research

On when and how adversarial nodes can be punished if they stall transaction confirmation in blockchains

Podcast: how blockchains are trying to maximize throughput and minimize latency

Resolving how many evil validators a blockchain can tolerate while still maintaining liveness and security

Jolt is an open-source, RISC-V zkVM that is fast, secure, and easy to use -- a new, state-of-the-art approach to SNARK design that’s based on three years of research & development at a16zcrypto, which we open sourced for anyone to use or develop further. But Jolt is really a story that’s decades, and even millennia, in the making.

Applications beyond the crypto industry for 2026

Various a16z crypto partners (plus a few guest contributors) observe about what’s ahead — on topics ranging from agents and AI; stablecoins, tokenization, and finance; to privacy and security; prediction markets, SNARKs, and other applications… to how we’ll build.

Timelines to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer are frequently overstated — leading to calls for urgent, wholesale transitions to post-quantum cryptography. But the real challenge in navigating a successful migration to post-quantum cryptography is matching urgency to actual threats.

Identifying a specific rewriting of the ECDSA signing equation and a method to compute and verify it

Introducing the notion of an exponent-VRF, or eVRF, a VRF that provides a generator of some finite cyclic group

Why did the Industrial Revolution take place where it did, and then spread beyond? It had to do with a competitive, open market of ideas, Mokyr argues -- a transnational “Republic of Letters” -- not unlike the crypto ethos of open source, decentralization, and more. 

Prediction markets are a hot topic again. But beyond the buzz, what is a prediction market, exactly? How do they work, how are they designed, and what makes them work?

Two economists talk congestion pricing, recently implemented in New York City—plus the overlap with blockchains