People claim that users don't ultimately care about privacy, and I think that may be true when it comes to Instagram and Facebook and other social media.

But I don't believe it is true when it comes to finance.

In order for crypto to actually become mainstream, it's going to have to have privacy.

And so then that creates a self-reinforcing

feedback loop. It creates a network effect that means that there will be a handful of winning

privacy chains. Everything else will be small relative to those winners.

Welcome to the A16 Z Crypto podcast. I'm Robert Hackett. And today we're joined by Ali Yaya, a general partner here at A16Crypto, who recently published a thesis about how he thinks privacy will become the most important moat in crypto. We talked to him about his idea, what's given him conviction in it,

and its implications. We also talk about the variety of technologies that are available to us to

achieve that privacy vision, and whether the outcome of having just a handful of privacy chains that

win conflicts with the decentralization ethos of crypto.

If you want to read Ali's post, you can check it out on A16Z Crypto.com. It's part of our

big ideas for 2026 package. And here is my conversation with Ali. Ali, you recently put out a thesis.

You said that privacy will be the most important moat in crypto.

That's a big claim.

What gives you such confidence in that thesis?

And why are you so sure of it now?

This was inspired by just me spending some time thinking about how block space is

becoming functionally the same everywhere. There's this overabundance of sort of quote-unquote

high-performance blockchains that are coming to market or that maybe in some cases have

existed for a long time now.

And also with the fact that we now have very easy bridging solutions, that block space,

that is essentially functionally equivalent, is also now accessible from everywhere.

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