Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has recently removed the word “crypto” from its flagship fund branding, instead now referring to it as the “frontier.”
The firm has claimed that it “will continue to invest in crypto” but considers this move an expansion of its focus.
To celebrate this expansion, Protos decided to go back in time and review some of the high-flying predictions and claims about crypto that a16z and its partners used to make.
a16z not chasing ‘the next hot thing’
Ali Yahya, then an a16z general partner, told CoinDesk in 2023 that a16z was “100% committed on crypto as a space” in a conversation where he pointed out that many “fair weather” venture capitalists were moving their focus away from crypto to focus on “chasing the next hot thing, which is AI at the moment.”
More recently, Yahya announced that he was exiting a16z and also noted that he cares “most about building infrastructure that enables open software ecosystems.”
He also observed that that “most uses of AI will soon be many-to-many: many humans and many agents working together.”
Daily crypto users still a billion short
Chris Dixon, an a16z general partner, while on a podcast discussing its newest crypto fund, emphasized how valuable it will be to get a billion users to be daily users of crypto.
A16z’s 2025 State of Crypto report estimates that there were somewhere between 40 and 70 million monthly active users.
AI might destroy us
Ben Horowitz, one of the founding partners, warned that the United States needs to get to “world-class” in crypto, or artificial intelligence might destroy us.
Bitcoin is the new internet
In 2014 the other founding partner, Marc Andreessen, predicted that “in 20 years, we’ll be talking about Bitcoin the way we talk about the internet today.”
Billions of crypto users to come from gaming
Arianna Simpson, then an a16z partner, predicted the next hundreds of millions or billions of crypto users would come from gaming, specifically games like Axie Infinity.
Axie Infinity would subsequently collapse.
Read more: What it was like to have Quontic Bank’s metaverse pool party all to myself
Behold, the ‘golden era of web3’
Dixon, when Crypto Fund 4 was launching in 2022, proclaimed that web3 would power the next computing cycle, and claimed that “we think we are now entering the golden era of web3.”
A quaint prediction about DAOs
Yahya, in 2021, noted that “in the same way that the internet unlocked all sorts of new fundamental value by improving messaging, DAOs have the potential to do the same by improving our social mechanisms of coordinating humans and capital on the internet.”
This prediction now feels quaint, given how frequently DAOs are ignored, exploited, or bypassed.
Read more: Black Thursday revisited: MakerDAO keeper exploited for $500K
Is TikTok ‘NFT-ised’ yet?
Sriram Krishnan, an a16z general partner and former senior White House policy advisor on artificial intelligence under Donald Trump, predicted in 2021, “I suspect we will see all forms of online content traditionally in social networks NFT-ised. Imagine, for example, every TikTok video having an ‘owner.'”
Read more: An actual NFT success story? Tascha Labs’ shattered diamond
Horowitz loses a bet
In 2014, Horowitz challenged Felix Salmon to a bet, with Horowitz staking that 10% of Americans would use BTC monthly by 2019.
Trump is like an internet comments section
Andreessen, on Joe Rogan’s show, predicted that every politician will cryptographically sign every statement they make so that there’s an immutable record.
He’s also deleted a bunch of his old tweets, including one where he relays something he overheard, namely: “Trump is like an internet comments section decided to run for president.”
Only time will tell if crypto stays at the frontier for a16z.
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