Marc Andreessen, a founding partner of tech-focused venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is now more bullish on Ethereum and Web 3 than Bitcoin, contrary to his outlook in 2014.
During an interview with ReasonTV published on Wednesday, the venture capitalist discussed the future of cryptocurrency adoption and regulation, along with Bitcoin’s role as money.
Crypto, not Bitcoin
According to Andreessen, crypto and Web3 represent “the other half of the Internet,” containing all the features that people wanted the Internet to have until now. This includes the ability to do business around the world with a trusted financial layer, in the form of blockchain technology.
Using that layer of trust, a large number of financial assets can be represented: money, property claims, property deeds, property deeds, security contracts, loans, internet art, and more.
“You can build on top of the unreliable Internet all the capabilities you would need to have a complete economy,” Andreessen explained. “That’s a giant idea – the potential there is extraordinarily high.”
Such ideas are not entirely new, since they come from the entrepreneur. In a Washington Post article published in 2014, foretold a new generation of the Internet with powerful applications built on a “distributed trust” platform. At the time, he thought the specific platform would be Bitcoin, but now he believes the mainnet has “stuck up” and “stopped evolving.”
“If I were to write that today, I would say that it is Ethereum instead of Bitcoin, or I would just say crypto or Web3 instead of Bitcoin,” he said.
While Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ethereum currently has the most active rate market, derived from its active DeFi and NFT economy. It also has more active developers than Bitcoin, which BitMEX Research credits to its more flexible programming language and welcoming culture for use cases other than money.
In a16z’s 2022 State of Cryptocurrency Report, the firm border how certain web 3 platforms do a great job of rewarding their creators who inherit web 2 giants like Facebook. Notably, the document did not contain any mention of the word “Bitcoin.”
Although he is not impressed by the number of functions of Bitcoin, Andreessen believes that Bitcoin can help increase economic freedom around the world as a form of money. unlike some criticsrecognizes that money can take various forms, as long as it is a tool used for trade.
Banning Bitcoin, he added, is probably impossible. “The source code is freely available,” she said. “For a government to ban Bitcoin, they are literally putting themselves in a position where they are banning math.”
A16z critics
In late 2021, Twitter co-founder and Bitcoin believer Jack Dorsey made enemies with Andreessen, who blocked Dorsey on Twitter after coming under fire for secretly owning the Web3 ecosystem. Dorsey has even mocked Web3 and its related VCs by launching their own decentralized identity application on Bitcoin, called “Web 5”.
A16z is one of the largest venture capital firms in crypto, investing billions in token purchases, such as Solarium – and other forms of web3 technology. Earlier this week, the crypto community raised concerns after the VC giant, which owns 4% of Uniswap’s governance token UNI, exercised their power to single-handedly obstruct a new governance proposal.
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