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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah, and today's episode continues our

series on All Things Crypto, with Chris Dixon in conversation with Nick Tomeno, founder of

early stage crypto fund One Confirmation and formerly BD at Coinbase. In this conversation,

they start off with a framework for understanding tokens,

to what gives them long-term value, what's the role of stable coins in the ecosystem,

as well as scaling issues, on-chain versus off-chain protocols, forks, and other trends in crypto.

You can also check out more details about this episode, as well as past episodes in this series,

and a video

covering the building blocks of crypto on our site at a16z.com slash crypto.

So people may have heard of tokens on coins. Token sometimes means like specifically ERC20,

which means tokens built on Ethereum. Some people use the term more broadly. There's a little bit of

confusion around the nomenclature. But, you know, broadly tokens, coins. There are different categories of

tokens, I guess. And maybe you can, so you have a kind of a framework here. You can help

walk us through that. There's a lot of different mental models people have, and this is just mine.

But how I think about it is simply kind of two types. So the first is what I call a usage token. And some people call it a

medium of exchange token. Some people call that a utility token, but it's basically a token

where ownership is required to use some digital service. And you can think of any blockchain

as a digital service where you have kind of buyers and sellers. Bitcoin's the most widely known usage token where

...