How to hire growth teams [newsletter]
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in our newsletter — a guide to trending topics in crypto with insights and resources from engineers, researchers, and others on the a16z crypto team. Subscribe to see it in your inbox every other week.
In this edition…
- Building your crypto business development team
- Myths about blockchain privacy
- Antimemetics, or why some ideas don’t catch on
- Our zkVM Jolt just got 6X faster
- More news and updates: The stablecoin playbook for TradFi, Google’s L1, DUNA adoption
How to build business development and growth teams
Building an effective business development (BD) and growth team in crypto introduces a new set of dynamics that make it impossible to simply copy and paste an organizational chart and expect it to work — especially as the industry continues to evolve.
The right BD/growth profile depends on what your company is building and what outcomes you’re targeting. For example, are you building on a public chain, focused on growing TVL and users? Or are you an infrastructure provider targeting fintechs who want to embed crypto into their core products? Answers to questions like these will guide your approach.
To help, we wrote a guide and a set of practical lessons drawn from firsthand experience building in and working closely with founders across the crypto ecosystem.
6 myths about privacy on blockchains
David Sverdlov and Aiden Slavin
When it comes to concerns about the end of privacy, blockchains are in good company.
Older technologies — like the telegraph, telephone, and the internet — have all spurred similar concerns… none of which actually came true. Blockchains are often misunderstood as creating a dangerous level of transparency. At the same time, others allege the opposite: that blockchains are too private and so create a haven for anonymous crime. Neither is true.
But the real challenge isn’t about choosing between privacy and security. It’s about building tools — technical and legal — that support both. Blockchains are already on this path. From zero-knowledge proof systems to advanced cryptography, privacy-preserving solutions are scaling. As our readers know, far from being just about finance, blockchain privacy opens doors for identity verification, AI, and more applications that benefit users.
To address some of the misconceptions around privacy on blockchains, we cover 6 of the most pernicious myths, starting with…
Myth: The internet works fine without privacy
Reality: A lack of privacy in the early internet impeded widespread adoption. In general, people had higher degrees of privacy before the internet.
Myth: Public blockchain transactions are anonymous
Reality: Not true! They’re pseudonymous, meaning onchain activity is traceable (even though identities are obscured).
Myth: You can choose between combating illicit finance or protecting user privacy — but not both
Reality: In fact, illicit activities are a small portion of total blockchain activity, and illicit finance is far more prevalent a problem for fiat currencies.
The antimemetics (and memetics) of making ideas happen — in crypto and beyond
From memes to movements to vibes, ideas are some of the most important drivers of modern technology adoption — but while some spread in seconds, others stay hidden, forgotten, or suppressed. So what makes ideas pollinate, germinate, or simply die on the vine?
In this special episode of web3 with a16z Nadia Asparouhova, author of Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, and a16z crypto editor-in-chief Sonal Chokshi cover antimemes and other ideas that actively resist spreading, focusing on: where and how ideas take off; how some ideas mutate like viruses; why packaging ideas matters; and what we can all do to move ideas to action.
Jolt: 6x faster
Markos Georghiades, Justin Thaler, Andrew Tretyakov, Julius Zhang and Michael Zhu
Our state-of-the-art open source zkVM, Jolt, has just gotten faster. Incorporating Twist and Shout — two new memory-checking arguments that ensure a prover correctly handles every read and write to the VM’s memory — unlocks…
- Over 1 million RISC-V cycles/sec on a 32-core CPU and over 500,000 cycles/sec on a MacBook, a roughly 6x speedup compared to just a few months ago
- Proof sizes of about 50 KB, an order of magnitude smaller than alternative zkVMs
- An even cleaner codebase
There are even more optimizations on the horizon, including a “streaming prover,” which would bring Jolt to devices like smartphones.
For all of the details and comparisons with other zkVMs…
More news and updates
U.S. puts data onchain: The U.S. Commerce Department said Thursday that it has begun publishing GDP and other economic statistics across nine public blockchains — Arbitrum One, Avalanche, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon PoS, Solana, Stellar, and TRON — via cryptographic hashes. The initiative is a first for the U.S. government, signaling interest in blockchain technologies’ potential for greater efficiency and data transparency.
Google enters the race to win payment rails: Google Cloud is building its own blockchain network with the goal of “better payments through evolution, not revolution.” Stablecoins are being used for incremental improvements today, but bigger improvements are on the horizon. They’re better money with unique characteristics (atomic settlement, programmability, composability) that make entirely new scenarios possible.
In other words: Evolution to onboard, revolution to win. Check out the last edition of our newsletter for more on why fintechs are building L1s/L2s.
DUNA adoption accelerates: Investing protocol Syndicate is the latest network to share its plans to adopt a DUNA, a legal structure for DAOs. This is part of a broader shift away from offshore foundations (which are costly, opaque, and increasingly misaligned with U.S. regulation) toward more transparent and legally recognized structures. Towns, an open source protocol for building decentralized messaging apps, has also announced DUNA plans. Meanwhile, the Uniswap Foundation will vote on a proposal soon; if it passes, Uniswap Governance could become the largest DAO to adopt a DUNA yet.
Tokens, and more tokens: a16z crypto CTO Eddy Lazzarin and Head of Policy & General Counsel Miles Jennings joined Blockwork’s Empire podcast to discuss how to launch a token (legally). They cover “token design, designation, and how Founders can think pragmatically both along legal and engineering lines to execute their project.”
The stablecoin playbook for TradFi: Sam Broner (a16z crypto Investment Partner), Cuy Sheffield (Head of Crypto at Visa), Simon Taylor (author at
) on the Tokenized podcast talking about stablecoins — from fintech adoption to China’s potential yuan-backed stablecoin.
— a16z crypto editorial team
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