Chris Dixon: prediction

Transcript context

…There is legal free entry in the sector. People can go to Andreessen Horowitz. They can go to you personally and ask for VC money to do something. I recall a bunch of people told me I should try Mastodon, which was decentralized. I did. I didn’t like it. Most people didn’t like it. That’s now a bunch of years ago. No one has come to me in at least five years and said, “Oh, Tyler, you need to try this new decentralized service.” Why isn’t that happening? What’s the benefit the service might be offering me that’s concrete? I have a section on Mastodon. I think there’re architectural flaws in the whole thing. For example, if you’ve used it, there’s this whole concept of servers, and you have this very challenging problem of coordinating across servers, and it’s very fragmented. That might be a separate topic. Look, I think a broader thing is, when I think about where blockchains are getting adopted, if you look at where they’re successful right now, it’s mostly in financial applications. Stablecoins, for example — I think that the numbers are shockingly high. If you Google Visa stablecoin dashboard, Visa is, I think, a pretty neutral party. They have a dashboard that tracks it. It’s $3.5 trillion in stablecoin transactions last month, and that’s been steadily going up. It’s been going up. Stablecoin, just for your audience, is something like, it could be a dollar or euro, but it’s backed by an asset in the bank, so there’s Tether, USDC. There’s a bill that just passed the Senate Finance Committee and is going to be voted on in the House, hopefully in the next six weeks and hopefully passed. That is congressional legislation to put full rules around stablecoins. All of this growth has been happening before there was that kind of clarity. I think that could really accelerate it. The reason I’m saying this is that, look, it may just be me. I think there’re really interesting things you can do with blockchains and social networks, but the reality is, in 2025, it could just be that we have social networks. The network effects are strong, and the areas to focus on when you have new architectures, like blockchains, may be other areas. In software, there’s a phrase, greenfield, brownfield. Greenfield is, you have some breakthrough — AI or crypto or whatever — do you go after existing use cases and make them better or do you go after new use cases? What you’re describing is more brownfield. It may just be that some of the wars are fought, and they’re over. There’re 3 billion people using Facebook apps. At some point, the network effects are so strong that even if you come up with something that’s much better, it may just be a challenge. I’m sure some of your challenge on something like Mastodon is just that your friends aren’t there. Network effects. To your question, I’m very excited, obviously, about blockchains in this new architecture. We make investments in a lot of different areas because we like to experiment and try a bunch of things, but I think right now, the most likely areas where we’re going to see increased adoption are in these areas where things are more broken. I would say that’s in payments, financial services. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening also at the intersection of crypto, blockchains, and AI. With stablecoins, once the Trump people are no longer in office — it’s four years from now, but what do you think their regulatory counter-reaction will be like? The stablecoin issuers — they are subject to runs, right? There’s nominally 100 percent reserves. There’s no guarantee.…

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