Wednesday, July 06, 2022

Afore Capital

joining a16z crypto Over the past two years, we have seen an explosion of new protocols that facilitate exponentially faster, cheaper, and larger volumes of transactions per second that allows for the beginnings of a reality where the matching logic of a “marketplace” can be coded into the smart contract itself. ....... The rate of growth in the web3 ecosystem is explosive. ......... Fanning this fire is a surge of brilliant builders who won’t sit idly by to accept the mediocrity that is the current iteration of the internet. ........ From my interactions with the a16z team, they can only be described as “Crypto Ocean’s Eleven” consisting of some of the very best hackers, cypherpunks, operators and builders from every corner of the internet.

2022 State of Crypto Report



Dropping out of Harvard to work closely with founders while the hype dies is the best way to focus on learning everything I can while supporting the founders building the next cohort of industry-defining companies. ....... There is a large inflow of world-class talent from Web2 and TradFi flowing into the crypto ecosystem, and I want to be with these folks as they combine the best Web2 building principles with the best of Web3 to help create the permissionless, transparent, global, and iterative tech foundation of our economy. ....... open source culture tied into the concept of ‘Open Source Money’ & ‘Open Source Disney’. ......... As a TradFi fintech investor looking at backend banking and payments infrastructure, I realized what an inefficient financial system existed. We have created siloed databases (some that depend on obscure programming languages like COBOL) to help keep track of who owns and owes what. ......... A financial system which is inherently functional 24/7, low maintenance, constantly iterating and improved upon from a set of global eyes rather than 5 engineers in a bank, with permissionless engagement with the system. ......... This system has the potential to turn intermediaries into permissionless protocols, and remove friction from the way we exchange value. As we saw from the Internet incrementally removing friction from communicating information (people were asking why we needed information that fast back then), an incrementally frictionless financial system allows for the exponential growth in second-order business models. ......... that fallacy where 1995 David Letterman points out that the Internet was not useful for broadcasting and recording sports games, since we already had radio, television and tape recorders. ........ We do not need to imagine that crypto will eat up the entire financial world tomorrow — we just need to believe it can grow as fast as the Internet, which after 40 years, is still only 20% of retail sales. ........ Sometimes, crypto leads to fragile economic systems that blow up to the detriment of retail investors. That is bad. However, we can create better payments systems, better remittance platforms, and more transparent, permissionless financial ecosystems when we use blockchain technology in the right way. ......... If we were to design a more efficient global financial system from scratch, what technology, principles and mechanics am I more likely to use? ............ I grew up in Singapore, a small island, and interacted with my cultural world through the Internet. ........ I spent countless nights staying up reading Halo fan fiction on Fanfiction.net. Through pure passion, the fanfiction community brought the Halo universe to life, through hundreds of thousands of pages of elaborate back-stories and fantastical writing. ......... The biggest takeaway was that a lot of cultural value that exists in society and culture are driven by people using the Internet to coalesce communities around niche passions to build a common fantasy world. That our culture is driven as much by our grassroots community, as it is by giant cultural behemoths like Disney and Hollywood, and that they can work together. Web3 offers the promise of creating structures that allow grassroots communities to capture value together, around community-directed cultural properties.

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