Latest news with #A16z
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Banks Exploring Stablecoin Amid Fears of Losing Market Share, BitGo Executive Says
As the stablecoin competition is heating up with looming regulation in the U.S., traditional finance institutions are taking notice—largely out of fear of losing out to digital dollars, said Ben Reynolds, BitGo's managing director of stablecoins, at Consensus 2025 in Toronto. Speaking at a panel discussion, he said that BitGo's recently launched stablecoin-as-a-service has seen 'incredible inbound' interest from U.S. and foreign banks wanting to tokenize deposits or issue stablecoins. "A lot of banks are just being defensive—they're afraid they're going to lose their deposits,' Reynolds said. "They look at stablecoins and say: How do we not get left behind?" Yield-bearing versions of stablecoins and tokenized money market funds have seen rapid growth recently, but still make up only a fraction of the $230 billion stablecoin market. A16z's Sam Broner said that while yield-bearing stablecoins are a promising market segment, their primary use case is for payments and transactions where users don't really care about yields. Still, a near-term killer use case could be 'collateral mobility'—the ability to instantly move money to meet obligations across different platforms. "You can't do a lot of things with a share of a money market fund," Broner said. "You've got lock-up periods, business-hour settlement, and contracts that have to be manually reviewed. Crypto gives you programmatic, permissionless flexibility." Yield-bearing stablecoins could also be attractive for institutions, said Matt Kunke, crypto product strategist at BlackRock. "If you're a DAO, protocol, or market maker, moving between crypto holdings on an exchange and your brokerage account is slow and full of friction," he said. "Stablecoins that carry yield just reduce that drag.' However, regulatory distinctions will shape the market. 'A tokenized Treasury fund is a security, and an actual stablecoin is not,' he explained. 'They deserve fundamentally different markets." Joseph Saldana, chief financial officer of the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, pointed out that yield–generating tokens have the power to broaden investors' access compared to mutual funds that often have minimum limits of investment that "lock out a lot of people." "We want to service the underbanked and give broader access to instruments the rest of us enjoy every day," Saldana said. Sign in to access your portfolio
AU Financial Review
30-04-2025
- Business
- AU Financial Review
Australia's VC giants jostle for world's hottest AI start-up
The country's biggest venture capital funds are jostling for a stake in the hottest start-up of the year, the two month-old artificial intelligence business valued at $15 billion. Run by former OpenAI chief executive Mira Murati, Thinking Machines Lab is on the verge of raising $US2 billion ($3.1 billion), making it the biggest early-stage round in history, led by heavyweight Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, now known as A16z.
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
LayerZero's ZRO Jumps 10% as VC Firm Andreessen Horowitz Buys $55M Worth
Interoperability protocol LayerZero's native token (ZRO) surged Thursday on news that venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's (a16z) crypto arm increased its investment in the project. The company acquired additional $55 million ZRO tokens committing to a 3-year lock-up period, general partner Ali Yahya said in an X post. A16z has been an early backer of the protocol's development firm LayerZero Labs, participating in the team's $135 million series A fundraising round in 2022 and the following $120 million series B round in 2023. ZRO advanced 10% to $2.56 following the announcement before shedding some of the gains. The token was recently up around 5% during the day, outperforming the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index and bitcoin (BTC) gains. LayerZero is a key piece of infrastructure that allows communication between isolated blockchains with cross-chain messages. The protocol underpins 125 blockchains, has facilitated over 145 million cross-chain messages and $75 billion in value transfers. Its tech supports projects such as PayPal's stablecoin, DeFi protocols Ethena and Pendle, and was selected as an issuance partner for Wyoming's stablecoin project. The investment will help the protocol expand beyond interoperability to token issuance, data management, governance and improving databases, according to an email. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Stablecoins Are a 'WhatsApp Moment' for Money Transfers, a16z Says
Remember the old days when calling or sending a message via text outside the country cost money? With the help of modern messaging apps like WhatsApp, paying for cross-border calls and texts is now obsolete. For money transfers, stablecoins might do just that: democratize the payments industry by eliminating historical gatekeepers, says venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). "Just as WhatsApp disrupted costly international phone calls, blockchain payments and stablecoins are transforming global money transfers," the firm said in a blog post on Wednesday. The current global payment infrastructure is a complex web involving points of sale, payment processors, acquiring banks, issuing banks, correspondent banks, foreign exchanges, and card networks. Read more: What Is a Stablecoin? To make matters more difficult, each of these intermediaries charges fees and introduces delays, making international transactions cumbersome. For instance, a16z says remittance fees can reach up to 10% — just like cross-border calls or text used to be restrictive before instant messaging apps came into play. Enter blockchain and stablecoins — cryptocurrencies pegged to assets like the U.S. dollar. "Stablecoins offer a clean-slate alternative. Instead of stitching together clunky, costly, and outdated systems, stablecoins flow seamlessly on top of global blockchains," the blog post said. "Already, stablecoins are slashing the cost of remittances: Sending $200 from the U.S. to Columbia using traditional methods will cost you $12.13; with stablecoins, it costs $0.01." And, it's not just remittances where stablecoins are eliminating inefficiencies; this could help boost B2B payments on a massive scale, too. A16z uses business transactions from Mexico to Vietnam as an example, which take three to seven days to process and cost anywhere between $14-to-$150 per $1000 transacted. These pass through as many as five intermediaries along the way, each of which takes a cut. The adoption of stablecoin could make such transactions nearly free and instant, it says. Some corporations have taken notice, and Elon Musk's SpaceX is already using stablecoins to manage their corporate treasuries to shield itself from FX volatility. So, it shouldn't surprise anyone to see that the total market cap of stablecoins has passed $200 billion or that the annualized transaction value of stablecoins in 2024 hit $15.6 trillion — roughly 119% and 200% that of Visa and Mastercard, respectively. However, the rise of stablecoins isn't without challenges. Regulatory bodies have scrutinized their use, making it "incredibly difficult" to bridge traditional finance to stablecoins, said a16z. The landscape is now finally evolving, as policymakers are now actively shaping rules to recognize and regulate stablecoins in the U.S. "A forthcoming bill clarifying this regulation could pave the way for even broader adoption and integration into the global financial system," the blog said. With the rapidly changing landscape for finance and crypto becoming more mainstream, stablecoins could become the transformative force that revolutionizes the future of money. "Just as WhatsApp disrupted costly international phone calls, blockchain payments and stablecoins are transforming global money transfers," added a16z. Read more: U.S. House Committee Advances Stablecoin Bill, While Dems Warn of Trump Conflicts Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Exclusive-Andreessen Horowitz seeks to raise $20 billion megafund amid global interest in US AI startups
By Krystal Hu, Anna Tong and Kenrick Cai SAN FRANCISCO - Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is seeking to raise about $20 billion in what will be the largest fund in its history, to capitalize on global investors' interest in backing U.S. artificial intelligence companies, sources told Reuters. The tech investment firm, known informally as a16z, has told limited partners that the fund will be dedicated to growth-stage investments in AI companies and draw upon global investors keen on investing in American companies, the sources said. The record fundraising and the goal of capitalizing on foreign investment interest in the U.S. tech industry come against the backdrop of a sweeping tariff plan by President Donald Trump to urge companies to manufacture goods in the U.S. To raise such a large amount of capital, a16z has been pitching it around the world. International LPs see the fund as a way to invest their money more easily into American AI companies without restrictions, one of the sources said. Andreessen Horowitz did not reply to requests for comment. A16z's founders, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, announced last year they would support Trump, breaking with their traditional support for Democratic candidates, a sentiment shared by other prominent Silicon Valley figures such as Elon Musk. Even by the standards of a firm known for raising some of Silicon Valley's largest investment vehicles, the new fund would represent a colossal step up in scale. It would test LPs' interest in venture capital amid global economic turmoil and continue the debate over how scalable this asset class is while maintaining appealing returns. If successfully raised, the new megafund would be surpassed only by SoftBank's two Vision funds, a massive experiment by deploying unprecedented amounts of capital into the tech sector, which has yielded mixed results. SoftBank Vision Fund 1, launched in 2017, was a record-breaking $100 billion fund, while its successor, Vision Fund 2, manages about $56 billion from SoftBank's balance sheet. Another Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, has over $56 billion in assets under management across multiple funds, with its evergreen fund growing to $19.6 billion this year, according to filings. A16z's largest fund to date is a $5 billion growth-stage fund it raised as part of a $9 billion fundraise it announced in early 2022. It similarly asked LPs to commit capital into a grab bag of funds, each focused on a different sector or stage of startup maturity, to secure a $7.2 billion haul in 2024, $3.75 billion for a growth fund. The new fund, in its early stage, could take several months to close. Some LPs are drawn to the performance of its previous large funds, including one dedicated to cryptocurrency investments, as well as a16z's close ties with the Trump administration, one source said. A sizable chunk of the capital would be set aside for follow-on investments into AI companies in the firm's portfolio, one source told Reuters. A16z was an early backer in some of today's hottest AI companies including Databricks and Musk's xAI, and has continued to participate in their multibillion-dollar growth-stage fundraising rounds. The firm is asking LPs to back a single vehicle instead of several across different sectors, underscoring both venture capitalists' obsession with artificial intelligence, and the massive capital demands of companies — in particular among those building large language models that require major amounts of computing power and data. A16z has already been aggressive in backing numerous companies in the field, participating billion-dollar funding rounds as a lead investor in AI model developer startups including xAI, Safe Superintelligence and France-based Mistral. It has also purchased shares of OpenAI through a tender offer in the secondary transaction market. Founded in 2009, a16z announced itself with a loud attitude and ambitions to disrupt the venture capital industry by going bigger. It raised funds larger than the industry norm and outbid traditional blue-chip investors to win stakes in promising startups, further sweetening the deal by hiring a legion of staff to provide support for those companies. The first $300 million fund was considered an enormous debut fund at the time. A16z now manages $45 billion of assets under management, according to its website. It became a registered investment advisor in 2019, gaining more flexibility in investment style beyond the traditional VC. The firm runs several sector-specific funds that invest in categories such as biotechnology, cryptocurrency and defense tech. For AI companies, it recently put together a cluster of thousands of Nvidia's GPUs that it advertised for rent to startups in its investment portfolio that might otherwise have difficulty securing access to the chips. Sign in to access your portfolio
