Why Some Crypto Purists Are Mourning the Collared-Shirt Era That Andreessen Horowitz Just Named

A particular type of grief occurs when something is given a name rather than when it passes away. For the past few months, Andreessen Horowitz, the company that everyone in the industry simply refers to as a16z, has been doing something subtly important: it has begun characterizing the turbulent, spiritually intense, and sometimes shoe-less early years of cryptocurrency as a phase. a stage of laying the foundation.

foundation. the time before the rails were installed. Additionally, some of those who experienced it, lost sleep, and occasionally lost money as a result, are finding that framing more difficult to comprehend than they anticipated.

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The purists might have always felt this way regardless of the circumstances. Industries tend to forget what a movement was like, and movements have a tendency to calcify into industries. However, timing is important in this situation. According to insiders, a16z Crypto is currently raising its largest blockchain vehicle to date, a fifth fund estimated to be around $2 billion.

Chris Dixon, general partner of the company, has been likening the current state of blockchain technology to that old neural-network paper from 1943, which was unimportant outside of research labs until several decades later. If you arrived early and are now informed that you were in 1943, the analogy is tidy, comforting, and a little unsettling.

A16z Crypto partner Guy Wuollet recently wrote an essay outlining the company’s stance in an unusually straightforward manner. He wrote that finance is an integral part of a greater vision, not a diversion from it. Blockchains are not conjecture; they are infrastructure. The fund structure is based on cycles longer than ten years. You get the impression of a company settling into something when you read it.

Comfortable with the long view in a way that, depending on your personality, either reads like a farewell letter to the wilder, more bizarre years when no one was quite sure what any of this was for or inspires confidence.

The language of infrastructure roadmaps and LP memos feels very different from those early gatherings, where the emails were purposefully cryptic, the maps were purposefully unreadable, and the idea was that you had to be inside to know where to go.

Two of the company’s more well-known figures have left or are in the process of doing so. General partner Arianna Simpson, who had worked for the cryptocurrency division since its early, tougher days, has announced her resignation. After the TxO initiative was put on hold, Kofi Ampadu, who supported out-of-network founders for four years through the company’s Talent x Opportunity program, wrote a memo to staff detailing the experience of “closing my a16z chapter”.

People quitting companies is nothing out of the ordinary. However, it is worthwhile to consider the departure of founding-era figures during such a large-scale fundraising campaign because it reveals something about the company’s evolution from its past.

There have always been two publics for cryptocurrency. Some people view it as an asset class that can be held, traded, or used to create structured products, while others view it more as a civilizational endeavor. The second group has always been much more difficult to control, noisier, and stranger. They found significance in showing up at bars in lower Manhattan without a set schedule.

They created projects like Urbit, which were so allergic to legibility that the maps were third-generation Xeroxes, the event emails were confusing by design, and the idea was that accessibility would taint the product. Despite having the financial support of Thiel and Andreessen, it managed to maintain its counterculture vibe. Really, the entire plot revolves around that tension.

Money is not the source of the grief that is currently being processed in cryptocurrency Twitter corners and in the occasional lengthy essay from a disillusioned builder. The issue is not with the $2 billion fund. According to one interpretation, Dixon’s ownership of 95% of historically invested positions is an act of faith. The issue is more nuanced: naming an era suggests that it has ended.

A venture firm is creating a narrative when it begins creating timelines and railroad analogies, and narratives are always in the past tense.

In the firm’s own framing, the eccentrics who supported this prior to the rhetoric’s arrival—those who attended events they couldn’t find on a map and attended meetings in bars that weren’t yet part of mainstream culture—are now the foundation. prerequisite. The 1943 article.

Whether the platform a16z is developing will uphold that faith or merely absorb it is still up for debate. Stablecoins, tokenization, prediction markets, and the increasingly popular intersection of AI and cryptocurrency are the main topics of the company’s “Big Ideas 2026” roadmap. Wuollet is probably correct that ground-breaking applications typically don’t appear until the plumbing is in place, and these are real things with real utility.

The early faithful, however, feel that something was also lost in the process of professionalizing the plumbing: a texture, a set of beliefs that were simply lived and didn’t require explanation in an essay. As this develops, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that a movement has progressed further from its foundations the more clearly it explains them.

The ten-year horizon is crucial, according to believers who are still holding. that those who experience nostalgia are mistaking the feeling for the vision. Perhaps. However, it’s important to recognize that vibe and vision aren’t always distinct from one another; in certain cases, the oddity was the thing operating, not just the surrounding environment.

The collared-shirt era has been named for what lies ahead for a16z cryptocurrency and the ecosystem it has contributed to. Furthermore, naming something is typically the first step toward letting it go.