arrangements that the world wants to have [such as] loans and contracts and insurance and all these other things.”
a16z, which was previously recognised for its early investments in Instagram and Slack, initially joined the crypto market in 2013 with an investment in Coinbase and has subsequently funded important cryptocurrency-related companies such as OpenSea, Polychain Capital, Avalanche (AVAX), Solana (SOL), and Yuga Labs.
Andreessen Horowitz recently announced the establishment of its fourth cryptocurrency fund, valued at $4.5 billion, increasing the total amount of cash invested in crypto firms by the firm to little over $7.6 billion. According to Managing Partner Chris Dixon’s letter, a16z created the newest fund to take advantage of the “golden period” of Web3 development. He stated:
“We could actually imagine the entire global economy running on the blockchain like 30 or 50 years from now.”
Read more:
- Co:Create, an NFT infrastructure startup, secures $25 million seed funding led by A16z
- Venture Capital “a16z” does not consider Cardano as an Ethereum competitor
