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Andreessen Horowitz backs blockchain startups with $2.2b
Andreessen Horowitz, a Menlo Park-based venture firm, launched a US$2.2 billion crypto fund on May 5 to back blockchain startups at all stages over the next decade.
The move comes as venture investors continue shifting capital toward AI.
The firm said Crypto Fund 5 will focus on areas including payments, financial services, decentralized systems, stablecoins, blockchain lending, prediction markets, perpetual futures, and tokenized assets.
The new vehicle is smaller than a16z’s US$4.5 billion crypto fund raised in 2023.
However, it is larger than the recent US$1 billion fund from Huan Ventures and Dragonfly Capital‘s US$650 million raise.
🔗 Source: CoinDesk
🧠 Food for thought
Implications, context, and why it matters.
A crypto fund for an AI-driven economy
- Andreessen Horowitz says AI agents are becoming economic actors, so they need infrastructure for identity, payments, and coordination 1.
- The firm says the internet was built for people, not for AI systems that can create content and make transactions at near-zero cost 2.
- The fund will likely back startups building that layer, including portable digital identities for AI agents and decentralized tools that verify whether an online user is human 3.
- This frames the crypto fund as a bet on the plumbing an AI-native economy needs to run safely at scale 2.
A business market for self-directed software
- The strategy shifts attention from consumer speculation to business infrastructure for an “agent economy,” where software programs transact on their own 1.
- That opens demand for “agent-native” tools that handle machine-scale micropayments or keep AI tasks running over long periods. Temporal, a software company that helps developers run automated workflows reliably over time and is used by OpenAI, already offers that durable execution layer for complex AI workflows 4.
- If it works, software could be built more for machine reading and action than for human-friendly visual interfaces as AI agents take on a larger role 5.
- The idea also pushes for open standards that could keep the AI economy from being locked inside a few centralized platforms 3.
Recent Andreessen Horowitz developments
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