--:-- Robert Hackett: Crypto sure does feel exactly like a 17-year-old, right? Like just nearing the end of adolescence, starting to step into adulthood, being taken seriously by the other adults in the room, but still plenty of growing up left to do.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Every bank I've ever spoken with wants to talk about stablecoins. Every financial institution, and then small companies, merchants. They feel totally inevitable now to the mainstream. Bitcoin specifically now, it's a top 10 asset in the world. Crypto certainly has become a meaningful part of the modern economy today.
--:-- Robert Hackett: People say people don't care about privacy, whatever. No, of course they care about privacy. People take it for granted. That's what they mean by "don't care." But they have expectations.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Crypto just turned 17, and it's finally being taken seriously by the adults in the room. Today, you'll hear from Darren Matsuoka and Eddie Lazarin of A16Z Crypto on their 2025 State of Crypto Report. They cover how the industry hit $4 trillion in market cap while developers mysteriously stayed away, why stablecoins are now a top 20 holder of US debt, and the perfect storm of institutional adoption that's actually real this time.
--:-- Robert Hackett: We discussed the distributed price innovation cycle where meme coins couldn't attract builders, why privacy will become non-negotiable as crypto goes mainstream, and what happens when crypto turns 18 next year, becoming a legally liable adult with real regulations and consequences. Let's get into it.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Welcome to Web3 with A16Z. I'm your host, Robert Hackett. Today, we're taking you behind the scenes of A16Z Crypto's 2025 State of Crypto Report. Each year, this report takes stock of where the industry stands, cutting through the noise to capture a snapshot of crypto's evolution across markets, technology, policy, culture, and more.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Now in its fourth edition, the State of Crypto Report reflects how this once-fringed technology has recently hit all-time highs and gone mainstream, from stablecoins and tokenized assets to rapid recent adoption by major financial firms. In this episode, we'll dig into the findings and themes from this year's report with some of its authors, including lead author Darren Matsuoka, A16Z Crypto's Head of Data and Funds Strategy, and Eddie Lazarin, A16Z Crypto's Chief Technology Officer.
--:-- Robert Hackett: We'll also talk about what's changed since last year, where crypto stands in its stages of development, why stablecoins are suddenly taking over, and how institutions from fintechs to legacy banks are embracing the technology. We'll also look ahead at trends like privacy and tokenization, and what the next phase of crypto's adulthood might look like.
--:-- Robert Hackett: You can find the report in this episode's show notes and at a16zcrypto.com/stateofcrypto2025. Also be sure to check out our new State of Crypto data dashboard, which you can also find on our site. As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
--:-- Robert Hackett: All right, so before we even get into the findings of this year's report, I want to take a step back and ask, what is the State of Crypto Report? Why do we do it each year? With so much happening, with so much noise, with so much at the technical level, infrastructural level, so much just beneath the surface, I think it is incredibly helpful if someone goes in and sweeps it all together and just takes a snapshot that allows you to place yourself in the history of the unfolding of some new kind of technologies. And that's why we do it.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: A16Z's role is to bring the periphery to the mainstream, the periphery of technology, of course. And crypto is, although it is mainstreaming in very notable ways, which is a theme of the report, it still remains on the periphery because of its inscrutability, its infrastructure heaviness, the subculture of its people. Things make it hard to understand. The report is our attempt to try to crystallize a moment in time every year or so and share it with everyone. It's like take the unevenly distributed future and distribute it more evenly.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: It's also our fourth year doing the report, which gives us a cool lens to see how things have changed and evolved over the years since we started doing this. That's also something that we'd like to look at year over year to see what are the trends that are emerging and what is falling off, and everything in between.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Yeah, I always have a lot of fun looking at past editions. It's always pretty interesting to see how things have shifted and changed because there are lots of changes that happen.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Oh, yeah. Many things unexpected in some way, sometimes unexpectedly prophetic. In other ways, a little goofy.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: There is goofiness. But hopefully this report, as you said, will do our signature move, which is to separate the signal from the noise. And with that, I think let's dive in. Let's talk about this year's report. What, in your view, changed this year compared to last year?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I think the surprising thing is that on essentially every front, crypto is mainstreaming. The numbers are becoming clearer, more specific, larger, faster in every dimension. We talked a lot last year about stablecoins finding product market fit. Well, that has been one of the big themes of 2025. People have obviously been talking about stablecoins, but I think everyone agrees they are now in a completely different place. They feel totally inevitable now to the mainstream.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: We were saying they were inevitable a year ago and that they had hit product market fit. Now I think I've heard the cable news talking about stablecoins. I see headlines about stablecoins. Every bank I've ever spoken with wants to talk about stablecoins, every financial institution, and then small companies, merchants. Everybody's talking about them.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: There was a great headline, by the way. It was like, "There's a new cryptocurrency called stablecoin. Here's what you should know."
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, which is unreal. That's when you really know you made it, when the boomers trip over themselves trying to understand you.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: But that's just one example. ZK proofs have accelerated. Privacy has reached a surprising early stage of some indications of product market fit, not in the same way as stablecoins. Interesting stuff with X402, AI payments, the agentic economy, as some people say. That's still very nascent in my mind. But if you take each of these fronts, they're all plugging into different critical aspects of crypto and advancing. You can see unmistakable signs of progress and mainstreaming across the entire industry.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: That to me is almost like a perfect storm. You look down at a hurricane from the sky, from way up there. It looks a lot different than when you're in the middle of it or just beside it. It's hard to see the shape, maybe somewhat menacing. But if you see it from orbit, you see the structure, you see the order, you see the accumulation of structure in the thing. That's how you know that it's real. That's what makes it a discrete object. Our industry is reaching that point where all the forces are coalescing and connecting together along with the rest of the economy in a way that underscores its inevitability and its realness.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I think that's a really apt analogy too. This is an industry that has hurricane force winds. Even when it appears to be nice and pleasant and tranquil and things are steady...
--:-- Robert Hackett: You mean when you're offline?
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Yeah, when you're offline. It usually means it's the eye of the storm. It's just a brief reprieve until the madness begins again.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Another way I like to think about this is I use this silly analogy with crypto as a 17-year-old. The Bitcoin white paper was released in October 2008, which means the industry is now 17 years old. Crypto sure does feel exactly like a 17-year-old. Just nearing the end of adolescence, starting to step into adulthood, being taken seriously by the other adults in the room, but still plenty of growing up left to do. It's right on the cusp of entering adulthood and really stepping into the world.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I think that's right.
--:-- Robert Hackett: So crypto is moving from its adolescence into its adulthood. Maybe it's early adulthood, but it's adulthood. 17 years old.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: That's right. Soon to be joining the workforce, putting its talents to use for many large financial institutions, for sure.
--:-- Robert Hackett: So let's talk about the big picture cycle that we like to look at, the way the market evolves in this sort of cyclical way. It undergoes various waves. It has had different periods that have defined those waves, that have characterized them based on what was popular at that time. Where are we now in that cycle?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Looking at a price graph is always a scary thing because you can start to project all types of fantasies onto it. It's far worse than tea leaves. I could hear an argument from almost any direction. I don't think we're in the depths. I don't think we're in crypto winter. That's pretty clear because we did hit a new all-time high this year with market cap exceeding $4 trillion. $4 trillion is a lot of money. So I feel confident in saying that.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: It also doesn't feel like we're exactly in a frenzy, though. I think that's pretty clear. I haven't been getting questions from Uber drivers and stuff like that. A lot of us know that feeling when the normies are all of a sudden curious again. I haven't quite been getting that. But at the same time, I've been getting other really interesting strong signals, like the financial institution interest, where we're hearing concrete, interesting plans from all types of companies who want to integrate specific things.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: In prior cycles, the corporates got really interested around the peak because of the price action, because of the retail frenzy. I'll admit there was something very insincere about it to me. I just didn't buy it. In retrospect, a lot of them did bail when things got a little bit dark. That happens. But this time it doesn't feel like that. This time it feels like they're actually building real tech that is going to last in many cases. Not in every case. Real tech doesn't always pan out. Not every product pans out. But it feels like something they want to follow through. So that gives me a little bit of a hype cycle vibe, but maybe it's a little bit different.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: The regulatory climate has changed radically since last year. That's probably the single starkest qualitative difference between this year and last year. The regulatory condition has totally inverted. It has gone from near worst case scenario, really bad, to outright jubilee, practically.
--:-- Robert Hackett: It was not that long ago that you had senators talking about an anti-crypto army as a way to fire up their base.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Right, exactly. And now it's the exact opposite. By contrast, we have sincere bipartisan laws being passed and laws being debated that are mature, serious, and planned for the future. Real serious laws that are trying to structure the industry for long-term success. It's definitely a positive, exciting time.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Let me add a contrasting, somewhat negative point. It isn't really the case that I see far more crypto developers now than I did in prior years. I don't think that crypto developers are swarming at an all time high. I think a lot of them have left to AI. We have pulled them from other industries in certain cases. So it's a little bit of a wash. If we were in the peak of crypto summer and if it was just a totally ultra optimistic period, then I think we would be seeing a lot more there. The point is there are some signals that indicate that we're not at the exact most outrageously hot, supercharged time. But the fundamentals, as I hope the report shows, is maturity and strength in all the most interesting, all the most substantial areas in crypto.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: What's very weird about this is we've often talked about this price innovation cycle. Prices go up and that causes developers to get involved. That causes new products to get released. Then it kicks off this flywheel, this positive feedback loop of more people getting interested and excited and the actual tech getting better. We've seen prices go up, as you mentioned. We went above a $4 trillion total market cap for crypto, which is on par with the GDP of Japan. It's come down a little bit since then. Who knows where it'll be by the time this publishes. But at the same time that we've had these prices increase, the developers have not kept pace. This is what you were getting at, Eddie. We're not seeing this same kind of feedback loop as we've seen in previous cycles. At least the data is not showing that.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I think this is a really important point to double click into because it gets at everything that we do and all of the expertise that we develop from meeting with these entrepreneurs and developers, analyzing and evaluating the whole innovation aspect of the crypto space. Not considering the macro price view, but just looking at developers. As you mentioned, Robert, this price innovation cycle, we've always believed and invested on the thesis that there is this strong feedback loop between prices, developers, and then ultimately users. Throughout crypto's history, we've seen this repeat itself. With the ICO boom, then DeFi summer, then the NFT surge. All of these things generated interest. It increased the prices. As a result, developers saw the opportunity to come in and build new products that attracted new users. We've seen this cycle repeat itself throughout crypto's history.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: The last uptick in prices that we saw, if you look at the external events that happened around those times, it was things like the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs that launched. It was things like the meme coin mania that brought in new users. To me, and clearly to developers as well, these things just weren't that interesting to build on. What can you do as a developer to develop a new kind of innovative product or offering with the ETFs or with new points? And by the way, caveat on the ETFs, we are calling them ETFs very casually. They are ETPs, exchange-traded products.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Which we're very aware of, which indicates that the underlying portfolios are not securities.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I think all of that speaks to the fact that we saw a run-up in price that was more so driven by these external factors, not the traditional developer-driven bull market like we've seen historically. With all that said, I actually think we're extremely well positioned right now for the next developer driven bull market. The reason is because we have the stablecoin trend that is now bringing in a new type of builder that we've never seen before, whether it's from more traditional finance backgrounds or fintechs or whatever. I think there's a huge reason to believe that stablecoins will draw more developers in. We also have pending market structure legislation in the U.S. right now, which by design is meant to attract the next wave of developers in the United States, provide clear rules of the road, which hopefully should lead to an inflow of talent. I think we're really well positioned.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I feel that feeling really strongly. I have been excoriated in public for being a little critical of meme coins. If I could risk that again, I'd say that from the perspective of the average entrepreneurial person or developer, meme coins don't present a lot of opportunity except maybe a coin flip to make a bunch of money. Maybe making a launchpad could be interesting. In any case, it's evidently true that that's not something that most entrepreneurs, even most crypto curious entrepreneurs, see and say, "This is the future of a technology that I can bet my career on that will last the test of time." It just doesn't have those properties.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Whereas I think stablecoins do. Network tokens, if we get the Clarity Act, do. A lot of the interesting ways of trying to create new decentralized marketplaces using some of the tech like we mentioned in the report, those things have those potential properties. But those things hadn't had the same type of attention as a result of the price innovation cycle that maybe other things did. The ETPs and meme coins and so on did. The cycle got a little bit dislocated, I think. There are these exogenous factors and also it may be implicit in what we're saying. The space has pluralized. There are now actually multiple different areas.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: There are people who I've talked to, which genuinely surprised me, people who are experts in stablecoin payment flows and exactly how they relate with payment processors and KYC requirements and these types of things. And they don't know a damn thing about what's happening in meme coin launchpad world.
--:-- Robert Hackett: To what extent is AI attracting or drawing people away from crypto?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Look, it's true. AI is really exciting. It's really attractive. There's huge opportunity, huge investment. I think it's a great area. Obviously, our firm is very focused on AI as an exciting, productive area. I think it's natural and makes sense that a lot of people would be attracted to it, especially when they compare their opportunities in AI with opportunities in crypto. If they weren't a meme coin person, they're probably more attracted to AI at the peak of AI.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: At the same time, if you're a crypto person who doesn't care so much about the hype cycle, the hype and its popularity among certain tech circles or others, then you also know that this time, the time when the regulatory is at its zenith, when the interest by other startups is maybe somewhat lower, that's actually the exact best time to do it. I'm not worried because having been investing with our funds for a while now, I know that when something is a little bit uncool, that's kind of when it's at its best. So yeah, AI has taken some attention. At the same time, and you'll see in our slides, basically an equal portion, an equal number of people came from other industries to crypto. Perhaps reflecting the shift in focus, the shift in interesting thematic areas in crypto.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: The historical context is also important here. I think a lot of people actually don't remember this, but the time between the FTX collapse and the launch of ChatGPT was less than a month. If you think about this dark period, Darren, we've omitted this from the history books. But if you think about what that meant for a smart kid coming out of college, you see the FTX collapse, and as a result of that, the entire crypto industry was under a full-blown regulatory attack. At the same time, there's this exciting new technology that has emerged. It's a pretty obvious choice. Even as people who are in the crypto industry, it made a lot of sense at the time to do that. That's why we get the question all the time, how much talent have we lost to AI? It's definitely hard to assess the quality of talent just by looking at some of the numbers we have. But I think, yeah, we did lose some talent to AI, certainly.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: But now things are changing. Now we have a much better regulatory environment that is encouraging people to come back to crypto or people who are coming out of school to build in crypto. Even better to do that in the United States. It's fully supported by the regulators now, which is a very positive signal. Also, we talk about this a lot in our report as well, there are very clear opportunities at the intersection of crypto and AI now. There are lots of ideas on how crypto can solve some of AI's most pressing challenges. We're seeing a growing number of people and startups interested in the intersection of what I think are the two most important technology trends probably of our lifetimes.
--:-- Robert Hackett: I haven't seen this analysis done before, so I think it's really interesting that since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, there's been about a thousand net crypto jobs gained from other industries and a thousand net crypto jobs lost to AI startups. So it kind of nets out. I think people who don't look at the data might think that crypto has lost more to AI than it has gained from elsewhere. It's interesting to see that it's been kind of even.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Which in the grand scheme of things, given how cool AI is, that's a win to me. It's a huge trend.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Let's finish talking about the market dynamics, the sizing it up, who's using crypto, what they're using, how many people are using it. Let's talk hard numbers around these things. You sort of talked about it, $4 trillion in market cap. We've hit all time highs this year. That's one way to measure it. If you look at Bitcoin specifically now, it's a top 10 asset in the world. All of the top 10 assets are either U.S. tech companies or global commodities. Crypto certainly has become a meaningful part of the modern economy today.
--:-- Robert Hackett: You can also look at the number of people that are using crypto. We have an updated estimate to our analysis that we put out last year, which basically says we think there's somewhere between 40 to 70 million unique people using crypto on-chain monthly. Of course, it's a very wide range because it's very difficult to get a precise number there. We did a constructed analysis, bottoms up, based on wallet user data, on-chain forensics, some discussions with some of our portfolio companies, and industry partners. We came up with this range of 40 to 70 million. It's about 10 million more than our estimate last year. Even that, in the context of the broader set of people who just own crypto for purposes of investment or speculation, it's still just a very small fraction, which presents an opportunity to bring more people on chain from that larger group that owns crypto.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: And remember, this is transactors. This is people who are actually kicking transactions on chain, individual people, which is the most strenuous, most difficult, highest standard to reach. I think if you ask among your normie contacts, you can validate this ratio. There are many more people who own a little bit on Coinbase or whatever versus people who actually withdraw into a wallet, use a smart contract, use DeFi, transact, pay for something, whatever. You'll find in your experience this waterfall. People who just own, people who are kind of frequent engagers, owning, buying, selling, transferring, people who actually use apps of some type. 40 to 70 million at the sharpest, most difficult point to be in in that funnel. That's a pretty big number in my mind.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Honestly, on our team, we're always trying out new stuff and showing each other. I'm sometimes amazed at how difficult crypto can be to use, how difficult it can be to use safely, how many cognitive hazards there are in using it, ways you can make mistakes. It has gotten substantially better, but it still has a long way to go. You can fat finger $300 trillion into existence by accident, for instance.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yeah, who hasn't printed $300 trillion by accident?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: No, but we shouldn't be digging on anybody. There are mistakes and no harm was done. That happens in TradFi too.
--:-- Robert Hackett: It does. Exactly.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: That is an impressive number to me, 40 to 70 million who actually use it. I should point out that we don't really break down this 40 to 70. It would be way too difficult into behavioral cohorts, like segments of exactly who is doing what and that type of personality. But I was just at a crypto related meeting yesterday with a bunch of 40, 50 really highly informed people who were primarily focused on South American remittances, South American use. Some gentlemen who ran a Guatemalan bank, some guys who ran Mexican banks. They were telling me that something like a third of South Americans interact with crypto. I forget on the frequency, maybe it was monthly, maybe it was yearly. But in any case, a huge number, maybe indirectly, through using other services. That is mind-blowing to me. And that's despite what is, candidly, a brutally challenging user experience. I see that and I see opportunity. People are using it despite its challenges.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: That's a good segue to what I think is one of the more interesting slides in the State of Crypto Report, which is our geography analysis this year. We looked at it through two lenses. One was mobile wallet usage, which we think is at least a proxy for people that are actually using crypto on-chain, whether it's for buying goods and services, for remittances, or interacting with applications of crypto. If you look at the geographic data associated with those indicators of on-chain activity, it's largely coming from developing countries, countries like Argentina, Colombia, Pakistan.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: On the flip side, the other lens that we looked at this through is web traffic associated with the top tokens on CoinGecko, which we think is an indicator of interest in trading these tokens. That is developed nations like South Korea, Australia. It speaks to the fact that the applications where crypto is needed most today tend to be more geared towards the developing countries where they have unreliable financial infrastructure or economic or political stability. I think crypto is serving them well, whereas the developed nations tend to skew more towards trading the tokens and speculation and the other side of crypto.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Two quick things before we move on to the next section. One thing, there was a notable decline in the number of monthly active addresses this year. Last year we had 220 million. This year we have 181 million. That's a pretty notable decline. This year, we actually didn't do a comparison as we've done in years past of monthly active addresses lined up with a chart showing internet adoption and showing how these things are playing out at a similar rate. I want to ask about that. Do we know why monthly active addresses might have dipped this year?
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: We've always been very skeptical of monthly active addresses as any indicator of user activity and its progress. We often will anchor some analysis and assumptions around that, but we've never led with monthly active addresses as the be all end all for crypto adoption and activity. The short answer is that people can spin up many different addresses and there are reasons to do that at times. Particularly with the crypto industry that has different incentive structures and airdrops and farming, it does become a very gameable metric. We've always treated it with a lot of caution.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I will say, and I'd be curious to get Eddie's take here, I think this year we've seen a little bit less of the airdrop farming and that specific type of activity, largely because I think people have caught on to this and they're not, in many cases, just going to blindly airdrop to a bunch of addresses. I think maybe that subsided a little bit.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I have seen, even in just the last few weeks, a little bit of a new meta emerging that can't wait to follow, which is people saying that airdrops are done. Airdrops are over. They're too farmable. Instead, some alternative. Some people are saying selling tokens. Maybe there's some legal caveats around that. Some people are saying just partnerships, giving them in partnerships. I saw someone talking about that, like forget airdrop farmers, embrace partners. Things like that.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Maybe backing up and connecting this with what Darren was saying with your question, Robert. In prior episodes where we've talked about active addresses and in other podcasts where we talked about the airdrops and stuff like that, we often talk about the professionalization of airdrop farming. That has remained. That's not going to decline.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: That knowledge won't be lost. The airdrop farmers have figured out how to do a great job. At the same time, people have figured out how to block or remove or undermine airdrop farmers.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: In prior years, part of our highlighting active addresses, and we still have the number in here, is because the active addresses is still a kind of a proxy for something. It's a reflection to some degree of the total capacity of the system. It's a reflection of the interest and willingness of people to even perform anything, whether it's legitimate activity or whether it's farming.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Now that people are becoming a little bit more guarded about airdrop farming, we're likely to see that number adjust maybe somewhat closer to something that reflects real usage. I don't mean one-to-one parity with users and addresses. I use many addresses in my daily use. I mean something that is some kind of a proxy.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Interesting. So maybe some inklings of a prediction for 2026 beginning to coalesce, the meta changing from airdrops over to some other new sorts of ways.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, but as transaction capacity, as total gas capacity or consensus capacity grows and the cost of transactions decreases potentially, then the willingness to spin up more addresses for spam goes up because the marginal cost of the spamming declines. So basically, at the limit, my belief is that the number of active addresses and transactions should converge with the capacity of the system, not only with real use.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: It's hard to predict. I'm more willing to bet that the number of monthly active users will go up in a more consistent way. And it's why we do these estimates, right? Because we recognize that there are flaws in the existing data that's out there. And so we put our heads together. We talk to a bunch of people. We approach it from a lot of different ways and we try to throw out an estimate because we think it's useful to know how many people are out there, even if it is a wide range that we're estimating. So that's why we do it.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Another thing I really want to get into is Bitcoin itself. So past year's reports didn't focus so much on Bitcoin. But this year, there is a number of slides on it, in fact, at the very start, because it's been such a big part of the story, the narrative in the crypto industry over the past year.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Over the past three years, Bitcoin has really clawed its way back into being more than 50% of the market share of crypto in aggregate, which is kind of incredible. And this store of value narrative has really caught on. People are still kind of thinking about how they should regard Bitcoin. Is it a high-risk tech-like product? Is it a safe haven kind of thing? Maybe just tell me a little bit about what we're seeing, what we found when it comes to Bitcoin's product market fit.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: There's a couple cuts. One is that I don't know that it's the case that the Bitcoin store of value story has caught on as much as I'd say that the need for a store of value has increased, right?
--:-- Robert Hackett: I like that distinction.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: That's, yeah. I think that that is already a well-accepted story about Bitcoin. But the reason I say that, the data point to look at, which we do have a comparison with assets, including gold in the report. If you look at the trend, gold has had a spectacular last two years. Really spectacular. That I think is an indicator of the same phenomenon.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: The easiest way to think about it is that now there's gold and there's digital gold. There's trad gold and there's new gold. And Bitcoin has really owned that. And I think it has found a really comfortable sweet spot as this kind of digital gold at a time when people really want gold. And evidently through probably the same motivation, the same impetus, they want Bitcoin.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Another big theme for Bitcoin, which is emerging and interesting, is that there have been a number of attempts to technologize Bitcoin. We've talked a little bit less about Bitcoin in prior years, mostly because Bitcoin from a technological perspective has remained more or less fixed. It is kind of ossified, as some people say in crypto, where not a lot of changes come. Those changes are infrequent, not huge. They don't really change the underlying technological characteristics of it.
--:-- Robert Hackett: We actually see that it's attracting a lot of developers. It is like in the top five in number of developers. That is something that has begun to change a little bit for Bitcoin. It never used to be this way. It used to be a very stagnant, don't rock the boat kind of thing with Bitcoin. But now there seems to be more activity lately focusing on it.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: There is. I think that that activity comes from the fact that because the price has done very well, people who have seen the growth and success, which is indisputable, of DeFi in Ethereum, in Solana, in the other more smart contract blockchains, they've seen that success. And they've said, "Look, we have this massive pool of capital, this gigantic commodity asset. How can I make that accessible to DeFi?"
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: And there have been representations of Bitcoin usable in the rest of DeFi, like wrapped Bitcoin and others. But they have a set of trust assumptions because of the way they work technologically that requires the owner of Bitcoin to maybe compromise on the sovereignty of their holdings. And so the theory has been for a lot of people — I've heard this story many times sort of the last half of last year and a couple times definitely this year — how can we make Bitcoin without importing new trust assumptions accessible to DeFi because of DeFi's total success?
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: DeFi has continued to grow. We have slides that allude to that. And DeFi is also in a much better regulatory position than it was last year. So those are serious tailwinds for entrepreneurs who want to sort of unlock the trapped pooled capital over on Bitcoin side, despite its relative lack of programmability.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: So the store of value story plus the DeFi story has led to some people to try to get over that. There have also been some interesting projects. LightSpark has done a great job of innovating on Bitcoin, Lightning, and trying to make it genuinely useful for financial institutions. That's created a little bit of buzz. And then also there have been some interesting research projects like BitVM, which a group of people have been collaborating on, trying to find ways to make Bitcoin genuinely programmable without requiring any technological upgrades.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: So I think it's an area to track. I wouldn't say that it has turned Bitcoin into something that is robustly a tech platform. Again, it still is kind of in this fixed state, but it's possible that changes. So it has made it maybe a little bit more interesting for builders.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I don't think it'll surprise anybody that Ethereum, that its L2s like Base, Solana, that these chains have attracted so much interest from builders and developers. But it is kind of interesting that Bitcoin has now gotten into the top five in terms of interest and developer activity.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Yeah, but it's not just a fad, right? There's real reason for that. The store of value stuff that Eddie was talking about, the fact that it doesn't change very often is an interesting property. At the very least it's a differentiator.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Exactly, right? The brand of Bitcoin is unmatched. There's just no other crypto that has the brand and recognition globally that Bitcoin has. So there are properties that make this interesting.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: And they're also facing, because of the way that Bitcoin works, the way that public key cryptography works, it also is vulnerable to the eventual development of a quantum computer whenever that happens, maybe in a decade, maybe multiple decades, I don't know. We've got a slide on this too, where there are actually at this point, 6.7-ish million Bitcoin at risk to this threat, to this quantum threat, which is around $750 billion. That's a lot.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: And the people in that community are going to face a choice about whether to do something about this or to just sort of, whoever gets the quantum computer gets the Bitcoin or are they going to burn stuff or whatever? I don't know. It's a complex challenge that I think is worth getting ahead of for sure.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: The good news is we have the tools to be able to transition to a post-quantum world. We know what needs to be done. The challenge that Bitcoin will have to figure out is how do you do it? And Bitcoin's community has been resistant to change. And this may end up serving as a forcing function to some extent. There are proposals out there for Bitcoin's transition to the post-quantum world. There are ways to do it. And I think the community will figure it out, although I don't know exactly what the answer will be.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yeah, open question.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Yeah.
--:-- Robert Hackett: All right, let's talk more about adoption. Another big thing that's happened is we've had a new trend of these digital asset treasury companies that are these public companies going out and snatching up tokens and sort of building up a war chest, a horde. They're kind of aligning themselves with one chain at a time. There's like Solana ones, there's ETH ones, there's Bitcoin ones. So what are the numbers around these digital asset treasury companies, these DATs, and also the uptick in ETPs, ETFs?
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: It's actually shocking just how much crypto today is being held in publicly traded vehicles. I think for Bitcoin and Ethereum, at least, between the ETFs and the DATs, now about 10% of the total token supply is held in publicly traded entities, which I think certainly has had an impact on the market. I don't know how this will all end, but I think it'll be fun to watch.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: We've fulfilled the social vision. It's fun to watch. I'll say that. I don't know if it'll be fun.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Yeah.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I will say I think a lot of things get conflated in the usage of the term DAT. People often associate it with the sailor-esque strategy, which I don't pretend to really understand. The issuance of debt to purchase assets and so on. Not my thing, this sort of financial engineering. I don't really totally get it, candidly.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: But putting tokens inside of an equity vehicle and making them publicly accessible in some way does create opportunities to give different types of entities access, like retail and people who want to buy things. But they just want to do it through the equity channels because they're easy to access and well established.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: There might also be types of deals that individual projects can make with another company in a partnership agreement, like a contractual relationship that you can't make a contract with Bitcoin today. There's no one to make a business agreement with. For Ethereum and for any truly decentralized project that wants to be really decentralized, having a separate entity that is purpose-built to make these types of deals creates a natural counterparty for people who want to make productive agreements in service of the growth of an ecosystem or a token's ecosystem.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: So I think it's a creative type of tool. And I think we haven't really seen all the ways that they will be used. And I certainly hope it's for more than getting leverage on tokens. But it is definitely a growing phenomenon for sure. So it should be something that we track.
--:-- Robert Hackett: One thing that I think is extremely interesting to note is BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, their ETP product for Bitcoin, is the most successful launch of any ETP or ETF product ever. Period, ever in the history of these products. That is kind of insane.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, it is. I mean, candidly, a little surprising to me. I say this with self-awareness, but I don't know why you don't just buy the Bitcoin, to be honest.
--:-- Robert Hackett: To be honest.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: But again, evidently I'm wrong.
--:-- Robert Hackett: You're a purist, Eddie. You're a purist.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, but I'm wrong and the market has spoken, so I obey. The market is always right.
--:-- Robert Hackett: We've talked a little bit about the market dynamics that are going on, some of the trends that are happening between ETPs and DATs. I want to talk about institutional adoption because this really is the thing I think that sets apart this year. It seems like every major financial company, not every single one, but a lot of them, are really getting involved here.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Actually, I have PTSD from previous cycles where you had these various institutions dipping their toe in the water, getting a little interested. Maybe they're going to get involved. And then they retreated, pulled back, and things were stalled for years. But they are embracing it by every measure. They're launching products. They are getting involved, making acquisitions, striking partnership deals. It's happening.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: And I think the big difference between what you were talking about historically and today is that these institutions are no longer just trying to chase the hottest trend. They actually see the opportunity for crypto to reshape their businesses. And I think that is different than it's ever been.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I think stablecoins are a big reason why that's the case. I think it's very easy for financial institutions to see the stablecoin opportunity and what it could do for their business. And as a result, we've seen institutions flood in with real commitments, real product launches, real acquisitions, big IPOs. Lots of money at stake here. And I think it's really, really exciting.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I was around three years ago, Robert. I was around seven years ago. I was even following 10, 11 years ago. I was following this stuff before I was doing crypto professionally. I always remember hearing the promises from the institutions and then kind of wincing a little bit and being like, "Okay."
--:-- Robert Hackett: It's even funny to hear you say "doing crypto professionally," by the way, just thinking back to that 10 years.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, it's almost weird that I'm saying that.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yeah, it's a little cringe.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Because it's so mature in a way now. But I remember hearing them say that and not taking it seriously because there were just too many questions. The legalities were unclear. The business opportunity was unclear. The infrastructural capability to handle what they wanted was unclear. There was layer after layer after layer of unclear.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Seven years ago, if a major retail chain tried to accept payments in crypto, the reality was — and this is the conversations I was having with people — there's just no way to do that in a scalable and affordable way, let alone in a way that had a decent user experience. The scalability and affordability has been solved. The regulatory is nearly there. And the UX has a way to go, but we're running out of excuses.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: And now when I talk with some of the people on the slide we have about some of the largest financial institutions embracing crypto, this is the type of thing they used to say to me three years ago, seven years ago. "We see all this exciting stuff. The tech is really cool. We want to show that we're leaders." Basically some innovation lab — not to be critical, very nice people — but the innovation lab wants to show that the company's not losers. That was the problem they were solving.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Now I'm hearing people say, "We're cutting costs in this area and we're expanding our line of business in this area. We're going to offer a whole new bunch of products here. And then in this area, we can just move way faster while slashing costs." And they're being very concrete with me. That's just not the same conversations. That's why I feel a little differently about it.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I would be shocked if five years from now, we look back and crypto has not advanced in institutions. Whereas if you had asked me seven years from now if the institutions will be using crypto broadly, I think I would have said, "We've got some way to go. There's some more cypherpunk stuff you should look at."
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: The opportunity is massive because of how much distribution these financial giants have. If they are serious about these commitments, if the developments continue, we could see crypto deeply embedded into the financial services that we use every day. And we could see crypto seriously being used by billions of people around the world. That is the size of the opportunity here. And I think, for the first time ever, we've got a chance to make that happen with these institutions.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, I think that's right.
--:-- Robert Hackett: I'd love to know which of these companies or who has been most surprising to you getting involved.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: If I'm reading the situation, casting back to when things were heating up sort of at the end of last year, I feel like the starting gun was Stripe acquiring Bridge, which happened pre-Genius Bill passing, pre-there being actual rules of the road for stablecoins in the U.S.
--:-- Robert Hackett: And after the State of Crypto report last year, didn't it?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: And after the State of Crypto, yeah. And this was after we had gone out there and said that stablecoins have found product market fit, which is kind of cool. We called that one right. But no, I think Stripe was the starting gun because they bought Bridge. And I think this got all the other players paying instant attention. They were like, "Okay, this is a real thing we need to start to take seriously." That's my read on it. I'd love to get how you guys think this has sort of shaken out among the players and who's been very surprising to you getting involved.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Well, I think Stripe has done more than that since then. They have their Tempo project, which could be interesting, could be Corpo, could be Crypto. We'll find out.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yes, their own blockchain that they're building.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Yeah, they acquired Privy, which is a great team working on some wallet infrastructure. So they've continued to advance. I've been continuously impressed by Robinhood. They've really leaned into crypto in a hard way. They've got their own L2.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yeah, their own L2.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: They want to tokenize stocks, tokenize equities, bring them on chain, bring them into the app. Super cool plans there. I've remained impressed by the Revolut team. Super interesting bridging plans, integrating with crypto rails plans. That's part of their plan for global domination.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Maybe I'll throw out one to surprise you a little bit, Robert. I had a great conversation with some brilliant people at Morgan Stanley not long ago who were shocking to me how thoughtful and specific they were in terms of the types of products that they want to offer to their users. Not like "dip our toes, we're going to flirt around with crypto a little bit." The opposite of that. They specifically saw the opportunity. They wanted to talk about technical and regulatory challenges in offering that product in a safe and secure way to their users. But they wanted to be as on-chain as possible, specifically because they saw opportunities in DeFi, opportunities to offer new types of products, opportunities to help manage their customers' wealth in an ideal way, which is a very interesting cut on it.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: And many of these — BlackRock's Biddle Token has been an instrumental building block for a lot of people who want to expand stablecoin issuance and use that as the foundation of their own stablecoin or settlement between categories of stablecoins. That product is the big kahuna when it comes to tokenized assets so far.
--:-- Robert Hackett: And I will say that does surprise me because when you mentioned Revolut and Robinhood, it's not terribly surprising that these fintech upstarts are trying to explore this new terrain. But to have a stodgy old legacy incumbent big bank do so like that, that is kind of surprising.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: That's exactly what I mean. I just wouldn't have heard a lot from them. That would have impressed me in prior years.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: And remember, you've mentioned Stripe acquiring Bridge as kind of starting all of this. But upstream of that is the stablecoin story. And even upstream of that is the infrastructure story. Stablecoins have been around for years now, but it wasn't until recently when we, with years of infrastructure development, improved the underlying blockchains to a point where we could actually make stablecoins a good product for payments. We could do it in less than a second for less than a cent. And it was at that moment, I think, that all of the pieces kind of started to come together.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: The institutions then really saw the vision, saw the opportunity, and then started to make the bets. And then they saw other people make the bets. And now we're at where we're at. And I think it's the theme of this year's entire report: all of the pieces are now coming together.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I like that. It's also a different cut on the price innovation cycle where it's not number go up, it's number go down. Costs go down, stablecoins become usable, and now you unleash this whole wave of new innovation that's happening.
--:-- Robert Hackett: All right. So we've been talking a little bit about stablecoins, but let's talk a little bit more specifically about what's going on there. Over the past year, there's been $46 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume. I can't even wrap my head around that number. It's so gigantic. Are those numbers real? Where is all this activity coming from?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Well, I'll let Darren clarify a little bit, but you'll notice there's an unadjusted number and then an adjusted number. So here's one of these nuanced seeming paradoxes that you need to be aware of when you see these things: when it costs less than a penny to move a million, 10 million, even $100 million, then it happens a lot. Because people are rebalancing their internal portfolios. Institutions are rebalancing their portfolios. Exchanges are recycling through different wallets. All these things happen because they can happen cheaply.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Think about if electricity in your house cost $10,000 per kilowatt hour, you would be incredibly sparing and careful with every single thing that you do. If energy costs less than a penny per kilowatt hour, then you don't give a shit at all. You leave the lights on, blow dry air for as long as you want, crank the water heater up. In other words, the apparently low cost affects these numbers for what may seem like large behaviors to people.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: To normal people, and this is reasonable, you wouldn't move around a million dollars willy-nilly. But if it costs you next to nothing, then maybe you actually do. So one of the interesting consequences of extremely low gas costs, mature infrastructure, institutional adoption, and stablecoin proliferation is that you get huge volume numbers, which may not necessarily reflect meaningful economic activity. Rebalancing my balance is not real economic activity. It's like taking your wallet out of your pocket doesn't count as spending. Whereas actually spending is a different behavior.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: This $10 trillion adjusted number is our attempt to filter out many of the most obvious sort of not economically meaningful transfers to try to get something a little bit closer to someone deposited money to an exchange. That's meaningful. Someone making a payment, that's meaningful. Someone depositing into a DeFi protocol to lock it for generating yield or so someone else can lend it. Someone borrowing it. Those are meaningful uses because it's actually changing hands or going into a mechanism.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: We typically like to focus on the adjusted metric. We reference it multiple times throughout the report because we think it's a better indicator of real, genuine, user-driven activity and it does filter out those artificially inflationary practices. And we work with a data provider called Allium to come up with that methodology. And I think that's maybe the better number to use in most cases.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: But still, $10 trillion over the last year, that rivals some of the largest global payment networks that have been around for decades. Multiples of PayPal's transaction volume. Right in there with Visa. Quickly approaching the transaction volume of ACH, which plums the entire banking system. So I think very impressive what we've seen in terms of growth in this category in such a short period of time.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, this number is growing quickly and it's going to keep growing quickly. So what's happening with stablecoins is because it's programmable on this blockchain, there's all types of behaviors underneath. There are genuine payments. We have some evidence and there have been some interesting reports that show that that is growing. It's particularly growing in emerging economies.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: But there's also things that you might say you put $100,000 in a DeFi protocol. Is that the same as spending $100,000 on Visa? Probably not, because that $100,000 you spent on Visa is not coming back. But that $100,000 that you deposited into a DeFi protocol, you could just pull it out the next day freely. That's how they're designed. So it is a little bit of an apples to oranges comparison, but I think you need to appreciate the breadth of the types of activities that are possible just by using stablecoins. All these types of things are possible behaviors, which is what makes the network so potent. It's so broad in its application as opposed to other types of networks which are so specific and narrow in their application.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: And to your point, this growing stablecoin transaction volume continues to increase even when we account for the adjusted numbers. And that is decoupling from spot crypto trading volume, which would kind of indicate that people are actually using these things for reasons beyond trading or beyond speculation.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: For a long time, stablecoins were criticized for only being used to settle speculative crypto trades. And I think that was the case up until recently when stablecoins found product market fit. They showed that they had many real organic use cases. And since then we've really broken the correlation and we are no longer just going up and down relative to the trading volume.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Tether and Circle still dominate, but we're seeing growth of other stablecoins as well. I wonder what you think of that trend, how that'll continue to pan out in the future.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: The details there have a lot to do with regulatory conditions. The passage of the Genius Act after it's had some time to cook and after some of the more specific rules have been settled by regulators, will probably open up opportunities for more stablecoin issuers to issue stablecoins and to distribute them through a variety of channels.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Tether and USDC have been popularized by integrations with exchanges in their early days. They were primarily used as a means to settle a balance, to deposit and withdraw balance from a crypto exchange. But we've seen that grow since then. Tether is used globally. We mentioned specifically Ethereum and Tron. I've heard at least anecdotally and seen a little bit of evidence that there's a significant amount of payments being settled in certain countries using Tether on Tron. There's a lot of data, both anecdotal and quantitative, and you can see a little bit of that in our report.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: The usage of stablecoins evolves like other technology. It starts for crypto-to-crypto exchange settlement. Maybe it goes to developing country payment for certain small and medium businesses.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Then it becomes for some DeFi-ish stuff. Then maybe it becomes for payment stuff. As it grows and as the technological properties change — like gas fees, liquidity, integrations, bridges — all evolve, the same thing can be reused for another purpose. That goes back to the point I was making about transaction volume: there's a lot of different stuff that makes up that volume. It's expanding and growing and becoming more complicated, not simpler. So I see it following the same pattern as everything else. In the future, we'll probably have more stablecoins. They may be more specialized to specific applications, especially now that regulations are clear and product-market fit is far beyond obvious.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Speaking of expanding and growing, one slide I've got to talk about is this one about the U.S. national debt, which is also expanding and growing at an alarming rate. And probably that has contributed to the passage of the Genius Act. It's kind of crazy. It's like the government is scrounging for spare pocket change underneath the couch cushions, and then all of a sudden you discover gold bars there — which just happen to be stablecoins, this incredible source of demand for U.S. debt.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: You can see in the data that stablecoins now account for... they are now a top 20 holder of U.S. treasuries. That puts them ahead of Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Israel, Germany. Stablecoins as a category are now holding more U.S. debt than many, many sovereign countries. It's absolutely wild that there is this pent-up demand.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I think this is such an important part of the stablecoin story. On one hand, as you pointed out, we all know the U.S. national debt is growing out of control. We know that the demand for that debt is fading. For the first time in 30 years, foreign central banks hold more reserves in gold than U.S. treasuries. Everybody's looking for a store of value now.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Exactly.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: And on the other hand, we have the stablecoin opportunity. As you pointed out, they are a big source of demand for U.S. debt. They're holding all of these U.S. treasuries. The category is projected to grow into the trillions of dollars in the next few years.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yeah, Citibank has a really incredible prediction on this. They say by 2030, they expect it to grow almost an order of magnitude. If it's at around $300 billion today, it'll be $3 trillion.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Yep.
--:-- Robert Hackett: So trillions of dollars worth of stablecoins. More than 99% today are denominated in USD. You put those things together, stablecoins are a clear opportunity for the U.S. to sustain dollar dominance in a very uncertain time.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Really amazing. Let's talk about privacy. I know you're a big privacy guy, Eddie. You've got a whole privacy stack that you personally use. Tell us what's going on in the privacy world.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, yeah. So a theme — whenever I talk on the pod, I feel like some of my a16z neurons that have grown in my brain have a very specific shape. The shape is that technology develops in this sort of historical way. The best way to predict the future, even though predicting is flawed, is to unfold technology one layer at a time and try to imagine what happens. What bottlenecks appear? Which second-order consequences occur counterintuitively? That's the way to think about it.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Privacy could not be more obvious to me. Has been for years. I will scream it forever. I don't care if this uptick in privacy is a fad and it goes away. It's going to come back again later. It is inevitable. The reason no one has cared is because if stuff doesn't work, if no one's using it, you don't need it to be private. At the same time, things being illegible and confusing is often a workable substitute for privacy in the short term. Crypto has plenty of this illegibility and confusingness.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: So combine a lack of total mainstream adoption for consumer use cases like payments — which we've been saying may happen, has the signs of happening, isn't happening yet. Consumers don't make their payments with stablecoins. But for there to be payments with stablecoins, you need stablecoins. You need stablecoin adoption. You need institutional acceptance of stablecoins. You need transaction fees to be low. Et cetera. All these other things we've talked about. Once that becomes the case, people will demand privacy.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I know this is talked about in crypto all the time, ad nauseam, makes me crazy. People say people don't care about privacy, whatever. No, of course they care about privacy. They do care, but they won't necessarily articulate it that way. If someone shows you Venmo from 10 years ago, shows you all the transactions you've paid and all the comments, and it's all out in the wild, people have an adverse reaction. People take it for granted. That's what they mean by "don't care" — they take it for granted. They just assume they have a functional level of privacy. They don't demand specific cryptography. They don't demand incredible distinctions between privacy, anonymity, pseudonymity, confidentiality. They don't do that, but they have expectations.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Once these things become popular tools — blockchains for payments, blockchains for personal finance, blockchains as neobanks, whatever — then people will demand privacy, and institutions will demand privacy. A very clear theme for me over the last year or so as I've begun to have more conversations with institutions is that they consider privacy a non-negotiable property. It is a table stakes property they must have. They cannot reveal their behavior to competitors, to the public. They cannot make the public uneasy. They need to be able to offer this to their customers. They've made it abundantly clear to me.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Now, you might say, why don't we have it yet in crypto? There's two reasons. One is that the ways crypto has been popular so far hasn't really needed it. If you're just moving a little bit out of an exchange, putting it in DeFi, messing around with some meme coins, or in an emerging economy wanting to hold some dollars — these don't really demand profound privacy. The illegibility of crypto might be good enough for you. But the minute it starts to get into more private things — salary, payments, personal finance — people will start to do contrived things to get privacy. They'll start to make tons of addresses. They'll start to use apps that offer it. It's just absolutely going to happen.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: The second is that privacy is very difficult technologically and from a compliance perspective. Technologically, we've needed a lot of advancements across different areas in cryptography to try to get closer to privacy. We've learned a lot. There are some protocols we allude to in the report. We have some total flows through Railgun. We talk about some cool stuff with Zcash and the Zashi wallet. Noir, developed by one of our portfolio companies, Aztec. These are incredibly complex projects. Even though the products work today — Railgun is live, evidently, it's working — it has a pretty challenging user experience. Despite this, it is still growing. Despite this very challenging user experience that, in my mind, is not yet appropriate for retail, it is still growing.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: This is new tech, new cryptography that they have struggled to repurpose for mainstream use. As crypto starts to become useful in these other domains where privacy is more important, there will be more demand for the applications of the new types of cryptography we've developed to make things private. This is going to happen. Everyone needs to be ready. We have this interesting wave now, and I hope it foretells a growing wave of interest. But I'm just marking a spot in the sand, Robert.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Based on what you're saying, and these conversations you're having with institutional players, are we getting ahead of ourselves? Is the adoption running ahead of the technological capabilities that crypto can offer?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: It's not that they're running ahead. This is how it works. One head yanks the other as they race forward. No one's going to solve the privacy problem until there's a product that you want to launch that needs privacy, that isn't going to work without it. And you need to bang your head against the wall and fix that problem. And vice versa — some products can't take off unless they have privacy built in out the gate, and people need to research and push the research ahead to do it.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I don't think we're getting too far ahead. There are ways to get little cuts at privacy and add incrementally more privacy. There are a lot of people who think about it. I see it as a front that's advancing. It's not clear exactly where the bottleneck will be or if there's one specific bottleneck, but I just don't see us in a future without it.
--:-- Robert Hackett: One year from now, Eddie, what percentage of stablecoin transfers do you think would be privacy preserving?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I love it. Let's get them on the record.
--:-- Robert Hackett: That's a tough one.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: That's a tough one. One year from now? Less than a percent. Not much. Not because it's not going to work, but because I think people are headed that way. There are some really cool projects doing this. I'm including confidentiality, by the way — light kinds of privacy. Basically just Eddie and his friends. The current stablecoin growth is so strong that the private growth needs to outpace it to exceed more than a percent or 10%. I think it's less than a percent. But I think three, four years from now, it's substantial — double digits. I don't know. Let's see. I'm probably wrong.
--:-- Robert Hackett: No, that's great. And I appreciate your view that necessity is the mother of invention. So it's not that adoption is getting ahead of itself. It's that it is a prerequisite for these advances to happen. Darren, do you have a prediction on that front?
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I'll take the over on Eddie's one-year prediction. I think we could get to more than 1% of stablecoins. We also have to figure out how to measure it. If it's private. If it's adjusted or unadjusted.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, well, yeah, but we'll see.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Okay, very interesting. So that seems like the next frontier for people to deal with. Another thing that is quite interesting to see is the tokenization of assets. We talked about this before. People call them real-world assets. I kind of hate that term because it makes it sound like blockchain assets are fake world assets.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, it's very infantilizing.
--:-- Robert Hackett: We need to come up with a better terminology here. But for the sake of speaking about it in the way that people do, this RWA trend.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: We should just call them big boy assets, Robert. Big boy assets. I'm kidding.
--:-- Robert Hackett: That's great. But let's talk about this. There's $30 billion worth of these real-world assets now on-chain. Obviously, stablecoins are a whole separate kettle of fish. But if we're talking about these other types of assets — everything from stocks to commodities to debt of all different flavors — there's about $30 billion worth of that on-chain today. And it's growing very rapidly. In 2020, there was almost nothing. Now, $30 billion. Rapid, rapid growth in that space. What's going on there? What's driving the growth? Why is this happening? What are the benefits of tokenizing things? Tell us about this trend.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: So first of all, I think real-world assets — I'll call them that for the purposes of this conversation — I think they're the key to the long-term success of DeFi because this is the bridge to traditional finance, which, as we know, is many trillions of dollars in opportunity. If we want DeFi to really reach the levels and scale that I think we think it can, I do think we need to bring these real-world assets on-chain. I think this is pretty critical to the long-term success, which is why it's exciting to see that there are already $30 billion in tokenized assets on-chain.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: The growth we're seeing is obviously something to keep an eye on. But I think it's incredibly early days still. There is so much room to grow here just given the size of traditional assets that can be brought on-chain. I think the growth we've seen over the last couple of years benefits from a lot of the institutional adoption we've seen. Getting these big institutions on board like BlackRock, which we talked about, is going to be key to the success here.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yep, you've got Larry Fink out there, the CEO of BlackRock, talking about tokenizing everything. He's preaching the gospel of tokenization.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Yeah, so institutions, and also the regulatory environment is going to play an important role here as well. The favorable conditions we've seen over the last year are going to work in the favor of this trend. So something I'm very excited about — maybe crypto's biggest opportunity in front of us right now.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, I mean, this is a big stack of assets, Robert. Although it's so easy to bucket them all and call them real-world assets and generalize over them, I think the most interesting insights are probably per category. I'm far from an expert on really any of these, to be honest. But I have heard colloquially that, for example, private credit — which is not a thing I know a lot about — is just easier to manage in a neutral layer where you can buy it, sell it to counterparties, and you don't have to integrate complicated systems or any specific third-party broker. You can just trade it on-chain. You can send them some stablecoin or pay them out of band, receive the private credit on the blockchain, and it just becomes an easy medium to transact it, to hold it, to account for it.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I've heard that from two private credit people. And by the way, when we're talking about private credit, private credit accounts for about half of all of these real-world assets.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yeah, which is amazing to me.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: It looks like it's on the order of $15 billion. It's not a thing I hear a lot about, but when I have heard about it, the explanation is surprisingly simple to me why they like private credit on-chain. It doesn't mean the off-chain is done, but it means that it's something that is at least functionally useful and attractive.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Just to use a really concrete example — one of the assets on here is Paxos Gold, the PAXG token. We talked a little bit about gold earlier in the podcast. Not that long ago, I bought a bunch of gold. I thought about how I wanted to buy that gold. I actually looked into buying gold bullion, physical bullion, partly because it's hilarious, but also maybe it's the best thing. You just hold some gold in your backyard.
--:-- Robert Hackett: You just hold some gold and it doesn't have fees. It just sits there and you hold it.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I thought, what's the best way to get access to gold? There are some ETF-like products where you can get access to gold. GLD is the big one, I think.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yeah, but you have to pay annualized fees. That is a real financial innovation — take something you can own and make you pay fees on it.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, and you have to hold it in a specific brokerage, which is not so bad, maybe. But when I looked into it, I genuinely found PAX Gold an attractive way to get gold exposure. Honest to God, not just because I'm a crypto guy, I thought, wow, the set of trade-offs here — owning the gold through the PAXG token — is better for me. That's the gold that I have. Not even for crypto. Obviously, I'm a little biased, I want to do all the crypto stuff, but it really is an easy way to do it. Super easy to sell, super easy to buy, super easy to hold in Coinbase or in self-custody if you want. And no fees. That set of trade-offs means it's just generally really simple. The way I hold my assets, that's just really consistent and easy for me to tack on. That just ended up being a natural choice.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I think if there were other types of assets that had similar financial and technical benefits, I personally would like to hold them too. I don't think of myself as a representative of a mainstream investor necessarily, but that is often a tell to me that those benefits are very soon going to be passed on to retail in a way that really makes a large-scale difference.
--:-- Robert Hackett: So presumably some of those benefits are more liquidity, the ability to trade whenever, 24/7, lower fees and prices.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: 24/7 competitive fees, venue independence. You can dispose of it on-chain. You can dispose of it at a centralized exchange. I think these properties are really attractive.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Is there an area of real-world assets that you're most excited about coming on-chain?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I think it's very cool and a net plus to bring equities or stocks — company stocks — on-chain. It's a really cool idea. I don't think it's a minus for crypto. I think it's a big plus for crypto. I'll say to a lot of crypto people, and I count myself among them, it's maybe not the most exciting thing because we're trying to create new types of institutions and new types of things to own, new types of networks — network tokens that we've talked a lot about. That's the most exciting thing to me. Tokenizing a company and putting it on-chain is maybe only an incremental improvement. But I still think it's exciting insofar as it creates exciting second-order consequences like stablecoins. Stablecoin is just dollar on-chain. It's not a new asset. It's the old asset on a new medium. And that has profound consequences because of all the profound ways that dollars are used — payments, collateral, settlement, all these things.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: For stocks, it could be similar. If people hold a lot of their assets on-chain, well, now they're on-chain. That means they're interoperable with a lot of other things, which means maybe they're useful in DeFi. You can go down the whole list of consequences of an interesting and liquid market asset being in someone's self-custodial crypto wallet. Those consequences are very, very interesting. Even if we're not exactly inventing a new asset, we're just changing where it's located.
--:-- Robert Hackett: So we've talked about putting real assets, traditional financial assets on-chain. Let's talk about some of the more crypto-native applications that have arisen over the past year. Perhaps one we could talk about where there's nothing backing it. No asset, no anything really, just some funny meme. That would be meme coins. This past year was really the year of meme coins, and we talked a little bit about this at the start. You mentioned how you had received some blowback for some of your meme coins.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Which slide is this, Robert? I blocked it out of my mind.
--:-- Robert Hackett: This is slide 29.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Okay, yeah, go ahead.
--:-- Robert Hackett: I'd like to talk about meme coins. I'd like to talk about perps and prediction markets. These three areas were really, really hot this past year. We can take each one in turn. I'd love to start with meme coins. Given that was maybe the earliest of the three to really take off, what's going on with meme coins? Are they here to stay?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, they are here to stay. They've been here for 12 years now by my accounting, maybe more. What has been innovated on, and the reason they came back so hard last year, earlier this year, was specifically because the underlying technology has improved. It doesn't make sense to launch hundreds of thousands or millions, as we have, of meme coins if they cost $100 each or even $50 each just to even have the idea. If it only costs a few cents, then all of a sudden that becomes a possibility. And the same with allowing others to buy them and speculate on them. So we saw a proliferation in these launchpads — these so-called meme coin launchpads like Pump, like others.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Like I said earlier, I have been criticized for being a little cynical about them. It's just not the most exciting part of crypto for me other than highlighting interesting social trends.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I maybe would take a little bit more of a positive stance here and just say the beautiful thing about crypto is that it's this credibly neutral platform where you can build all sorts of different things on it. Whether it's physical infrastructure networks through the deep end category, or real-world assets, or in this case, some form of internet culture — it is open to accept all types of ideas and innovations. Meme coins popped up as something. A lot of it was obviously driven by speculation. But I think it's very worth watching how the space evolves because, as we've seen with other categories like NFTs, things can evolve. In the case of NFTs, we really transitioned from speculation to more collecting, and we have some data that supports that. I am unsure what will happen with the meme coin story, but it is cool that anybody can come in and build whatever they want on these blockchains. Whether you like them or hate them, I think they're an important part of the crypto story.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I'll say just to counterbalance myself a little bit too — you never quite know how the most important and impactful lessons will develop. Often the most interesting things start off looking really, really stupid. Now, often stupid things start off looking stupid too. So you have to balance that. Chris Dixon likes to say the next big thing starts off looking like a toy.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Yeah, which is totally true.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Which is one of his great aphorisms. So I think it's important to watch, and I have actually seen a lot of interesting and important lessons to learn. But it's going to come and go, and we'll see.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Let's talk about a couple of the other applications that have found some traction — like perps and prediction markets.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, those two I think are unignorable. They've really risen in the past year.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Perps, for one thing — it was not always clear that perpetual futures, that's what we mean by perps, were going to be the product that people who want to speculate on crypto use. Over the past year, it's kind of become clear that people have gravitated toward it. Why is that? What about perps has been so appealing to people looking to place bets on the price direction of crypto?
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I kind of think it's emerged as, like you said, really the ideal product for crypto speculators. From a product experience standpoint, it is the easiest and most intuitive way to open a leveraged position, long or short, on an asset in crypto. I think protocols like Hyperliquid have done a very good job of building the product experience for those type of crypto speculators. We've seen the results of that — trillions of dollars of volume. Hyperliquid is now on a billion-dollar revenue run rate.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, I agree with that completely. When we say perps, of course, perp-dexes also — it's not just perpetual futures, it's perp-dexes. Perps as powered by some kind of decentralized system. They've been around for some time. I would say the first perp-dex in a form very similar to the current form was dYdX. dYdX was definitely a popular product for its time. There have been innovations by dYdX, by Hyperliquid, by LiDAR, by these projects that are really trying to layer on incremental improvement after incremental improvement to make them into better and better products.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: To capture what they are, what you really get out of one for the audience is that there have been a variety of ways, as Darren was talking about, to take $100 and try to get more than $100 of exposure — leveraged exposure to some assets for the purposes of speculating. When I say speculating, I mean more like gambling, speculating. A little bit less than value investing. Maybe not what Warren Buffett would be doing.
--:-- Robert Hackett: He might want leverage, but yeah, probably not for this purpose.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, right. To do that requires composing together several types of tools. It requires some mechanism for lending — depositing collateral and then lending — some way to actually exchange and represent some type of order and get matched with a counterparty, some way to handle automatic liquidations when your position is no longer supported by enough collateral so you have to sell the collateral. The perp-dex is a highly refined product to deliver the composition of those things while maintaining as much liquidity as possible — liquidity meaning counterparties you can trade with so you can get something as close to the fair price for that asset as possible.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: They work really, really well for what they do. I think they work better than they've ever worked. And I think maybe to connect with what we were saying about meme coins, maybe the falling off in meme coins has come partly because people have been able to get this wild asymmetric exposure to assets without needing to get the meme coins. You don't have to go and identify some obscure brand new meme coin that you think is going to take off to get that huge asymmetric upside. Now you can get a highly levered position against a blue chip asset — ETH or Bitcoin or something like that. Which means you maybe don't need to wade too deeply into the swamp or the trenches, as they say, in order to get that risky exposure. You can do that in a more orderly system where there's maybe less asymmetric information and fewer predators lurking in the forest.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I tend to think that's not a coincidence. The speculator, casino-y side of crypto has long wanted this type of way to risk some bucks to make megabucks. And perp-dexes are a really, really highly engineered way to deliver that product.
--:-- Robert Hackett: One question I have about this, given that we're now on the other side of what was not quite a flash crash but was a pretty large market drawdown — are people playing with fire here? Has this introduced something dangerous into the system?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Well, anytime you're playing with leverage, you're playing with fire. Let me say that incredibly clearly. This is, of course, not financial advice ever, but anytime you're taking a lot of leverage, you're taking a lot of risk. Major caveats there. Leverage is crazy. I think leverage is a great way to lose everything. So yeah, you are playing with fire. There's no question about that.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Now, as far as whether the perp-dexes specifically are culpable for the flash crash — it's a little harder to say. We haven't done some sort of deep analysis that could say that. I will say that anytime a system has a lot of leverage, which the system has gotten better at creating — it has become more effective at delivering more leverage at a lower price — then when there is a market shock where market makers need to pull back and protect themselves and there's an unwinding of leverage, yeah, that can exacerbate crashes to some degree. But of course, better-designed systems are better able to handle that type of instability as well. They can liquidate faster, more efficiently, in a way that protects users more. I think that was also true.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: There is a subtle irony in that crypto, this thing that was sort of invented out of a desire to move away from the fractional reserve banking system, and now we're back at introducing all this leverage back into the system. It sort of comes full circle.
--:-- Robert Hackett: One way to put it, Robert, is that why do they get to have all the fun?
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: That's a good point. There was a really funny Gwart tweet about this — about how, "I'm sorry that you lost your son's college fund, but isn't it marvelous how gracefully the dealer swept away the chips and how effectively you were liquidated at the casino?"
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, so I would caution people against using leverage unless you really know what you're doing.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Let's move on to prediction markets, because that has been another big story. The irony there with prediction markets is that if you were a betting person and you were going to say whether prediction markets would stick around after the election, a lot of people said they expected it to fizzle out, that there wouldn't be interest to sustain this thing. And that seems not to have been the case.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Prediction markets have one of the most fascinating histories of anything in crypto. Starting in the early days of Augur, which came out of the rise and fall of Intrade, there was early experimentation in this category that essentially didn't work. Then we had Polymarket come onto the scene, and they were sort of doing stuff, and it wasn't clear what would happen. It was popular around the elections, but then it wasn't. It was this weird history.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Like many things we've talked about today, a lot of the pieces finally came together in a very interesting way. Now it's become one of the hottest categories in crypto. Polymarket and Calci are fiercely competing for what seems to be a growing pie of users. The intersection with sports betting has now become inevitable. There are some regulatory tailwinds that have really unleashed this category. The exact role that crypto is going to play is still to be determined, although we think there are some really interesting avenues to explore further.
--:-- Robert Hackett: It's just a very interesting, weird history with this space. It's awesome to see that it's finally having its moment. I personally couldn't be more excited to finally see this in more of a mainstream way.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I personally got into crypto from my exploration with Augur back in 2016.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: That's what I was going to say. It's come full circle. You are a crypto convert because of prediction markets. You shouldn't bury that. That's what brought you in, isn't it?
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Absolutely, yeah. It's fun to see that 10 years later, we're here. It's finally manifesting.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Okay, well, on the subject of predictions, what predictions do you two have for 2026? Let me preface this by saying I asked you this last year. Eddie, you said that you hoped that all of the new block space would be put toward productive ends. We did get meme coins after that. We'll put that aside. Darren, you said that you hoped that the applications section of this report would be longer than the infrastructure section. I think maybe that did come to be the case, because we didn't spend too much time talking about infrastructure here. We were mostly talking about how people are using this stuff. So I think you both were on the money last year with your predictions. I would love to hear what you think is going to happen in 2026.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Taking "productive" charitably, of course. The spirit of my comment last year was that we have all this new capacity. The capacity needs to be used. The pattern of the history of technology has been that we figure out how to create some surplus, and then some time passes during which entrepreneurial types figure out how to exploit that surplus and use it for something. What they use it for can be difficult to predict, but surpluses don't sit around long. Nature doesn't tolerate this. I feel that has been vindicated to some degree.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: If I had to predict the next year, I think we continue to see advances in the places we've seen them. There will be more infrastructural improvements, more capacity, all those things. We haven't talked too much about that today, but I think that will continue. But what I think we will really see is all the integrations, promises, applications, and wirings together that we've started to hear about this year. Those will be tested. They will launch, they will be live. We will see interesting uses of them, and we will see their flaws as well.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I alluded to one of them today: maybe we will see the emperor has no clothes and privacy is actually a very strict prerequisite for many people. Maybe we will, maybe we won't. Maybe we'll have some band-aid solutions while more sophisticated cryptographic solutions come online. When financial institutions start putting assets on chain because of the way regulations shake out, maybe some of them will require certain types of credentials, certain types of KYC to access them. I don't really know.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: The point is, as people get to the finish line in launching these new products and showing the culmination of these interests that have been exposed, we will figure out what shortcomings exist. Whenever there are obvious bottlenecks, obvious problems in the development of new goods and services, entrepreneurs come and try to fix them. They say, "You have this huge problem that's blocking you. I can actually solve that problem for this person, this person, this person, and that makes a business." So we will see the evolution of those things.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: I also cautiously think that we will see maybe more applications. Maybe that looks more like self-custodial neobanky stuff, maybe agentic payments-y stuff. I'm not exactly sure. But my feeling is that as stablecoins get wired up and payments become a possibility and more people have wallets, it will get easier from a user experience perspective to shift them from "I only have a little savings in this thing" into "Oh, I can make a payment with it. Now I can use this product easily, or I can defer to some agent to spend on my behalf." I'm not exactly sure, but I think we will see the consequences of the applications and the partnerships.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Excellent. So we'll see new application areas open up, and we'll also be able to identify bottlenecks and shortcomings with the current state of the technology. Coupling this with your statement earlier, your earlier bet with Darren on privacy — I'm hoping privacy will be a big thing, but we'll see. Stablecoins, yeah. People will recognize that we need privacy, but maybe still won't be using it all that much in a year's time.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Yep.
--:-- Robert Hackett: All right, Darren, let's hear from you. What are your predictions for 2026?
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: I've been saying that crypto is a 17-year-old, so next year it's going to turn 18. It can finally vote. A full-on adult. Now it's fully legally liable for its own actions. Life comes at you fast. I think it'll present itself on the regulatory side. I think it'll become an adult with real clear rules and regulations. I think it'll become an adult with respect to institutional adoption — the commitments will materialize. People really will take crypto seriously as an industry. I hope that just continues from the early signs we're seeing this year.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Maybe one thing I'll say a little bit more specific in terms of predictions. This year, we've heard a lot of talk about how stablecoins and other things can make things faster or cheaper or better than the traditional way of doing things. While that is all true, and we've got a lot of data to support that, I think the real opportunity for bringing the world on chain, the real opportunity for rebuilding these global payment rails around stablecoins, the real opportunity for crypto is the ability to now do things differently. The experimentation that we will hopefully see around new ways to do payments altogether — things that we're not even thinking about today. That's what I'm most excited for. Not bringing the fees down from 2% to less than 1%. The new opportunities that get unlocked as a result of us rebuilding the financial system, creating this new internet. That's what I'm excited for, and I hope we start to see that next year.
--:-- Robert Hackett: I think people come for the savings and they stay for the network. That's what's really going to happen. The consequences of people having custody, having keys, having programmable assets, having composable assets — those are much larger.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: When you say "come for the savings," you mean flocking to the store of value narrative and then going from there?
--:-- Robert Hackett: I mean saving on transaction fees, saving on payments, payment processors, treasury management, all these sort of basic things. I think those popularize stablecoins, and the consequences are much bigger than just the savings.
--:-- Robert Hackett: Very interesting. All right. We'll have to see next year how things shake out. Thank you to Darren and Eddie. Thanks so much for joining. This has been a pleasure. For everybody who is listening, we will put links in the show notes to our 2025 State of Crypto Report, just released, as well as our new State of Crypto data dashboard, which updates these numbers more regularly. You can follow those metrics that we're tracking there. Eddie, Darren, thanks so much for coming on.
--:-- Darren Matsuoka: Thanks, Robert.
--:-- Eddie Lazarin: Of course. Pleasure.
--:-- [Host voiceover]: Thanks for listening to this episode of the a16z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at @a16z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.
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