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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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