Silicon Valley venture capital Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto investment arm, a16z crypto, has announced the completion of its fifth crypto fund, Crypto Fund 5, raising $2.2 billion. The fund will invest in stablecoins, on-chain finance, payments, lending, prediction markets, tokenized assets, and new infrastructure at the intersection of AI agents and blockchains. a16z crypto is also promoting CTO Eddy Lazzarin to a general partner, forming a four-person GP team with Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, and Guy Wuollet.
(Crypto markets welcome new liquidity: a16z Crypto Fund 5 raises $2.2 billion)
Crypto industry in 2017 was still crypto-anarchism, and in 2027 it will put on a shirt and walk into Wall Street
In the interview released by a16z crypto, the four GPs delivered a fairly clear judgment on this fundraising: the next phase of cryptocurrencies will no longer use “overthrowing the existing financial system” as the main narrative, but will return to more practical matters—products, regulatory compliance, and go-to-market.
Ali Yahya described how the crypto culture of 2017 still strongly inherited the spirit of Bitcoin and crypto-anarchism. Back then, the market believed that “code is law” was superior to government law, and that crypto systems would ultimately build a parallel framework that fully replaces traditional finance. But a decade later, that atmosphere has clearly changed.
Ali Yahya said today’s industry places more emphasis on “working with existing systems rather than trying to overthrow them.” He believes the most successful crypto founders of the next era will be those who value products, value market expansion, and are more pragmatic rather than ideology-driven. In other words, cryptocurrency is moving from revolutionary slogans to commercial execution, from “anti-establishment” to integration with the establishment.
a16z crypto’s new GP, Guy Wuollet, described this shift in more dramatic terms: cryptocurrencies are entering the “collared shirt era,” meaning the era of wearing dress shirts with collars. He said that in the past, crypto developers might have written smart contracts in a hoodie and slippers in a basement; but now, they wear shirts, suits, and ties, start meeting with major banks, and discuss whether to replace back-end systems and core ledgers with blockchain. To him, this is not surrender—it’s proof that years of technology have finally entered mainstream adoption.
a16z founder: the fundamentals of the crypto industry are actually improving
In an interview, a16z crypto founder and managing partner Chris Dixon pointed out that although the current crypto market prices and sentiment are low, and some non-financial applications have not developed as expected, the fundamentals of the industry are actually improving. He specifically highlighted that stablecoins have become the clearest mainstream use case. The global issued stablecoin supply is about $300 billion, and trading volumes are already comparable to large payment networks like Visa.
Dixon believes stablecoin growth is not like speculative trading, but more like the growth curve of a computing network—or even the growth curve of the internet. The key is that this growth is not highly correlated with crypto trading volume, showing that its use cases are shifting from speculative markets toward payments, remittances, savings, and cross-border finance.
He also linked stablecoin explosive growth to clearer U.S. regulation. Dixon said that the stablecoin bill passed in the U.S. last year—the Genius Act—provides a regulatory framework. On the one hand, it helps compliant founders know where the rules are; on the other hand, it lets consumers know whether there is truly a one-dollar reserve behind the stablecoins they hold, and whether issuers have undergone audits and risk controls. For the crypto industry that has experienced the collapse of Terra/Luna and FTX, this is a necessary condition for building trust.
Dixon further noted that companies like Stripe have actively embraced stablecoins because stablecoins allow payment services to rapidly expand from dozens of countries to more than 100 countries. He likened stablecoins to WhatsApp in the payments world: before WhatsApp existed, the global SMS network was stitched together from different countries, telecom operators, and high fee rates; WhatsApp, however, built a global communications network in an internet-native way. Stablecoins are similar: from day one, they are a global network.
In a16z crypto’s assessment, finance is not a retreat from the crypto vision—it is the gateway to a bigger vision. Dixon said finance becomes crypto’s “low-hanging fruit” because financial systems are still weak in many parts of the world, especially in savings, payments, and cross-border remittances. User demand is clear, and existing experiences are poor—so crypto infrastructure can more easily demonstrate value.
His model is: first, use financial use cases—stocks, bonds, stablecoins, payments, remittances, and so on—to make a billion people become daily (or nearly daily) users of blockchain. Once those people have already used wallets, on-chain infrastructure, and related services, it becomes natural to offer adjacent services. In other words, finance is not the endpoint—it is the foundation of the crypto internet.
From DeFi to Wall Street: the value of on-chain finance becomes speed, capital liquidity, and 24/7 markets
In the interview, Guy Wuollet focused on on-chain finance. He said that after stablecoin issuance grows rapidly, the market naturally needs new mechanisms for capital formation and yield: stablecoins need higher-yield investment opportunities, and they also need to become productive operating capital. Therefore, on-chain lending, credit markets, and private credit-related products are becoming highly attractive directions for startups.
He specifically mentioned problems that have emerged in the traditional private credit market in recent years, such as repeated collateral pledging, redemption pressure, and maturity mismatches. In traditional finance, lenders need legal procedures like UCC filing to confirm collateral rights—but ensuring that the same asset has not been pledged multiple times is itself a complex issue. Blockchain’s verifiability, transparent settlement, and programmable processes give it a chance to rebuild parts of the credit market infrastructure.
For traditional financial institutions, the value of on-chain finance is not just the slogan “decentralization,” but several more concrete elements: low latency, fast-moving capital, markets running almost 24 hours a day/365 days a year, and clearer counterparty risk management. Wuollet believes that what the crypto world previously called “decentralization”—if translated into traditional finance language—is essentially defining trust assumptions and counterparty risk more clearly.
He also mentioned that perpetual contracts were originally crypto-native products but have now expanded to traditional assets like stocks, commodities, and foreign exchange. This means the market structure built by the crypto industry over the past few years is no longer only applicable to network tokens, but can also be applied on top of high-quality traditional assets. More importantly, future new markets may be assumed to be built on-chain—especially in areas where traditional finance has not been adequately served, such as GPU, data center construction, power, energy, and new commodity markets.
AI agents will become economic actors, and stablecoins may become their payment rails
Another focus of the interview was the intersection of AI and cryptocurrencies. Ali Yahya previously worked at Google Brain, and he admitted that AI and the crypto community have long been distant from each other, even completely opposite in culture. AI tends to centralize compute, data, and talent, building giant systems that can see, learn, and reason about everything; cryptocurrencies, meanwhile, emphasize individuals, the edge, free markets, and decentralizing power.
But he believes the two are converging quickly, because existing financial systems were not designed for AI agents. In the future, most transactions may no longer be executed directly by humans, but by AI agents on behalf of humans or enterprises. If transaction volumes grow quickly to 90%, 99%, or even 99.9% executed by agents, then ACH, SWIFT, and card networks may not be the right underlying infrastructure.
Ali Yahya thinks stablecoins are nearly free, programmable, and internet-native—making them ideal for turning AI agents from “tools used by humans” into first-class economic actors within financial systems. For example, if an agent’s job is to save the user monthly expenses, it will not care about credit card brands or prefer existing payment networks; it will simply find the lowest-cost, highest-efficiency path.
Eddy Lazzarin also added that AI agents will reopen the imagination of “programmable money.” In the past, writing tools that can operate wallets, call smart contracts, and sign transactions required strong engineering capabilities; but now, users can collaborate with AI in natural language to generate code that operates on-chain assets. When “programmable money” combines with “writing programs with a few sentences,” money becomes something that can move “at the speed of language.”
This is also one of a16z crypto’s core bets on Fund 5: AI agents are not just chatbots or software agents—they may gradually become economic entities that can pay, receive, buy compute, provide services, and even raise funds for themselves.
Privacy is the next main battleground: without privacy, salaries and company ledgers can’t be put on-chain
In the process of on-chain finance moving toward mainstream adoption, privacy is also seen by a16z crypto as a key issue. Guy Wuollet said that today most blockchains are almost completely public and transparent, meaning every transaction can be viewed by anyone. While this might have been considered a plus in early crypto communities, it will become a barrier if the goal is to enter consumer and institutional scenarios.
He gave examples: no one wants their salary to be completely public, and no company wants its balance sheet and transaction details fully transparent. If a blockchain demands that level of openness, it can’t truly become mainstream financial infrastructure. Therefore, privacy is not an add-on feature—it is a prerequisite for large-scale adoption of crypto finance.
Ali Yahya added from the perspective of network effects: as interoperability between different blockchains becomes easier, block space may gradually become commoditized. Users and application states can move from one chain to another, reducing a chain’s defensive posture. But if data is encrypted, state transfers become harder; privacy may instead increase switching costs, strengthening network effects for chains with privacy capabilities.
On the technical path, he said there are already multiple privacy solutions, including protecting transaction privacy via centralized or semi-centralized participants, trusted execution environments, and zero-knowledge proofs. Ali Yahya said that over the past decade, zero-knowledge cryptography has improved by roughly 10 to 100 times, giving blockchains the opportunity to solve both scalability and privacy problems at the same time. a16z crypto’s research team is also pushing zero-knowledge-related projects like Jolt, aiming to make systems more scalable and more private.
a16z’s 10-year goal: a billion people use blockchain every day, and most financial activity goes on-chain
When it comes to how Crypto Fund 5 counts as a success, the answers from the four GPs all point to the same thing: true large-scale adoption.
Ali Yahya said that in ten years, he hopes to see more than a billion people directly or indirectly interacting with blockchain every day, and to see most financial activity globally shift to the chain. He also listed turning AI agents from human tools into first-class economic actors as one of the major outcomes Fund 5 could drive.
Guy Wuollet’s answer leans more toward financial inclusion. He believes that even if crypto does nothing else, as long as it can give every person on Earth a new bank account powered by a dollar stablecoin, that alone would create a huge impact. For people living in the U.S. or the first world, having dollars, saving, and investing is taken for granted; but globally, billions of people lack basic savings infrastructure. A stablecoin account could become these people’s first global entry point into finance.
Chris Dixon returned to the long-standing view he argued in Read Write Own: the internet was originally open, decentralized, and a network where anyone could build and publish products—but later, traffic, data, and revenues gradually became concentrated among a few major platforms. AI may further intensify this concentration, because model training is highly capital-intensive, and only a tiny number of companies have enough compute, data, and funding.
Dixon believes the only credible technology that can meaningfully fight this concentration trend today is cryptocurrencies and blockchain. It enables small founders, consumers, enterprises, and agents to build market, payment, identity, and coordination mechanisms without being entirely dependent on major platforms.
Over the past decade or more, the most common narrative for cryptocurrencies has been anti-banks, anti-government, anti-Wall Street, and anti-platform monopolies. But in a16z crypto’s new framing, cryptocurrencies no longer need to prove themselves by “overthrowing” existing systems. They can first become underlying coordination technologies for payment networks, stablecoin accounts, on-chain credit markets, tokenized asset trading systems, AI agent payment rails, compute and energy markets.
In other words, cryptocurrencies are moving from ideological products to commercial infrastructure. This is also why Guy Wuollet’s so-called “collared shirt era” is so apt: cryptocurrencies haven’t completely lost the spirit of crypto-anarchism, but they are packaging that spirit in a form that banks, Wall Street, AI companies, and everyday users can adopt.
If the theme of the previous crypto cycle was speculation, TGE, DeFi, NFTs, and high-volatility assets, then a16z crypto’s bet for the next cycle is clearer: stablecoins bring people on-chain, on-chain finance retains capital, AI agents amplify transaction volume, privacy and zero-knowledge make institutions dare to use it, and the real winners will be those who no longer just talk revolution, but can turn blockchain into everyday products.
This article, Interview with a16z Crypto’s four partners: Cryptocurrencies no longer overthrow the financial system—they put on a shirt and walk into Wall Street, first appeared on Lianxin ABMedia.
