Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has recently removed the word “crypto” from its flagship fund branding, instead now referring to it as the “frontier.”
The firm has claimed that it “will continue to invest in crypto” but considers this move an expansion of its focus.
To celebrate this expansion, Protos decided to go back in time and review some of the high-flying predictions and claims about crypto that a16z and its partners used to make.
Ali Yahya, then an a16z general partner, told CoinDesk in 2023 that a16z was “100% committed on crypto as a space” in a conversation where he pointed out that many “fair weather” venture capitalists were moving their focus away from crypto to focus on “chasing the next hot thing, which is AI at the moment.”
More recently, Yahya announced that he was exiting a16z and also noted that he cares “most about building infrastructure that enables open software ecosystems.”
He also observed that that “most uses of AI will soon be many-to-many: many humans and many agents working together.”
Chris Dixon, an a16z general partner, while on a podcast discussing its newest crypto fund, emphasized how valuable it will be to get a billion users to be daily users of crypto.
A16z’s 2025 State of Crypto report estimates that there were somewhere between 40 and 70 million monthly active users.
Ben Horowitz, one of the founding partners, warned that the United States needs to get to “world-class” in crypto, or artificial intelligence might destroy us.
In 2014 the other founding partner, Marc Andreessen, predicted that “in 20 years, we’ll be talking about Bitcoin the way we talk about the internet today.”
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