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DeFi Warhol
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Building top-tier crypto products since 2017. 5K MMR in research. 10K MMR in visualisation.
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DeFi Warhol
a16z just published five pieces that together tell one story, their vision for the next economic layer of the internet The thesis broken down: → The ad model is dying. AI agents don't click, don't scroll, don't get distracted. The business model that funded the open web for 28 years doesn't work when the buyer isn't human → Micropayments finally work. HTTP 402 ("Payment Required") was created in 1997 but never had viable rails. Stablecoins fix that. x402 (Coinbase) and MPP (Stripe x Tempo) now let agents pay inside a single HTTP request at sub-cent costs → This creates the "headless merchant" businesses that are just an API, docs, and a price per call. In MPP's first week alone, 913 agents ran 34,000+ transactions across 60+ services → The base layer is getting fixed too. Two research pieces on Strong Chain Quality and predictable transaction inclusion solve the problems that kept serious finance off-chain, MEV extraction, leader manipulation, and censorship at the validator level → Wall Street is already migrating. DTCC tokenizing U.S. Treasuries by H1 2026, NYSE building 24/7 onchain equity trading, Tradeweb executing real-time onchain Treasury financing on weekends with BofA and Citadel One bet across all five pieces: open protocols + programmable payments + AI agents + institutional-grade chains = the next internet-scale wealth creation event
a16z crypto
@a16zcrypto
03-28
This week, five different stories pointed towards the same shift: the internet is getting a new economic layer. Here's everything we published:
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DeFi Warhol
I went through Drift’s incident thread, and this is the clearest play by play of what happened to @DriftProtocol ↓ March 23 The setup appears to have started here. Drift says 4 durable nonce accounts were created. That suggests parts of the attack were prepared in advance. Drift’s implication → At least 2 of 5 signer approvals were already tied to the setup March 27 Drift says the Security Council multisig was updated because one council member was replaced. It did not explain why. But the change did not fully remove the attacker’s path. March 30 A new durable nonce account was created for someone in the updated multisig. That suggests the attacker still had effective access to 2 of the 5 required signers. April 1 Drift spotted unusual activity. Users were told not to deposit. Deposits and withdrawals were suspended shortly after. Later that day, Drift says there was a legitimate-looking test withdrawal from the insurance fund. About a minute later, 2 pre-signed durable nonce transactions were executed. Those transactions created and approved a malicious admin transfer. After that, the attacker gained control of Drift’s Security Council admin powers. With that control, the attacker added a malicious asset, removed withdrawal limits, and drained the protocol. Around $280M was withdrawn from: borrow/lend deposits, vault deposits, and trading deposits. Drift says this was not a smart contract bug and there is no evidence of compromised seed phrases. Their response: → Freeze the remaining protocol functions → Remove the compromised wallet from the multisig → Work with security firms, bridges, exchanges, and law enforcement From the looks of it. I'm thinking that this might be an inside job.
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DeFi Warhol
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CT was flooded with airdrop tier lists in January. We're at the end of Q1 now. Not a single S-tier project has shipped their token. OpenSea delayed SEA indefinitely. Monad gave the community 3.3% after three years and prioritized KOLs over actual testers. 84% of 2025 token launches trade below TGE. 88% lost value within three months. ICOs are quietly replacing the model because projects realized airdrops attract sellers, not buyers. So why does anyone still farm? Because in an extreme fear market (Fear & Greed at 10–19, lowest since 2022), farming feels like the only asymmetric bet left. And honestly? They're not entirely wrong. The B/C-tier projects that actually shipped are quietly paying out while everyone waits for S-tier glory that never comes. The airdrop meta isn't dead, but tier lists are not a strategy. Pick projects with real products and real catalysts, or be someone else's exit liquidity. x.com/18226569814185/182265698...…
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