Five months ago, a16z was heavily invested in Crypto; why has it now switched to Frontier?
Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher
In the early hours of October 23, Beijing time, a16z crypto founder Chris Dixon announced that the investment scope of the new fund will be expanded from crypto startups to a broader range of frontier startups, and a16z crypto will be renamed a16z Frontier.
Dixon emphasized that this is an expansion, and a16z will continue to invest in crypto and related fields while advocating for reasonable crypto regulation.
According to a report from The Information yesterday, Ali Yahya, the first full-time member and general partner of a16z crypto's crypto team, will leave a16z to start his own venture, marking a symbolic shift for the leading crypto investment firm.
Just five months ago, a16z crypto had just completed fundraising for its fifth fund of $2.2 billion, promising that this fund would be 100% directed towards crypto entrepreneurs.
In a year where leading crypto VCs have turned towards AI, why has it also reached this point?
Five Months Ago, It Was Still Committing 100% to Crypto
On May 5 of this year, a16z crypto announced the completion of fundraising for Fund 5, totaling $2.2 billion. Including the previous four funds, a16z crypto has raised approximately $9.8 billion in total.
The background for this fundraising was not easy. The primary market for crypto continued to cool in 2025, with the number of financing events hitting a near five-year low, prompting many leading institutions to seek opportunities outside of crypto.
In February of this year, Paradigm was reported to be raising up to $1.5 billion for a new fund, expanding its investment scope to AI and robotics. Just a day before a16z crypto announced its fundraising, former a16z crypto general partner Katie Haun's Haun Ventures also completed a $1 billion new fund, similarly including AI in its investment direction.
When asked if it would follow up on AI, a16z crypto's spokesperson told Fortune that Fund 5 would be 100% directed towards crypto entrepreneurs. In the market environment at that time, this statement made a16z crypto the most distinctly conservative player among leading crypto VCs.
a16z invested in Coinbase back in 2013 and subsequently backed projects like Solana and Uniswap. According to SEC filing data obtained by Fortune, a16z crypto chose to distribute returns to LPs at the market peak in 2025, achieving a net DPI of 5.4 times for the first fund.
However, the size of a16z crypto's single fund has also decreased from $4.5 billion in 2022 to $2.2 billion for Fund 5, with the total management scale of its four funds declining by nearly 40% in 2025, down to about $9.5 billion.
a16z crypto stated that it intends to return to a smaller fund size and shorten the fundraising cycle to keep pace with the rapid changes in the crypto industry.
Unexpectedly, five months later, it is the changes outside of crypto that it is keeping up with.
It is worth mentioning that according to Dixon's statement, the expansion refers to the investment scope of the new fund ("our new fund"), which is the Fund 5 that committed 100% to crypto, or another new fund beyond Fund 5, the text does not distinguish, and the market generally believes it is the former.
Investment List Has Long Exited Crypto Natives
In fact, shortly after the commitment to 100% invest in crypto was made, a16z crypto crossed the boundaries of crypto.
According to RootData data, after the announcement of Fund 5, a16z crypto participated in a total of 11 financing rounds. Based on business attributes, these projects can roughly be divided into three categories.
The first category includes crypto-native projects, such as the public chain Arc launched by Circle, the lending protocol Morpho, and the developer of Canton Network, Digital Asset.
The second category consists of fintech companies that have begun to adopt stablecoins. For example, the corporate payment platform Jeeves was founded in 2019 and was led by Tencent in 2022, with a valuation of $2.1 billion. Félix, OpenReserve, and Catena Labs also belong to this category, with businesses involving cross-border remittances, blockchain-based banking, and financial services for AI agents.
The third category includes companies like Ornn that are unrelated to blockchain. Additionally, Ornn, Catena Labs, and the AI trading terminal Elastics for prediction markets are all directly related to AI, indicating that AI has already entered a16z crypto's investment list.
On September 29, a16z crypto stated that one of the core values of blockchain is to create entirely new markets and predicted that on-chain markets will expand to commodities, foreign exchange, stocks, as well as risk assets like computing power, music, and sports that previously lacked financial expression.
On October 20, Dixon had a conversation with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, focusing on the topic of the AI agent economy.
Dixon pointed out that as blockchain is used more widely, the boundaries become blurred, and the infrastructure gradually retreats to the background, with Wall Street and fintech companies frequently launching blockchain-based products, making labels less important and defining them by what the company does more reasonable.
Early Core Members Depart
In January of this year, Arianna Simpson, a general partner who had worked at a16z crypto for six years, announced her departure to independently establish a new fund covering multiple verticals.
Now leaving is Ali Yahya. According to Dixon's announcement in 2021 when he was promoted to general partner, Yahya graduated from Stanford University with a degree in computer science, previously worked on robotics research at GoogleX, served as a core developer for TensorFlow at Google Brain, and joined a16z in 2017 as the first full-time member of the crypto team, participating in early investments in Compound, Avalanche, Near, and others.
Now, as the fund expands to AI and autonomous machines, this partner, known as the soul of the crypto team with a background in AI and robotics, has chosen to leave.
The new leadership team is jointly led by Dixon and a16z's two founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, along with general partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet, with Lazzarin being promoted from CTO to general partner in May.
In a16z's New Narrative, Crypto Transitions from Destination to Infrastructure
In the text, Dixon reviewed two long-term themes he focused on after joining a16z. One is new computing devices, representing investments including Oculus and drone company Skydio, Zipline; the other is crypto.
For the past decade, a16z crypto has described crypto as the next generation of the internet. Now, in Dixon's narrative, crypto is placed within the larger framework of betting on future technologies, becoming one of the cases.
Looking ahead, he extensively discusses the native applications brought by AI, autonomous machines, biomedicine, and machine-oriented networks, with only a brief discussion of blockchain, and it is placed after AI.
In this section, he positions blockchain as providing a fast, low-cost, global, and programmable financial channel for the internet, helping new networks gain native economic capabilities to facilitate transactions between machines.
In a16z's new narrative, crypto has transitioned from a destination to the infrastructure serving the AI wave. Whether this shift should be seen as maturity or a devaluation of the label is not uniformly viewed in the market.
Some believe this is a natural result of technology becoming mainstream. Terms like Web, mobile, and SaaS were once hot keywords in fund names, and as technology became ubiquitous, these terms gradually disappeared from fund names.
Mike Dudas, founder of 6th Man Ventures, stated that almost every crypto VC has done this privately, even if not publicly; crypto has deeply intertwined with other frontier technologies, and this term is always associated with those who were not serious in the past.
If the past a16z crypto represented the most steadfast long-term belief in the crypto industry, then a16z Frontier needs to answer whether it can continue to play a defining role in a broader technological landscape as crypto transitions from the protagonist of the story to infrastructure.