All 17 Crypto & Web3 posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
Blockchains eliminate the historical supply constraints on financial markets—listing gatekeepers and geographic fragmentation—enabling permissionless creation of both new risk units and novel transfer mechanisms, from prediction markets to perpetual futures on alternative assets.
As real-world assets move onchain, DeFi primitives designed for volatile cryptoassets will give way to new infrastructure—CLOBs, fixed-rate lending, options, dark pools, and portfolio margin—that better serve lower-volatility, institutional-grade assets and unlock orders of magnitude more financial activity per dollar deployed.
As blockchain throughput becomes commoditized, financial markets need stronger guarantees: predictable transaction inclusion and ordering, resilience against gatekeepers, and pre-execution privacy. A16Z Crypto examines what protocol designers must solve for blockchains to serve as core financial infrastructure.
Local (non-USD) stablecoins represent the largest untapped opportunity in crypto because every economy needs a domestic payment layer, not just an offshore dollar layer. The author argues that monetary policy concerns, geopolitical risk, and the natural incentives of local payment incumbents will drive inevitable adoption of local stablecoins despite today's 99%+ USD dominance.
Tokenized real-world assets (RWA)—stocks and commodities trading on blockchains—are growing at 53% monthly, outpacing AI startups, with major financial institutions and blockchain infrastructure like Allium powering institutional adoption.
Real-world asset perpetual futures trading—contracts tied to stocks, gold, and commodities—has surged to $117 billion in monthly volume, with 86% of activity now happening onchain, driven largely by infrastructure upgrades enabling decentralized derivatives markets.
Financial institutions can build and transact on permissionless blockchains while satisfying BSA, AML, CFT, and sanctions compliance through risk-based controls at the application layer, not infrastructure ownership—a misconception driving costly adoption of permissioned alternatives.
The stablecoin sandwich architecture solves some FX frictions but pushes local liquidity problems to the edges. Hybrid credit solutions (Arf, Mansa, Zynk) finance capital holding; stablecoin-native models (Avenia's BRLA) eliminate it entirely—but adoption will be slow, favoring hybrids in the near term.
A16Z Crypto (9) · Fintech Ruminations (4) · Multicoin Capital (2) · Tomasz Tunguz (1) · Into the Metaverse (1) · Chamath Palihapitiya (1) · A16Z (1) · Antler (1)
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