Chris Dixon: The Long Game for Crypto There's a growing trend to declare that "non-financial use cases for crypto are dead." Some even argue that the "read-write-own" model has failed. This conclusion misunderstands both our argument and the stage we're in. We are clearly living in the era of blockchain finance. However, the core idea was never that all crypto applications will emerge simultaneously, or that finance won't arrive first. The core idea, then and now, is that blockchain introduces a new primitive: the ability to coordinate people and capital at internet scale, with ownership embedded directly in the system (and increasingly, AI agents). Finance is the most natural place for this primitive to prove itself, which is why we've been the first to highlight it as a productive use for tokens. Finance is not separate from the broader narrative, but rather part of it. It's the foundation and testing ground for everything else. This belief has influenced our work at a16z Crypto from the beginning. Many of our investments have been explicitly financial, including Coinbase, Maker, Compound, Uniswap, and Morpho. As I wrote in my book, "Blockchain networks can make financial infrastructure a public good, upgrading the internet from handling bits to handling money." We anticipated that finance would be crucial during this transition, and we continue to expect that other categories will evolve alongside it in the near future. a16z and a16z Crypto are playing a long-term game. Because building a new industry takes time, our fund is structured with a time horizon of 10 years or more. The Importance of Sequencing So why haven't non-financial use cases yet fully taken off? First, sequencing matters. Infrastructure and deployment often precede new categories of applications. The internet didn't start with social media, streaming, or online communities. It all started with packet switching, TCP/IP, and basic connectivity. Only when hundreds of millions of people came online did entirely new cultural and economic categories emerge. Crypto is no different. Before meaningful adoption can occur in media, gaming, AI, or other areas in the distant future, hundreds of millions of people will likely need to come online through financial applications like payments, stablecoins, savings, and decentralized finance (DeFi). Many applications rely on established wallets, identity verification, liquidity, and trust. There are other factors at play. One of the core advantages of crypto is the ability to grant ownership to the community through tokens. However, years of scams, exploitative practices, and regulatory attacks have severely undermined trust in tokens, likely contributing to the recent market downturn. Building a community of true owners in an environment of cynicism is difficult. Policy as the Missing Piece This is why we have been advocating for a clear regulatory framework surrounding tokens for over five years. Good policy does two things simultaneously. It provides a clear roadmap for developers and establishes risk-based safeguards to protect consumers and build market trust. Market structure legislation like the CLARITY Act would introduce disclosure and transparency standards to prevent rug-pulling and self-dealing. While these standards are commonplace in other markets, they have long been absent in crypto. For emerging technologies, policy progress is often slow and gradual, but can also be rapid. Much of my work over the years, including my book, has focused on laying that foundation. It's about explaining the benefits of crypto and blockchain to policymakers and the broader public, and providing a well-grounded perspective on how these technologies might evolve over time. We often hear that this framework has been valuable to policymakers in Washington, D.C. Years of education, debate, and refinement can quietly accumulate in the background, only to surface when a political or institutional window of opportunity opens. The response to GENIUS powerfully validates this theory. Almost overnight, stablecoins transformed from dubious to legitimate from a financial, technological, and governmental perspective. While the shift seemed sudden, it was the result of years of hard work by developers, policymakers, and advocates who came together at the right moment. While I expected a positive response, the speed and scale of adoption surprised even me. This makes me optimistic about market structure legislation that, at a high level, will do for other categories of tokens what GENIUS did for stablecoins. A Long-Term Game Great things take time. The breakthroughs we see today in AI are the result of decades of hard work by brilliant minds. (The first paper on neural networks was published in 1943.) The origins of the internet date back to the 1960s, and the commercial internet was only possible thanks to visionary developers and thoughtful policy actions in the 1990s. Building a new technological system is a long-term game, and this is what a long-term game looks like: long periods of groundwork followed by rapid inflection points. If you want to work in a more mature industry, that's fine. But if you want to build a new industry from scratch, the process can be confusing and frustrating, but it's important work. It's only through periods of confusion that clarity emerges. Chris Dixon: @cdixon Programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups, crypto. Managing Partner of a16zcrypto. See announcement: http:/a16z.com/disclosures twitter.com/gorochi0315/status...