a16z Podcast: Cryptonetworks as Emerging Economies (Done Right?)

When designing cryptonetworks — really, emerging economies — how do we avoid some of the monetary and fiscal policy failings of “real-world” economies? Like not separating currency and capital, which accelerated and spread economic growth through the former… but also concentrated the latter into the hands of a few? Yet how can we empower users to access capital while also managing risk?

If the promise of cryptonetworks is to better align incentives and value capture, then we can’t make the same mistakes as we did in traditional economies. We also have the chance to do novel things not possible in the physical world, through software. So this episode of the a16z Podcast — featuring voices from Placeholder VC and a16z Crypto — goes deep into the nuances and mechanisms of cryptonetworks, tokens, and decentralized applications at every layer of the “stack”. Chris Burniske (who has written a lot about financial modeling-influenced frameworks for analyzing crypto) and Joel Monegro (who has written about “fat protocols”, and once managed the Digital Economy Department at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of the Dominican Republic) of Placeholder VC discuss and debate all of the above — and more! — with a16z crypto‘s Denis Nazarov and Jesse Walden (co-founders of Mediachain, which was acquired by Spotify).

Throughout the history of information technology, we’ve gone from hardware to software, and software to data. So what’s next, what’s the layer above data? The answer is governance — which gives more people a way to participate in decision making around a given network — but the answer for how to implement the best governance isn’t so clear.

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