UNCHAINED: A16z Crypto’s Chris Dixon on How Blockchains Can Save the Internet
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2024
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The well-known venture capitalist has published a book, Read Write Own, about how the concentration of power into the hands of a few Internet behemoths is bad for entrepreneurs and society at large.
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Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner of a16z crypto, believes the Internet’s early ideals of democratization and community ownership have been subverted by the consolidation of power into just a few small companies like Facebook and Google. He’s written a new book called Read Write Own in which he writes about this phenomenon and argues that blockchain technology can help reverse the trend by providing an environment in which developers and entrepreneurs can once again build direct relationships with their audiences.
Dixon joins Unchained to discuss criticisms of crypto VC firms, how he feels now about a16z’s previous investment in Facebook, how crypto has become overly politicized in the U.S., why Facebook’s Libra project was ultimately shut down, the significant promise of restaking and EigenLayer in particular, and why he believes that creator royalties are essential for the NFT market.
Show highlights |
- What inspired Chris to write his new book and why he thinks the crypto industry is misunderstood
- What the current problems of the Internet are and how do just a few companies control most of the revenue
- How Chris explains the concept of blockchains to the layman
- The importance of property rights in the real world and how blockchains make this better
- How Chris responds to the criticism that venture capital firms “dump on retail” and what a proper allocation of tokens to VCs is
- What the best designs are to achieve good governance in decentralized networks
- How the crypto industry has become politicized in the U.S.
- What Chris thinks about a16z’s investment in Facebook
- Why Facebook’s Libra project was shut down and his takeaways from the venture
- What lessons did Chris learn from the 2022 crypto debacle, with the collapse of FTX, Terra, Celsius, 3AC, etc?
- Where Chris sits in the debate about modular vs. monolithic networks
- How restaking and EigenLayer could “unlock a bunch of new design possibilities,” according to Chris
- The role of open source software in driving a better environment and better projects
- How decentralized social networks could attract new levels of adoption
- Whether creator royalties are necessary and why Chris believes that they are “non-negotiable”
Thank you to our sponsors! Popcorn Network
Guest |
Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner of a16z crypto, author of Read Write Own
Previous appearance on Unchained: Chris Dixon on How Trust Is the Best Lego
Links |
Tokenomics
Unchained: What Is Tokenomics? A Beginner's Guide
Venture Capital
Unchained: Does Venture Capital Investment Violate the Ethos of Crypto? Sequoia Says No
Modular vs. monolithic
Unchained:
Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate
What Are Modular Blockchains? A Beginner's Guide
Restaking
Unchained:
Do You Need to Think Twice Before Restaking Your Assets?
What Is Ethereum Restaking? A Beginner's Guide
Royalties
Unchained: Are NFT Royalties the Way? How to Build a Sustainable Creator Economy
The Chopping Block: Two on Two Debate: NFT Royalty Throwdown!
The 2022 debacle
Unchained: Collapses, Bankruptcies, and Fraud: How 2022 Became the Year of Crypto Carnage
SocialFi
Unchained: What Is SocialFi? A Beginner’s Guide
Crypto & AI
Unchained: When AI and Blockchain Meet, How Can Each Technology Benefit?
The Chopping Block: Why AI Will Change the Course of History in Crypto
Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for listening to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto on the CoinDesk Podcast Network. |
| 0:06.5 | You can also listen to the episodes on the Unchained feed earlier if you subscribe there. |
| 0:11.7 | Plus, check out all our content on our website, Unchained Crypto.com. |
| 0:16.8 | I'm pro-Bitcoin. I get attacked by the Bitcoiners as being into, I'm actually pro-Bitcoin. |
| 0:20.3 | I try to be pro-Bitcoin in the book. But Bitcoin has one use case. It's sort of a digital store of value. Like my goal here is to build a new wave of internet services that replace a lot of the big internet companies and do a lot of different things. And so I just view it as you need, you know, we need to have more projects doing more things |
| 0:41.0 | and doing it, you know, in a way that is, it has proper funding. |
| 0:50.5 | Hi, everyone. |
| 0:51.7 | Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things Crypto. I'm your host, |
| 0:55.7 | Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto eight years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes |
| 1:01.6 | was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the January 30th, |
| 1:06.6 | 2024 episode of Unchained. Streamline your Defy with VaultCraft, the ultimate on-chain toolkit for deploying custom |
| 1:14.6 | automated defy products on any EVM chain. |
| 1:18.0 | Join Volcraft's referral program, unite with the community, and supercharge your crypto. |
| 1:22.9 | Details on vaultcraft.io. |
| 1:25.9 | Today's guest is Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner at A16Z Crypto. |
| 1:31.3 | Welcome, Chris. Thanks for having me, Laura. The day this podcast airs, your book, Read, Write, Own, comes out. |
| 1:38.3 | Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a long time in the work, so I'm excited. |
| 1:43.0 | You've been a VC for 11 years, and this is your first book. |
| 1:46.7 | So what inspired you to write it? |
| 1:48.7 | Yeah. |
| 1:49.1 | You know, I blogged for years, like, you know, sort of 2008 through 13 era, and I've always liked |
| 1:56.9 | writing and, you know, been now in the kind of crypto space for about 10 years. |
... |
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