Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon: What’s at Stake in Crypto Regulation

Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Robert Hackett discuss one of the most consequential policy debates facing the crypto industry: the push for comprehensive U. S. market structure legislation and what regulatory clarity could mean for innovation, financial markets, and America's technological leadership. They explore the CLARITY Act, stablecoins, securities law, consumer protection, and why both builders and financial institutions are calling for clear rules of the road. Along the way, they discuss the lessons of the early internet, FTX, open financial networks, and why they believe thoughtful regulation can strengthen innovation rather than slow it down.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Dixon?

  Stable coins are tokenized stocks or dollars on blockchains. Rivals the size of the Visa network, trillions of dollars transacted. If you have a dollar of that stablecoin, there is a dollar sitting in the bank. And that's why the Clarity Act working its way through the Senate is so important.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  One of the biggest opponents to the bill is Senator Elizabeth Warren.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  And why? Why are we working on this?

• 0:20Speaker 01

  She says that North Korea and terrorists and ransomware hackers are going to run wild if this bill passes. The national security people I talk to typically don't agree with that because there's a trail. Another debate that has been opened with respect to Clarity bill. Developers should be held more liable for the software that they write. If you saddle people who don't plot us, they get used by many people for many reasons. It's a kill shot to the industry, which is clearly the goal. Volumes are now rivaling Visa network, which is insane. Lots of gigantic financial institutions have rushed in. BlackRock, JP Morgan, Visa itself, Mastercard. What happens if Clarity does not?

• 0:58Erik Torenberg?

  Crypto has reached a pivotal moment. As Congress debates landmark market structure legislation, the decisions made today could shape where the next generation of financial infrastructure is built and whether the United States remains the global leader in crypto innovation. In this episode, Robert Hackett sits down with Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon to discuss why regulatory clarity matters, what the Clarity Act would change, and how clear rules could unlock the next phase of blockchain adoption, from stable coins and tokenized assets to the future of the internet itself.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Welcome to the A16Z Crypto Show. I'm Robert Hackett and I'm here with Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, who, if you watch the show, need no introduction.

• 1:46Marc Andreessen?

  Great to be here.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  So today we're talking about regulation. Congress is currently hashing through some legislation, once in a generation market structure legislation that could determine where the future of the financial system and internet get built. It passed in the House last year with bipartisan support, and it has been making its way through the Senate ever since. Now, there's been lots of fights and obstacles over it, which we'll get into. But before we do, I want to zoom out and go big picture and talk about why regulatory clarity matters, what the status quo costs us, and what's at stake for the country and for anybody who may end up using this technology.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  So, Mark, I'd like to start with you. Back in January 2014, you wrote an op ed for the New York Times called "Why Bitcoin Matters." Things were a little bit different then. This was a pretty contrarian position to stake out. The crypto industry, which, if you could even call it that, back then, looked very, very different. How have things changed from then to now?

• 2:58Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, sure. So 2014, so 2014 was so long ago that the New York Times actually ran a positive piece on crypto.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  From you.

• 3:06Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And from me, with my name on it. And so, yes, this was in the distant past. This is for the kids watching this. This is when dinosaurs were on the earth 13 years ago. Might as well have been in the 1500s. But yeah, I'm actually really proud of that piece. And so if you read that piece today, I think it holds up really well. I think it holds up in a few respects. So, you know, one is, and I should say this, like, it's actually fairly amazing. The Bitcoin white paper, you know, this piece is even five years into the macro trend. And, you know, it was still the kind of thing where it was still, you know, big news to even, you know, believe that this technology mattered at all. So I think it was, you know, I think, I think I was prescient, not that Bitcoin is going to matter, but I think I was prescient and kind of forecasting that we were still in the beginning of the adoption curve.

• 3:49Marc Andreessen?

  Like, there was still, there were still a lot of people that were going to have to, you know, that were going to have to learn about this, want to learn about this and be part of it. And so I think that that holds up. I spent a lot of time, you know, in the piece and around that time, trying to really educate people on the nature of this technology with Bitcoin, with the blockchain, because that, you know, that was new. And, you know, for people who are not, you know, don't have computer science degrees or math degrees, like, that is kind of a, well, for people who do have computer science degrees, it's kind of a weird idea. So for people who don't have computer science degrees, like, it's a genuinely new idea. So, and I think the importance of that has held up really well. You know, I think the thing that, you know, in retrospect, you know, is, needs to be changed about the piece is, you know, every time I said Bitcoin, just swap in crypto, right? Which is, like, at that time Bitcoin was crypto.

• 4:34Marc Andreessen?

  Like, it was, you know, it was essentially the only game in town. You know, Chris, you can correct me on the timing if you want, but I believe at that point, there was the proposal for what were called colored coins.

• 4:45Marc Andreessen?

  Around then, so people don't remember, there was a proposal for this thing called colored coins, which, by the way, is the single worst branded proposal of all time. You know, much, much, much worse than New Coke. But the concept of it was actually Bitcoins, Bitcoins that were going to be tagged basically with properties that would let them represent other things. And so that sort of idea was that Bitcoin would be extended to basically enable both tokenization of real world assets and also, you know, virtual assets like NFTs. You know, of course, what happened was that didn't happen. And what happened instead was the creation of new blockchains and the creation of new crypto platforms and then ultimately Ethereum and then everything else that followed. And so, you know, what started as a technology became an industry.

• 5:28Marc Andreessen?

  And so I think if you, if you read that piece, you'll see that I projected many of the use cases and the future development of technology, but it took a different path. Now Bitcoin obviously has been very successful since then, but, you know, what we've really seen since then is this explosion of innovation. This explosion of innovation that has both happened and that wants to happen around all the other use cases that we, that we talked about in the piece.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's actually remarkable how well that piece holds up. But there is one forecast in there that I want to cite in particular that stands out, which is, and I quote, you say, "The coming years will be a period of great drama and excitement revolving around this new technology." I think you were spot on there. Chris, you've been there since the start as well. You were an early advocate and acolyte of crypto. How have things changed from the early days to now?

• 6:17Chris Dixon?

  Well, as Mark was saying, at the time, way back, sort of 2014, in the early days, it was mostly kind of hobbyist and, you know, super enthusiast and kind of a, kind of a subculture, cultish thing. The technology was, Bitcoin was sophisticated, but a lot of the things Mark alluded to, like kind of the newer blockchains, were early, had performance issues, scaling issues, other kinds of things. Fast forward today, you know, every day you'll see a new announcement from a major bank or fintech company announcing a platform involving stable coins or tokenized stocks or other kinds of digital assets. The stablecoin volume, so, you know, stablecoins, for those who don't know, are basically what

• 7:01Chris Dixon?

  Mark described with Bitcoin, except they're dollars on blockchains. That is now, you know, rivals the size of the Visa network, trillions of dollars transacted. You can go into WhatsApp and send money anywhere in the world for almost free in the same way you'd send a text message using stablecoins. It's, you know, really the way money should work. It was, I think Mark, Mark could speak to this as one of the pioneers of the internet, but I think was one of the kind of ideas that early internet pioneers expected to happen, honestly, much sooner. And for a variety of reasons, took a lot longer, but we're now finally kind of seeing that dream, you know, come alive with, with money moving as easily as bits. So now it's a very mature industry.

• 7:45Chris Dixon?

  The technology, the underlying infrastructure has gotten much, much more sophisticated. Even three years ago, might cost, what I just described, might cost a couple of dollars, if not tens of dollars, to do that transaction. Now, you know, on most of the popular blockchains, Solana, Ethereum and so forth, it's sub one second to close, to settle the transaction, sub one penny to send something, right? So, and that's due to kind of the equivalent of Moore's Law on blockchains, which is you've gotten, you've gotten sort of more and more performant chains. You know, you read about hacks and things in the newspaper about crypto. The reality is Bitcoin has never been hacked. Ethereum has never been hacked. Organizations that use these things have had lax security and have been hacked, but

• 8:26Chris Dixon?

  the chains themselves, highly secure, highly performant now. And you have, you know, big institutions and, you know, trillions of dollars moving around on these things, which, you know, of course, brings us to our topic, which is, you need, you know, when you have that going on, you need regulatory clarity. You need, you need a framework around that.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  But let's talk about that because you cited that stablecoin volumes are now rivaling the Visa network, which is insane. This is trillions of dollars per quarter turning through this system. Lots of gigantic financial institutions have rushed in, BlackRock, JP Morgan, Visa itself, Fidelity, Mastercard. I mean, you could rattle off just any number of names and they're all building on this technology right now. But we've gotten this far without rules. So there's been very little in the way of regulatory clarity or guidance. Why do we need, why do we need rules now?

• 9:24Chris Dixon?

  Well, so yeah, so good question. So for a variety of reasons, the kind of for political and policy reasons, the regulation around crypto was broken into two components, stablecoins and the rest of the market. So stablecoins are roughly 15%, let's call it, the market. 85% is, is the rest. There was a bill-

• 9:42Speaker 01

  And that's by market cap.

• 9:43Chris Dixon?

  That's by market cap. Last year, a bill passed Congress, assigned by the president, called the Genius Act, which provides a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins. And it's not a coincidence that stablecoins are also the area that's taken off the most in the last year, because once you have regulatory clarity, that means that builders have certainty, consumers can know, if you're an American consumer and you use USDC or another genius compliant stablecoin, you know that if you have a dollar of that stablecoin, there is a dollar sitting in the bank, because that's the genius regulation, that that bank is audited and it's sitting in short-term treasuries, which is basically the safest thing the financial system can offer. And so you know that dollar, you can be assured that dollar's there, it's

• 10:25Chris Dixon?

  not an FTX, it's not a lunataro situation where it will disappear tomorrow. That gives you, as a consumer, confidence and protection. If you're an institution, if you're a bank, if you're Stripe, if you're PayPal, and you want to go and, go and enter this market, you want to know there are predictable rules, that there's a framework around it, there's not going to be an FTX, that what you build will be compliant, not just next year, but the next 10 years, right? And so, and then if you're an entrepreneur, of course, it's similar kind of logic. You want to know there's certainty, you want to know their, their rules. You know, you're, all our entrepreneurs are happy to hire lawyers and pay a lot of money to be compliant, they just need to know what they're aiming for. And so, as a result of that bill, we've seen a takeoff in, particularly around stablecoins. And then,

• 11:09Chris Dixon?

  kind of the close cousin of stablecoins is like, once you put a dollar on a blockchain, you can put a stock, you can put a treasury bill. And so that's also, you know, been, there's been a lot of adoption there with people kind of, you know, relying on agency guidance and other, not non-legislative regulatory levers to give them guidance on how to do that. But the big kind of hanging problem right now is that you've got sort of this, this other section of the market, including blockchains themselves, which stablecoins are built on, which don't have a comprehensive federal regulatory framework. And that's why the Clarity Act, which is being, working its way through the Senate, is so important. Because that provide, that's sort of the other 85% of the market. So you can kind of imagine it's like, as if we had a regulatory framework for cellphones, but not for cell towers or something, like, half, half, half the technology is regulated, the other half

• 11:53Chris Dixon?

  has this sort of uncertainty around it. People are still building there, people are trying to do their best to kind of, you know, understand what the rules are. There, you know, there's this other lever of policymaking, which is the agencies, such as the SEC and CFTC, they provided some guidance and things. But ultimately, you know, what industries are built on, as you alluded to in the beginning, with the internet, is they're built on legislation. Legislation is solid ground to build on, it's immutable, you know, has the stamp of approval of the US Congress. It's, you know, the result, importantly, legislation is the result of a lot of smart people getting together, people from different political parties compromising,

• 12:34Chris Dixon?

  you know, finding the right balance between industry, consumer protection and so forth. And, and, you know, so we think ultimately, that's, that's what is required and why the Clarity Act is so important.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  So, as you mentioned, we do have some rules, it's for stablecoins, that covers a sliver of the market, but there's this gigantic swath of the market that remains largely unregulated. Mark, why, why do we need rules for all of this? And why do we need them now?

• 13:02Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so, so, you know, as we've been in this just kind of bizarre, violent state for the last several years, you know, where sort of crypto was developing, you know, largely without rules, you know, for better or for worse, in kind of, you know, what I would describe as sort of experimental ways, you know, between, between sort of inception through 2020. And then we had, you know, between 2020 and 2024, we had an administration, you know, in the White House that just like, absolutely just decided to just kill the industry, like just, you know, flat out, you know, declared war, specifically, by the way, declined to regulate, refused to regulate, and instead decided to prosecute. And, you know, this kind of really remarkable thing happened, which is the industry did die through that process, like crypto is still standing. And the sort of most bizarre sort of aspect of that for me is I've had these conversations with some lawmakers in DC where they say,

• 13:47Marc Andreessen?

  "Well, you know, I'm going to support crypto now because like, if it didn't die during this whole period when we tried to kill it, then it must be good. And, you know, we should probably support it." Which, you know, is sort of the most, you know, kind of reverse logic way I can think of to end up positive on something, but I guess I'll, I guess I'll take it. And so, and then that also led to this kind of bizarre situation where people said, "Well, you know, crypto hasn't, you know, materialized in the way that you guys all said. You know, you don't have all these use cases that, you know, sort of, where are all the use cases? Why, you know, why isn't everybody using crypto?" And it's like, "Well, because there was like a five-year, like, regulatory prosecutorial assault, you know, that tried to kill it." And, you know, in most areas of tech, you know, most areas of the tech industry never go through that. Occasionally, you get one that does. And

• 14:30Marc Andreessen?

  when they do, you know, they, they'll say they live a very different life under very different, different kinds of pressures. And then, you know, along the way, you know, when that sort of assault was happening in America, you know, against American companies primarily, the, you know, overseas companies by and large, you know, ran in whatever way their local jurisdiction allowed. And that culminated in the catastrophe of FTX, right? You know, stealing, you know, just outright stealing customer funds. And then that led to a catastrophic blowup. And then people look at that and they're like, "Well, see, that's, you know, you can't trust crypto." And of course, the real answer is you can't trust like fully unregulated crypto. You like actually have to have a framework and you have to have life risk controls at these companies and you have to have compliance and you have to have auditing and you have to have all the things that a grown-up, you know, financial services business has. And so, anyway, long-winded way of kind of getting

• 15:12Marc Andreessen?

  to the point, which is like, we need a regulatory, we need a stable, permanent regulatory structure for crypto in the US, the same way we have for stocks and bonds and everything else. And we need it both because we need this industry to succeed, which we think, you know, and many people think is extremely important, and we can talk about that. And then, we also need it so that it doesn't lead to catastrophe. We need it so that it doesn't result in where FTX is. And so, and we need it so that people's money, you know, doesn't get stolen. And we need it so that, you know, the winners of the market aren't fly-by-night operations operating on, you know, yachts off some coast somewhere. And so, so in a lot of ways, it's like the most obvious thing in the world, the US financial system's been through this many times before. The most famous case is, you know, the, the Securities Acts that created the SEC, regulated the stock market, after which, you know, the

• 15:55Marc Andreessen?

  US capital markets in the next, you know, 100 years, you know, 90 years became the, you know, the envy of the world. You know, we're not looking for a free lunch, we're not looking for subsidies, we're not looking for, you know, protectionism, we're not looking for support in that way. We're just looking for a, basically a permanent framework that lets people do business in a responsible way. And, you know, I think it's, in a lot of ways, it's the most obvious thing in the world.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  So you mentioned something in there, which is FTX. I think everybody might remember that exchange and its big implosion and collapse and all the fallout from it. What, what is inside of the Clarity Bill that would prevent something like that from happening again?

• 16:32Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, so, well, right now, there's, there is no federal regulator for crypto exchanges, as an example. So, the, you know, New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, they have federal regulators. Right now, there is no, the Coinbase's, Kraken's, FTX, you know, for every good company like Coinbase, there are many offshore ones that are not good. There is simply no regulator. There is no, and this is one of the very important things, it's a, it's a big chunk of the Clarity Act, is to provide that. So the SEC and the CFTC have oversight, they put in, you know, disclosure regimes, anti-fraud regimes, insider trading rules, all the things that, you know, that you are, we are used to, as Mark was saying, with the, with other financial markets. It's just the same kinds of rules with the same

• 17:17Chris Dixon?

  agencies overseeing them, that would, you know, so, for example, FTX wasn't audited properly, very simple. This is what ultimately happened, right? They were moving, apparently moving money between different entities, they didn't have all the money there. You know, if you're a federally registered crypto exchange, you are, you have, at an absolute minimum, you're being audited, you have all sorts of controls, they have surveillance regimes, they, you know, there's a whole- Suite of of things that are in the in the in the act that would empower federal regulators to do their job. And and if you're not compliant with these things, you couldn't operate in the US, is how it works, right? So it would have prevented that, you know, other big catastrophes.

• 18:00Chris Dixon?

  Terra Luna was a big one. It was a stable coin that wasn't stable. It didn't have dollars or or any other kind of stable currency behind it. It was essentially this kind of, you know, self referential thing where the token has valued by the token and would, you know, should never have been presented as a stable coin and would be illegal. It is illegal under, you know, the genius framework.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Works well when things are going up.

• 18:22Chris Dixon?

  A lot of things work well when things are going up and then don't work otherwise. So, yeah, these are, these are not, I mean, it's not, like, the details are hard, which is why it's been seven years or so that some of us have been working on the Clarity Act, and it's now been a year, I think, over a year since the House passed its version of it. And, you know, a year the Senate's been working on it. There's a lot of hard details. It takes a lot of kind of working across the aisles. There's been a very bipartisan effort. So I'm not to say the details, but you know, this is, has been done before, right? Financial industries have been regulated and the principles that that are used in other industries are applied here. And it's a very robot, what's in the Clarity Act now,

• 19:03Chris Dixon?

  the text that was released, you know, it's frustrating to read some of the news coverage, which apparently just doesn't, they, you know, they don't read the bill as far as I can tell, because they say things like there aren't, you know, sort of safeguards, for example, AML and, you know, sanctions regimes and all this is simply not true. There's a very, it is very, you know, it has strict definitions of who is, who is subject to, to, you know, these requirements. It applies all the same kind of money laundering and, you know, treasury, other kind of treasury rules to crypto intermediaries that are applied in other markets. The Federal Order Police just came out with their endorsement of the

• 19:44Chris Dixon?

  Clarity Act, the largest law enforcement organization in the country. You know, so people are sort of opponents are saying it doesn't have proper law enforcement, you know, clauses and and and rules, but this is simply not true.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's, let's talk about that. Well, let's, let's go over the fights that are going on with this bill. By the way, it's like 600 something pages, I think, at this point, but.

• 20:07Chris Dixon?

  So drag it into ChatGPT and ask, is there money laundering? Not that hard, you know, if, if people want to actually learn about this, you can do it.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  But so, so let's, let's go over each of these fights, each of these debates that's going on. You talked about illicit finance. That's one of the big ones. And in fact, one of the biggest opponents to the bill is Senator Elizabeth Warren. Her and her camp, she's called it a ticket to sanctions evasion. That's a quote from her. You know, she, if you hear her describe it, she says that North Korea and terrorists and ransomware hackers, they're going to run wild if this bill passes. What do you, what do you say to that?

• 20:49Chris Dixon?

  I mean, right now, there, it's extremely unclear, for example, which entities are subject to what rules. And so what you have is, you know, essentially a dynamic, what I've learned is, when you have gray areas in regulation, you have essentially a race to the bottom, right? Because you'll have, you know, look, I was on the board of Coinbase for a long time, Mark's on the board. Coinbase is a US-based company. They're, you know, they take regulation and compliance extremely seriously. But for every Coinbase, look, it's, it costs a lot of money and it slows down your product development. And so, you know, every year, a new offshore competitor will pop up that doesn't do those things and becomes popular because they can offer lower fees or, you know, whatever, fat better, iterate their product faster because they're not doing all the kind of compliant things,

• 21:33Chris Dixon?

  right? And so over and over again, we've had this phenomenon where there's sort of the good actor that, that, you know, this is one of the things that frustrated us frankly, is that we try to bet on the good actor, the compliant actor. And then for every one, there's kind of this evil twin, you know, the doppelganger offshore that sort of copies all the features, but doesn't do the compliance.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Stupid that one.

• 21:51Chris Dixon?

  And gets, yes, and gains popularity. And so what you end up having is just you end up, the, the ambiguity ends up favoring the bad actors, right? And so what the important thing to do with good regulation, I think the Clarity Act does this, is you very clearly define the regulatory perimeter, like who's subject to this and who isn't. And if you're not subject to it, you can't do business in the US. So like, if you're in the US and doing business, you have to be subject to it. You give clear definitions and then you have clear rules. And, and, and so as an example, in, in the Clarity Act, if you're a financial intermediary, if you're a, you know, somebody like a Coinbase or like a company that's holding customer funds, you're subject to all of the same regulatory, same

• 22:31Chris Dixon?

  rules that, you know, fintech, a company like Stripe or PayPal or anyone else. And it's simply, it's black and white in the bill. So I don't know how to argue with people that just simply are saying things that aren't factually untrue like that. It's just, you know, and, and as I mentioned, there's, you know, the endorsement of the various law enforcement agencies, a bunch of very, you know, look, it's not just, and there's, there's a lot of Republican senators who are very strong on national security sanctions, North Korea, who, who support the bill, including a number of Democrats who we think will end up supporting it who similarly are. So I don't think it's, it's neither true, nor is it shown by the kind of the range of support for the bill.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Mark, what do you think about this criticism that the bill enables sanctions evasion?

• 23:17Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so it's really, so I've, you know, spent a bit, you know, I've spent quite a lot of time, you know, kind of in, in, in national security world. And I would say the national security people I talk to typically don't agree with that. In fact, they typically say something quite different, which is ironically, they're, they're hoping that more criminals and terrorists use crypto and use blockchains because there's a, there's a, there's a trail. There's a blockchain and there's a trail. And that is contrasted specifically with how a lot of, for example, terror financing happens today. And so I'll just give you an example of this. There's a thing in kind of middle, the Middle Eastern kind of terror worlds, these terror organizations, there, there is an existing legacy payment system that, by the way, is, is, is not the banks. It's not any, any piece of technology. It's a system called the Hawala system. And it's a, it's an ancient, you know, centuries old

• 24:00Marc Andreessen?

  system. It's basically a sort of informal peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer payments. And it operates fluidly across borders. And the way that it works is, you'll have like two cousins, one in one country and one in the other country, and you go give money to the cousin in one country. And then it, and then that, the money never actually moves, but like that cousin tells the other cousin that the family now has that amount of money. And then as a result, the money, you know, effectively becomes unlocked in the other location. And so you, you literally have peer-to-peer payments happening around the world with actually no, no, no actual transfer, no actual transfer of physical cash. So you can't like catch it at the border. No digital trail whatsoever, because nothing is, nothing is happening digitally, no paper trail, no nothing. And, and, and that's, I think, for example, that's actually how a lot of terror plots are financed. And so

• 24:43Marc Andreessen?

  it would be, there was actually a term a while ago that national security people were kicking around, they called, they called crypto, they called it prosecution futures, which is if we could just get the bad guys to use crypto instead of using the other methods, like we would actually be able to then mine the blockchain to be able to prosecute down the road. And so this is one where it's just, the whole thing has just been incredibly confusing the whole time, because it's kind of this upside down, backwards, you know, kind of thing. And, you know, quite frankly, you know, not, not talking about anybody in office, but there have been even people in industry who have said things like, well, you know, crypto is inherently anonymous and, you know, you can't trace anything, you know, which is just like, you know, it's just like, you know, just like upside down bizarre world, you know, kind of claims, you know, which, which I think frankly, just comes from people, you know, not understanding, understanding the technology. And so I, I think just the actual reality of it is, if, if, if more bad guys are running more money

• 25:27Marc Andreessen?

  through crypto, I think more, more bad guys would get caught, not fewer.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Right on. Yeah. And, you know, there's this thing that happens on TV shows. I'm sure you watch them, crime procedural, cop procedural, where they're like, I'm the criminal, you know, wire me the money in, in Bitcoin. Nobody's going to know about it.

• 25:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so it's a couple of things. So, yeah, so what, so what is, so the traditional thing that they do in TV shows, traditional thing they do is they say, well, you need to put a gun to somebody's head. They say, do a wire transfer, like wire transfer the money, right? And then they'll literally show a digital display and it'll show digital display and it'll literally like have one of these things where it's like zero to 100% as the money moves. And the whole thing happens within like two minutes, right? And then in the real world, it's like, okay, try to, try to move money through the banking system across borders. You know, it's good luck, right? Like days and days and days, you know, because the systems are shut down, they don't work on weekends and the paperwork and the this and the that. It's just like, it's just like completely flat and implausible. So you're exactly right. What's happened is they've extrapolated that straight to crypto. And it's all inherent. And yeah, it's, you know, it's like any of these things, which

• 26:26Marc Andreessen?

  is like, yes, it works, it's, we're afraid on TV, you know, contra, contra maybe what, what, what a lot of people think, you know, television is not actually real life. And yes, it very much does not work that way. Both existing payment system does not work that way in real life and crypto does not work that way in real life.

• 26:45Chris Dixon?

  It's actually a non-trivial kind of research problem that's going on today. Research and product development to build blockchains that do have privacy because they are so they are so public. In that fact, one of the funny things that happened was, you know, we think that's important, just not for nefarious reasons, because if you want to like pay, you know, whatever, I want to pay you for some service, maybe it's a private, you know, it's maybe it's a medical thing or a financial thing, you don't want everyone to know about it, just like we do in the regular financial system, you'd want to have some privacy and that send someone a digital dollar, you want some privacy, right? It seems like a natural thing. It's funny because, you know, for a long time, everyone said, well, why would you want to build privacy? It's only for criminals. Since Genius has passed and now dollars nominated stable coins have gotten more popular. We've actually heard in DC now, people are saying, well, what about privacy? You need to have privacy.

• 27:30Chris Dixon?

  I guess we agree. We agree. It's not always, it actually is very reminiscent of the early internet, you know, and Mark, when you guys added, didn't, wasn't Escape, you guys invented SSL, right?

• 27:40Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 27:41Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. And so, you know, for the kids don't know this, that HTTPS, that was an Escape, that was an invention. And at the time, it was like, well, who would need that? Why would you need to send secret stuff? And at the time, probably some bad guys did use it, maybe, but of course, over time, we all realized that was an important and 99.9% of it is like good behavior, right? It's people interacting with their bank or something, right? You guys had to go, you got, did you go in front of Congress and didn't you have?

• 28:09Marc Andreessen?

  It was a four-year fight. It was actually quite analogous to this. And so, and when we started, so when we started, so Netscape was the first, Escape was the first piece of consumer software that got widely used, that incorporated public key, public key encryption, modern encryption with public keys. And at the time we shipped, we actually had to ship two different versions. We had to ship the strong encryption, we could ship a strong encryption version inside the US, but we were classified, encryption was classified as ammunition under, we're called ITAR export control rules at the time. So encryption was, encryption was classified in the same category as a Tomahawk missile, which meant that the Netscape browser was classified in the same category as a Tomahawk missile. And so, we had to ship deliberately, deliberately insecure versions of the product overseas. And you can imagine how much our overseas customers enjoyed that, right? They get this.

• 28:52Marc Andreessen?

  And by the way, we certainly labeled in the box, right? Which is like weak encryption, you know, basically do not trust this. And you can imagine how that, how that went for sales. And of course, immediately what happened was, of course, foreign competitors immediately then stepped in and, you know, started cloning it and started making a strong encryption. You know, some people outside the US just didn't use our product, they used products that were made outside the US. And so, you know, we went to Washington, you know, as you do when you're a kid, you go to Washington, you kind of explain things logically and they, and they, you know, they kind of, you know, they tend to stare at you like you've grown a third eye. And so, you start to, you know, really kind of get into the, you know, specifics and details of it. But then you get into this like fundamental dichotomy, which is, as you said, which is like, okay, is encryption bad? Because, you know, bad guys are gonna, you know, do bad things with it.

• 29:35Marc Andreessen?

  Or is it good because it is the key to establishing trust and being able to do business and for law-abiding, you know, citizens, you know, both here and overseas, to be able to, you know, cooperate together and be able to conduct business? And so, you know, it's like, do you want to completely eliminate the risk of, of, you know, any sort of ever cyber criminality? Or do you want to, or do you want to make like amazon.com possible? Right? And those questions are kind of deeply intertwined. And so, anyway, it was this, it was this very long, you know, kind of education process. It took, it took four years. It took a very, very long time to unwind. You know, they did ultimately make that change. By the way, the world did not end. And the world did not end for, you know, for several reasons. You know, one is, as you said, the overwhelmingly the use cases were positive.

• 30:18Marc Andreessen?

  And then, you know, the sort of intelligence services, you know, adapted in many ways. And then, and then, and then the other just incredibly positive thing that happened was American industry won, right? And by the way, not just Netscape, but like, you know, many other, you know, the global internet economy is dominated by American companies. And by the way, if you're in the national security state and you ask them the question of, would you rather have this giant industry be dominated by American companies or non-American companies, 100% of the time, they'll tell you they want dominated by American companies because they can deal with American companies, right? Whereas, you know, some, they, you know, they can't deal with some company that's running in some other jurisdiction. You know, they can't, a lot of times they can't even talk to them. And so, anyway, so it was this, it was this classic case study, you know, that one took four years, you know, this one, Chris, this is like a, you know, we're now in what, year

• 31:02Marc Andreessen?

  seven? And so, for people who think the modern world is speeding up, it's, at least in this respect, it's not, it's slowing down. But I, yeah. And this is why, by the way, there's so much pressure right now on clarity to get clarity patches because, you know, seven years through these, through these issues, I think is clearly enough.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  So let's talk about some of the other objections to the bill. Another big one is ethics reform. So the president, his family members, they have interests in crypto businesses. This will come as a surprise to nobody who's been reading the news. How do you, and so the critics say that this bill will enrich the people who are most vocally supportive of it. How do you address that?

• 31:43Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I mean, I would say, first of all, like, like, it's not my area of expertise, but like, I'll say as a citizen, I think there should be ethics rules for government officials. I don't think those should be exclusive to crypto. I think there should be ethics rules around trading stocks and other crypto, for sure, other financial assets. That seems reasonable to me. Number one. Number two, the Clarity Act, even without specific ethics provisions, will add significant restrictions to anyone in crypto, including requirements to, for disclosures around, you know, the risks and holdings of a crypto asset. It will add lockup requirements. So it's only an increase in the restrictions that would be applied to anybody, including

• 32:26Chris Dixon?

  government officials, is point number two. And then point number three, I think what's been frustrating from a political point of view is that, is that the, you know, the, the specific ethics kind of provision around crypto has been coupled with the topic we've been discussing, which is regulating this industry. This bill as proposed right now would be the first bill in US history, I'm told, that regulates an industry and also adds specific ethics provisions for government officials in it, right? This is very exceptional. Normally, government ethics rules are done separately and an industry is regulated separately. So, you know, so I, you know, I think that we're being held to, this industry is being

• 33:10Chris Dixon?

  held to a completely different standard than other industries. That said, I, look, I think that a very reasonable debate for people to have and for, and for politicians and policymakers to figure out is what, what ethics rules should there be for, you know, all financial assets, including crypto. Specifically on the, you know, right now, there is an act of negotiation. I hope, obviously, I hope there's a resolution. It's not, you know, it's between the various politicians, not, not sort of industry. Obviously, I hope they can come, figure something out so that we can move forward because we want to regulate this industry.

• 33:42Marc Andreessen?

  By the way, this bill puts controls on government officials' use of crypto that do not, that are stronger than apply to government officials' stock trading. And so, if you, if you don't like how government officials trade stocks, this bill puts in place something that is much stronger than that for crypto.

• 34:00Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. And one other point I would add is, right now, we think of crypto, most people think crypto as a thing you can trade. You know, I think what they're missing in that is that increasingly, like the stable coins we've been discussing, it's a thing you can use. And if the industry is successful, it will get more, you'll have more and more use cases and more and more ways in which it's sort of embedded into our financial life. It'll be a normal thing for a kid to buy tokenized stocks instead of going to some, you know, traditional stockbroker. And so, I also think it's important with these rules to make sure you separate that kind of trading behavior from the use behavior because, you know, I think it's important for, you know, for government officials to be, have access to modern technology. And I think this is the future of finance, so.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Okay. So there are government ethics rules in the bill and also it's a separate issue from creating market structure rules for crypto. Maybe these are separable issues.

• 34:55Chris Dixon?

  Like the, like the reality of where the politics are right now is that this is, that there are ethics provisions in the current bill, they're still being kind of negotiated. I hope they come to a resolution. But I think from our perspective, the important thing is that after this many years of kind of regulatory gray area and an environment that favors, as I was describing before, kind of a race to the bottom, the important thing from our perspective is we get a regulatory framework passed and, you know, we think the Clarity Act, while not perfect, is significantly better than the status quo. And so, I hope that those issues are resolved.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Got it. You mentioned you mentioned stablecoins again just now. And one of the big fights has been over the treatment of stablecoins in this bill. In particular, the banking lobby, most notably JP Morgan Chase has been very vocal about this. They are unhappy with the idea that you could earn interest on stablecoin holdings. Now, the fear, the concern, the worry is that if consumers can earn interest on stablecoins, that they're going to pull their money out of banks and keep them in these other accounts. That's going to cause deposit flight. And they don't want that to happen. So what's the state of that debate right now?

• 36:06Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I would, yeah, in the bill, essentially, I would say the banks got mostly what they wanted, which is that in the bill, you cannot pay, you cannot pay interest on balances. You can pay, there's, I think the exact language is anything that's functionally or economically similar to a bank account, and there's further legal clauses.

• 36:30Chris Dixon?

  What you can do is sort of more complicated things, like if somebody did multiple transactions, and if they did sort of a formula that's not functionally or economically similar to paying out on a balance. Like you can give them rewards for, you know, using their stablecoin wallet twice a month at Walmart. Walmart could give them some kind of reward back.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  So it's more like a credit card kind of.

• 36:55Chris Dixon?

  Which is what they'd asked for, the banks, it's basically asked for, and the industry, you know, there was, there was, it's all been sort of in the press. There was a, you know, a sort of a prolonged discussion, and they kind of got what they,

• 37:08Chris Dixon?

  they seemed like they got what they had asked for, but then remained, I don't know, seemed to then want more. So I think going any farther, you start to ban, for example, I think, you know, you start to ban things like Starbucks Rewards points and things, right? So I mean, it's, I think it's kind of gotten to the, as far as it can go. And essentially, you know, it was a compromise that was somewhat painful for the crypto industry. But, you know, in the context of the broader bill, we think it nets out, you know, still very, we're still very supportive of the overall bill.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  The thing that I find so interesting is, you know, this debate has been embodied by Brian Armstrong versus Jamie Dimon. They're kind of the two leading voices on this. But JP Morgan has a big blockchain unit. They're working on this stuff.

• 37:56Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  They, they have tokenized deposits that are live on chain.

• 38:00Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  So it's just interesting that, you know, they're trying to slow roll clarity, but also.

• 38:06Chris Dixon?

  I mean, these are, yeah, these are massive organizations, I guess, with, they're, you know, like, they're almost like countries or something, the JP Morgan, so there are many different factions and things. But yes, every, as far as I know, every big bank, including JP Morgan, have significant blockchain efforts. And I think if clarity passes, you'll see a lot of those efforts are, will roll out in a, in a significant way. We're way past the kind of, the way enterprises kind of use new technology, sometimes they kind of dip their toe in and do experimental stuff. We're way past that now. We speak to a lot of these organizations on a regular basis, like they have real significant deployments that are going to go live. Some of them are live, some of them are going to go live with greater regulatory clarity. They, you know, I think they see significant opportunity. I mean, you have to remember, the banking system is,

• 38:51Chris Dixon?

  for a bunch of reasons, I'm not, you know, not necessarily their fault, it's just that they're very, these systems are very complex and very intertwined with each other, but a lot of the technology is very antiquated. I mean, it's not, it's sort of a joke in Silicon Valley that they still have COBOL programmers at banks, but it's actually true, because they, a lot of them have very old code bases. And in their defense, it's because it's a very hard, you know, they're so intertwined that you can't just sort of upgrade your software by yourself. You have to do it all together. And so one of the things that blockchains have done for the financial industry is it's sort of given them a unified framework where they can all kind of say, hey, together, let's move into the 21st century. And it's, so it's kind of solved not just a technology problem, but a coordination problem. And I think if you speak to them, and as we have, they, they're all very excited about that.

• 39:37Chris Dixon?

  And so you'll see, I think, as a result, the other thing I'll say is just like the simple way to think about blockchains is they just remove layers of mediation, sort of, you know, they're disintermediation machines. They remove, you know, many of these things now, like Mark was saying, you send money through a wire. We had a case where we funded a portfolio company, it was international. Literally two weeks later, we couldn't find the money, like this is a significant financing, right? And it turns out, if you, if you actually dig into it, there is no international wire system. Like it's basically, you wired a bank, the bank has some piece of paper that gets moved somewhere else. They wired another bank, like there, there is no financial network, like global network, the way there is a global internet or a global WhatsApp network. It's, it's a patchwork of systems.

• 40:18Chris Dixon?

  And so one of the beautiful things with, say, stablecoins is you're just sort of, you're, you're building something just the way you would build it on the internet, which is this one big thing that kind of goes in over the top network. And so the banks see that opportunity. They say, wow, this is, this is, you know, we can save a lot of money. We can provide better products, you know, we can, you know, modernize a whole bunch of things. And so we see that across the board, that a lot of these organizations are very excited about this, including JP Morgan.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  So this is an opportunity for a big technological upgrade of all these systems. You mentioned they have parts of it that are still running on COBOL, many decades old, and this is a chance to.

• 40:55Chris Dixon?

  And don't take it from me, I mean, Goldman just came out, you know, CEO David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, endorsing the Clarity bill, Fidelity, BlackRock, a bunch of other kind of major financial organizations. They all have major efforts. Many of this is public, you know, the most innovative fintech companies like Stripe have gone in a big way. So you don't have to listen to me, just look at the, look at the news. I mean, it's, we were, at the beginning, we were talking about the early Bitcoin days. It's, we're very far away from that now. These are very big organizations. And the technology is, you know, on the verge of going very mainstream with the right regulation.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  There are a lot of endorsements, a lot of support. The one that sticks out for me, you mentioned earlier, is a lot of the biggest law enforcement organizations are for it, which I think is a major tell. I want to shift over to another debate that has been opened with respect to the Clarity bill, which is over liability for developers.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  There's a former White House cybersecurity official, Carol House, she's raised this concern that developers should be held more liable for the software that they write. She argues that this, if you don't hold them liable, that this could set a dangerous precedent for other areas of technology like AI. So Mark, I know you spend a lot of your time in the AI world, working on this stuff. What do you think about this argument?

• 42:16Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a kill shot to the industry, like it's just like, it's impossible. It makes software development impossible, because how can any software developer anticipate the use of the software down, down, down the road? And you don't even need to think about this in terms of software, just think in terms of anything. You know, if I run a hotel and a criminal stays at the hotel, they use the hotel, you know, and they plan their operation. Does that make you part of their conspiracy? You know, if I'm an engineer in a car and the car is used in a bank robbery, does that make me, you know, accessory to a bank robbery? Like, it's completely insane. You cannot, if you, if you saddle people who build products that get used by many people for many reasons, if you saddle them with downstream liability for the, for the uses, it just kills the industry, which is clearly the goal.

• 42:54Chris Dixon?

  And just to add to that, it's important not to conflate, like, and some of these, like court cases, there's been some conflation of, if you go, if you're, to use Mark's analogy, if you make, build a car, and then you actually like knowingly help a criminal do it, like, then you, then you are in trouble, okay? And no one's debating that, okay? And so if you build a piece of software and you're like, hey, criminals, come use it. And they send you an email, and you're like, how do I do a crime? And you're like, here's how you do a crime. And there have been cases like that in the software world. Like, that is a crime, and no one's debating that, okay? Like, no one, like, what we're talking about here is you're making software, like open source software, whether it's AI or crypto, and you're making it for a, you know, like a constructive use case. You're making a car, you're making a hammer, whatever, you're making an AI model, you're making a blockchain.

• 43:40Chris Dixon?

  And, you know, and then you, for example, make it open source. If you had unlimited downstream liability, or criminal liability, or civil liability, or any kind,

• 43:50Chris Dixon?

  it's, as Mark said, you just, you've simply, like, how could you ever make the, how could you ever decide to do that as an open source developer with that kind of risk? You couldn't. They almost, I think, and Mark, you know better, but in the AI world, I think there've been a few bills, including California, that almost passed, that would have imposed that kind of, basically, unlimited downstream liability on AI models, which, I mean, these people aren't, they aren't big companies that can afford defending themselves, like some five guys in a garage are going to take unlimited liability. Like, it's going to kill it. It's going to kill the whole, it's going to kill open source.

• 44:21Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, this is the thing. So that's the thing. So the first thing, and this is a very live issue in AI policy also, when people are trying to, trying to do this in AI, which I think clearly shows what they're, what they're trying to do. So first is open source dies, right? So just like, right out of the gate, open source dies, because like, open source developers aren't getting paid to start with. You know, they certainly can't take on, you know, enormous negative liability, you know, they certainly can't, you know, even if there were insurance, even if there were insurance available to cover unlimited downstream liability for product use by millions of people, you know, you still couldn't, you know, open source people can't afford to do it. So open source dies, because open source dies, academic research dies, right? Because without open source, there is no, there is no computer science research in any of these fields. It's entirely dependent on open source. So it kills, it kills computer sciences as a field. And that's just to start. Then it kills venture investing, right?

• 45:04Marc Andreessen?

  Because like, we can't, we obviously can't invest in a company if they have, you know, a million times the level of exposure, because somebody does something that they didn't even know about. And then it kills all the companies, right, all the startups, and then it kills the big companies. And it just kind of, you know, because they also can't, they also can't take that on. And so it rips right through. And so, and so this is the thing, where it's just like, the level of misunderstanding of what it takes to actually like run a business or do anything productive is, is, is either like just completely absent when people make that argument, or they are deliberately trying to kill the industry, which, by the way, I think they're trying to deliberately kill the industry.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Let's move on to one of the last objections that I've heard most often, which is that this bill would punch a hole in securities laws. You know, Mark, you mentioned that securities laws have allowed US capital markets to thrive over the past 90 some odd years and have made the US the envy of the world. So some people say that if this bill gets through, a company will just go, hey, I'm going to just tokenize whatever. I'm going to tokenize some asset. I'm going to, you know, put it on a blockchain and that is going to exempt me from SEC oversight and securities law in general. What do you, what's your response to that?

• 46:15Chris Dixon?

  So if you take a stock and you, this is in the bill, if you take a stock and you tokenize it, that's a security and it's, and it's regulated by the SEC like a security is. It's very black and white and clear. The, the only thing that is different in, with respect to blockchain regulation is that there, it delineates in certain situations that blockchains like, like a token like Bitcoin or Ethereum, in the Clarity bill, it delineates in some cases, it'll be regulated by the SEC. In other cases, it'll be regulated by the CFTC. In all cases, they have a federal regulator. And now this, by the way, this is even the sort of the, the last administration that

• 46:58Chris Dixon?

  was opposed to crypto implicitly agreed with this framework. Okay. Cause let me just walk you through it. So Bitcoin, when it started was presumably one or some set of people, whoever Satoshi was. And by definition, when something starts, it's centralized. There's a person behind it. They have sort of inside information and control. And the way the Clarity Act works, at that point, you are regulated by, that token is regulated by the SEC, right? So a new, someone creates a new blockchain, you know, they have control over it. And, you know, they have rules like if they, you know, they have lockups, for example, they have disclosure rules. They have all the kinds of things you expect from securities laws. Over time, when you hit certain thresholds of decentralization and start to look more

• 47:42Chris Dixon?

  like a Bitcoin of today or an Ethereum of today, where there is no central actor that controls it, has inside information and so forth, the Clarity Act designates that the CFTC oversees that token. So it's regulated as a commodity and not a security. Because at that point, you still need regulation to make sure that people aren't, you know, dumping on the market or cornering the market and all the other things that securities, that commodities laws regulate. But it's a different regulatory regime depending on sort of the, the nature of the asset.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  So it becomes more like things like, like gold, precious metals.

• 48:12Chris Dixon?

  That's right. That's right. Yes. It's like Bitcoin and, and even the last administration who was anti crypto, they said at some point that Bitcoin and Ethereum were sufficiently decentralized to be regulated as commodities. Right? So this has been implicit in court cases and in agency decisions from both parties for the last 10 years. All Clarity does is enshrine it in law and, and make the definitions really specific so that people know exactly where they are. So you don't have to go to court to figure it out. Right? So it's really just kind of taking what's been consensus across the courts and the regulators and making it sort of hard coding it and making it specific. But at every moment, so first of all, all existing assets by putting on the blockchain, they're still have, they still are securities, number one. And number two, all assets, digital assets have a federal

• 48:57Chris Dixon?

  regulator, right? And have a framework. And today, today, if I create a token and, you know, and this is the biggest issue you have with like a lot of these things is there's no rules for disclosure. There's no rules for insider trading and lockups. If the Clarity Act passes, like our investments will, we are effective lockup period, meaning that the period in which we can sell will, will increase significantly. Because a product, we'll invest in someone, they'll launch a product, it'll have a token. And until they're, these criteria are met for sort of hitting sufficient decentralization, there are lockups on venture capitalists and founders and so forth. Right? Which is how it should be. I mean, it should be, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a smart risk-based regulatory framework.

• 49:38Chris Dixon?

  And we think will allow for people to build products that are long-term products and build trust in the market. Consumers will, you know, consumers, investors and so forth, all the market participants will have trust in the market because it's regulated, because there's a framework around it. And, and that's how you build a real industry long-term.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  All right. So we've walked through a number of the live fights. All of these things are being debated right now. Any one of them could potentially tank this bill. What happens if Clarity does not pass?

• 50:11Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. Well, one is we'll keep working on it and someday it will pass. Number one, it will pass. Number two, a lot of these things can and are being done by, at the agency level, meaning the, you know, the agencies, the SEC, CFTC, Treasury and so forth. And so, you know, I, I think that the big difference is legislation is, you know, de facto permanent in a way that agency rulemaking is less so. And that's important both to, you know, make sure the rules are there and, you know, for the long term, for protecting consumers, but also for industry to have confidence. As you know, you, you were going to make an investment, you want to build something, those things can take

• 50:54Chris Dixon?

  many years to build. And so, you know, if you have to try to build that on like shifting sands, you're much less likely to make that investment of time and money. And it's just much harder to kind of, you know, you've got enough to worry about as an entrepreneur already without having, you know, kind of a shifting maze of regulatory changes. So, so that would be the downside. It'd be just, it would just sort of prolong that. But, but also look, we're going to, I think I'm optimistic will, it will get passed in the near future. But if it doesn't, we will keep working on it.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Some people have this idea that regulation and innovation are just opposites. They're at odds with one another. They're opposed. Mark, you spend a lot of your time on what you call the little tech agenda, advocating for startups, for builders, for developers. How does all of this fit into that regime? And, and why, why is regulation good in this case?

• 51:50Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So I would say political, political theorists talk about all the different forms of government and the thing that they, you know, have different debates about, you know, different forms of government, how well they work. And the, the one that I think everybody agrees on is there's a specific degenerate form of government called anarcho tyranny. So anarcho from anarchy and then, and then, and then tyranny. And then anarcho tyranny is a social government by which you regulate the law-abiding people to death. The anarcho part of it is you let the rule breakers go absolutely nuts. And then the tyranny part of it is you regulate or prosecute the, the, the good actors to death. And so you basically encourage the criminals and you, you condemn the, you know, the law-abiding. And, and so that, you know, that, that was the governance regime under, under the prior administration. You know, that, you know, that, that was the system. And, and, you know, to your question,

• 52:34Marc Andreessen?

  like startups sell that like very directly. And by the way, in, in two segments, which the startups outside of the US just went wild and did whatever they wanted, you know, which as we, as we discussed, led to FTX. Startups inside the US got brutal punished with, with no route to safety, with no route to a way to actually say to conduct business. And so like, if you were designing from scratch and saying like, what's the worst possible policy? What's the worst possible approach? Like it would be anarcho tyranny, which is what we had. You know, what do you actually want? You want, you want predictability. You want predictability. You want stability. You want prudence. You want reasonableness. You want, you know, protections at the right level of protection. You know, you, you know, you want consumer protections. You want investor protections. You know, you, you want things to be happening in a, in a, in a, in a fair way, but you also, you also want innovation.

• 53:19Marc Andreessen?

  You, you want freedom. You want the ability to innovate. You want the ability to deploy high-quality products that work in the way that, that, that they say they do. You want to be able to have customers be able to trust you and, and you want to be able to know that you're going to be in business in a year and not being sort of wantonly attacked and, and, and destroyed by a system that gives you no way to, to, to do it legally. And so it's, you know, like a lot of things in life, it turns out there, there is a middle ground. There is a, there is a centrist position. You know, the centrist position involves the correct level of regulation. You know, without that, you know, either side of that is, is, is just, you know, absolutely devastating. You know, not as devastating, too much as devastating. And so you want, if you want to kind of only lock it right in the middle, which is what we think this, which is very much what we think Clarity does.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Let's zoom out to and talk about what, what's at stake for the country and for American leadership. Passing the Clarity Act, why is it, why is it so important for the country to do this? What will it lead to?

• 54:20Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, I mean, so this is in the law, we would argue, this is in the long tradition of American technological leadership. And I would say American technological supremacy, which is, you know, do you want to be the country that leads the world in technology or not? And by the way, there's two parts to that, which is one is, you want the technology to exist. When, you know, some people argue that, you know, you're better off without certain technologies. But then there's another part of it, which is technologies do tend to exist, you know, once they get invented. And then, you know, do you want that to happen inside your own country? Or do you want, do you want to have that happen somewhere else? And, you know, we, we always make a very strong argument on this, which is you 100%. Every American citizen should want America, you know, regardless of political position or whatever, should want America to be the technology leader in the world. That has many benefits. It has, you know, direct economic benefits in terms of the wealth of the country

• 55:04Marc Andreessen?

  and the ability to, you know, pay for all the things that we want to pay for. It has enormous benefits in terms of also our security, our ability, like, let's put it this way, like for the crypto industry to be based in the US is overwhelmingly good for United States security, like an overwhelmingly good for United States law enforcement, overwhelmingly good for United States national security. Because then, you know, if you're the FBI or if you're the, you know, if you're any, any agency of government, you're dealing with American companies, which is, which is a much more straightforward thing to do when you, when you need something. And so it's, it's good from a security perspective. I, by the way, I think it's also good for, you know, opportunities for kids, you know, are, are your, your kids able to get educated in the state of the art, you know, technologies, have lots of career opportunities and are they able to work in those fields? And, you

• 55:46Marc Andreessen?

  know, American kids for a hundred years have had that edge, kids, you know, all over the planet and, and hopefully that continues. And so like, you know, it's, it's one of these fairly amazing things where in some ways this is like, like we're so used to America being the technology leader that it, it almost feels embarrassing to make this argument because it's such an obvious argument. Like America has so clearly benefited from this for, you know, for the, for the last hundred years. And, and in my view, we, we should all want that to continue for hundreds of years to come.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Chris, you literally wrote the book on this stuff, on blockchains, rewrite own. Tell us, what does Clarity unlock if it passes in a year, two years, in determinate future?

• 56:25Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. Well, as I mentioned before, I think of a, a simple way to think of a blockchain is, is a disintermediation machine. It lets you build internet services where instead of having kind of a bunch of, you know, organizations in the middle, taking pieces of the, sort of the take, the money along the way, you can build advanced internet services where it's, think of it as peer-to-peer. I can send you a dollar. Stablecoin is a simple example. I can send you a dollar. There's no intermediary taking, you know, if you send to Mexico right now, using a traditional financial service provider, it'll take 8%, 10%. Stablecoin, it's almost zero because there's not someone sitting in the middle. Right? So that's the simplest case. What's worked so far has been financial use cases.

• 57:08Chris Dixon?

  Stable coins, we're seeing now, people, you know, stocks and bonds and treasury bills and other kinds of financial assets, lending. I think that will, in the next couple of years, be the dominant use case. So I think we'll see what I hope is a significant upgrade of the financial system. By the way, a lot of the benefits are global, but you know, I think we take for granted here that we have a very high functioning currency and financial system. This makes us accessible globally. Longer term, and what I kind of talk about in my book, I think that you could take this technology and apply it beyond that. And you can, you can imagine, for example, a world where, you know, if AI agents proliferate the way that, you know, we hope they will, and I think a lot of people in the AI industry

• 57:52Chris Dixon?

  think they will, you can imagine internet of, you know, billions and trillions of AI agents conducting economic transactions, and the natural way they would do that would be through crypto assets. You can also imagine just, you know, all sorts, and I talk, I kind of, you know, allude to this at the end of my book, where I speculate about future use cases, other, you know, other kinds of things from, you know, services for creative people, social networks, games, all sorts of things, I think you can, you know. But, but I think for the next couple of years, mostly what we'll be focused on is, is this sort of finance 2.0 upgrade that we talked about.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  All right, well, time will tell whether policymakers listen to you guys, heed your advice, and realize that rules are better than no rules, and that the time is urgent, and that the benefits will accrue to whoever sets the standards first. Thank you both for coming on the show.

• 58:45Chris Dixon?

  Thank you.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Good, good. Thanks, Robert.

• 58:50Erik Torenberg?

  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. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.

• 59:34Erik Torenberg?

  For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.