This is the year the world came onchain.
When we launched our first State of Crypto report, the industry was still in its adolescence. The total crypto market was worth about half what it is today. Blockchains were much slower, more expensive, and le
Each year, the State of Crypto report from a16z crypto cuts through the noise and tracks crypto’s evolution across markets, technology, policy, and culture.
Now in its fourth edition, the 2025 State of Crypto report reveals how crypto has gone ma
Some stablecoins are centralized and backed by cash-like assets, while others are decentralized and backed by crypto-assets or algorithmic investment tokens. In this presentation, Shai Bernstein (HBS) discusses what drives market preferences toward different stablecoin designs, and whether these preferences change over time. Shai collected trading activity from Curve, a decentralized exchange that facilitates swaps between different stablecoins pegged to the same underlying asset. He relied on a host of event studies to identify shocks that increase de-pegging risk and regulatory uncertainty. The results suggest that during periods of heightened uncertainty, markets rush towards fully collateralized, centralized, and transparent stablecoins. But an increase in regulatory uncertainty drives the market toward decentralized and more opaque stablecoins, which may be more immune to regulatory reach. Using wallet-level information, he characterizes market reaction by traders’ level of sophistication. The findings highlight the need for regulatory clarity that is uniform across all jurisdictions.
About the speaker
Shai is a Professor in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School, a researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and the co-director of the Crypto, Fintech, and Web3 lab at HBS. He studies Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, with an emphasis on the impact of private capital markets on their evolution. He teaches the Entrepreneurial Finance course in the MBA elective curriculum, and a short intensive course on web3. Shai completed his Ph.D. in Business Economics at Harvard University. Before joining HBS, Shai spent eight years as a faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
About a16z crypto research
a16z crypto research is a multidisciplinary lab that works closely with our portfolio companies and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.
