1/ One of the great joys of living in New York City is never being more than a few minutes away from an amazing meal, and today we’re announcing @blackbird_xyz’s Series A to take dining experiences to a whole new level.

Led by CEO and Founder @benleventhal, Blackbird uses web3 to power personalized restaurant loyalty experiences. 2/ Web3 has enabled artists and creators to identify, engage, and directly reward their most loyal fans -- what if restaurants could do the same?

I’m thrilled to announce our seed investment in @dynamic_xyz! They are on a mission to accelerate the adoption of wallet based authentication by making it frictionless for developers to create login, onboarding, and authorization flows. One of the challenges to rapid development in web3 is the fragmentation of wallets across chains, which creates more obstacles for developers who have to write custom logic for account management, user-onboarding, access gating and more.

I’m delighted to share that we are leading the Series A in @OnChainStudios, which is building @Cryptoys— the world’s first NFT-native toy, gaming, and entertainment universe. We believe that Cryptoys is building the future of play—an expansive and immersive world filled with collectible toys, play-and-earn games, and animated entertainment.

Today we are announcing a16z crypto Fund 4. We’ve raised $4.5B to invest in promising web3 founders and startups, bringing our total crypto funds raised to more than $7.6B. 💪
a16zcrypto.com/crypto-fund-fo… As @cdixon wrote, we think the golden era of web3 is just beginning. Programmable blockchains are advanced, a diverse range of apps have tens of millions of users, and waves of world-class talent are pouring into web3 every day.

I’m excited to share today that @a16z crypto is leading the series A round of @weareflowcarbon as they develop an on-chain carbon credit tokenization platform to bring their net-zero vision to fruition.
More from @_PorterSmith and me below. a16z.com/2022/05/24/inv… When I was 22, I conducted environmental research in South Africa. After sleeping outside (with monkeys!) and spending long days collecting data for climate models, I was left with a sense that a challenge of climate change’s magnitude could only be tackled through technology.

Delighted to be co-leading an investment in @BreederDao, the missing piece of the puzzle in web3 gaming. This group is at the forefront of the metaverse and mastering its economics. Play-and-earn games—a major web3 trend—exploded last year. As COVID sent countries into lockdown, people in the Philippines and many other countries discovered they could earn a living in virtual worlds.

gm frens — I’m delighted to bring you moar good news from the gaming universe! We at @a16z are leading a $7.5M seed round in @OnChainStudios, which is building @CryptoysHQ -- a breakthrough NFT platform that brings you the best of gaming + digital toys. Why I’m excited: 🎮🧵👇 Cryptoys is a platform that combines elements of NFTs, gaming, and AI. Think of it as Roblox meets NFTs meets Amazon Alexa. Cryptoys are NFTs that you can play with, that get smarter the more you use them, and that are made fully interactive via different applications.

Today, we are thrilled to announce we’ve led a round in @YieldGuild. YGG is at the center of the play to earn movement and building an incredibly powerful community. Why are we excited? More below 👇🏼 🧵 a16z.com/2021/08/19/inv… Last year, when COVID swept into the Philippines, nearly 7.3 million people in the country lost their jobs and their livelihoods as the country went into lockdown.

1/ Today I’m thrilled to share that a16z crypto is leading a $20 million Series A in @ValoraApp, a mobile-first crypto wallet, enabling borderless payments in seconds with near zero fees.

a16z.com/2021/07/27/inv… 2/ We got to know @jackie_bona through her work at Celo Labs where she was Head of Consumer Growth. She's an exceptional founder who brings deep experience in consumer tech to building a product bringing crypto to communities around the world.

1/I'm thrilled to announce that @a16z crypto has led a round of financing in @goldfinch_fi. @katie_haun and I couldn't be more excited to partner with @sall and @_blakewest + team as they tackle one of the most important unsolved problems in DeFi today: undercollateralized loans 2/ This is a critical part of the decentralized financial stack to solve: in order for the industry to reach its full potential, it's important that we move toward greater capital efficiency. That comes in the form of un- or undercollateralized loans.

1/ Coinbase adds automatic staking for XTZ, and less than a month later, Binance introduces 0% staking fees on Tezos.

Stake wars are just getting started, and things are already starting to feel a liiittle uncomfortable.

A thread on centralization in Proof of Stake (PoS): 2/ Running a validator well is hard & requires technical expertise — it's definitely not for everyone, so we let users delegate their stake to other people running validators.

But this is causing stake to gravitate toward a small number of publicly-known validators.

0/ My team (esp @JacobPPhillips!) and I have been thinking a lot about gaming as a way to usher in a new wave of people to crypto. We're going to need that if this industry is to become more than the same group of people talking at one another.

A thread on in-game assets: @JacobPPhillips 1/ The gaming industry has undergone a rapid shift. The early 2000s were dominated by play-then-play gaming — i.e. pay $ to buy game, then play as much of you'd like. Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Fifa, etc. all used this model.

0/ We just released our opinion on the Zcash Founders' Reward (FR) debate. Here's a thread on our post in the @Zcash forum. @zcash 1/ Quick background for those who aren't familiar with the FR discussion: The Zcash FR is a fund used to reward Zcash founders, early employees, and investors. FR funds are also used to fund ongoing development through the Electric Coin Company (ECC) & Zcash Foundation (ZF)

1/ Today Dapper Labs (maker of Cryptokitties) announced Flow, a new blockchain to support mass adoption of consumer-facing games, apps and digital collectibles at scale. We at Autonomous participated in the round and here is why we are excited: 2/ Flow provides the infrastructure for decentralized entertainment experiences and provides benefits that aren’t available on other blockchains: applications and assets are composable, ecosystems are open, and network effects are enabled.

1/ As we get closer to the launch of a number of Layer 1 chains that raised big money in 2017 and early 2018, I've been thinking a lot about what those launches are going to look like and whether they will pan out as early investors might have hoped. 2/ The history of software development shows that building in a vacuum and expecting to come out with the perfect solution basically never works. Development is an iterative process which often involves many false starts and should have user feedback at its core.

1/ The general crypto narrative seems to be drifting back to bitcoin maximalism, so I wanted to share a few thoughts on bitcoin relative to the rest of the crypto market: 2/ BTC has clearly outperformed most other cryptoassets by a wide margin YTD. Expecting that this will always be the case (or that holding only BTC is the right move) strikes me as foolish.

0/ I love the concept of a personal regret minimization framework. Bezos used his to decide whether to start Amazon, and mine has been instrumental in every major life decision to date: 1)When thinking about a new opportunity, consider how rare this one is. How likely you are you to have a chance like this in the future? If it's a rare opp, prioritize it now. (i.e. chance to start a company w someone brilliant you admire & respect is RARE)

1/ Time for a thread on prediction markets! One of the most fascinating yet poorly understood areas of DeFi, IMHO. Let's explore... 2/ Prediction markets are exchange-traded markets with the purpose of trading on the outcomes of future events. Events can be anything where the results can be objectively verified, like sports games, political elections, horse races, price fluctuations of commodities, etc.

1/ What's happening in @UniswapExchange land? A thread about the #3 DeFi platform, by collateral locked. We're all learning here, so if I misinterpreted or misunderstood anything feel free to chime in (politely, please): 2/ First off, what is it? It's a protocol for automated exchange of ERC20
tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. It prioritizes decentralization and security and has eliminated rent extraction and censorship, enabling faster and more efficient exchange.

1/ ICYMI, @0xProject released ZEIP-31 last week, which is a proposal for a new set of stake-based liquidity incentives. It's a very comprehensive plan designed to incentivize market makers to provide liquidity, ensure broad participation from the community & more. 2/ You should go read the whole thing here, but I'll put out a few important takeaways in this thread, specifically starting with the liquidity function: blog.0xproject.com/0x-roadmap-201…

1/ In thinking about how I currently learn best, I am coming to the alarming realization that I think the entire education system is structured incorrectly for enhancing long-term memory and understanding. A few thoughts: 2/ How I currently learn about a new topic (i.e. how predictions markets work, or how Uniswap works) is by doing a complete deep dive for a few days, or in some cases longer, until I feel like I really understand it. This meanings reading source material like whitepapers ..(cont)