Before the internet could become a place to bank or transact, it needed a way for strangers to know who they were talking to, and whether a message could be trusted.

Turing Award winners Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman helped invent it.

In this episode of First Principles, Rivest tells the story of how they developed RSA, the first practical public-key cryptosystem. Their breakthrough made it possible to encrypt information, verify identities, and authenticate messages across an open network without requiring participants to meet or exchange a secret in advance — laying essential groundwork for the secure internet and, decades later, blockchains.

Rivest joins Tim Roughgarden, Head of Research at a16z crypto and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, and Dan Boneh — Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, a16z crypto Senior Research Advisor, and the “B” in BLS signatures — for a conversation about the origins and future of modern cryptography.

They trace the field from its early days, when most cryptographic research was classified and even the meaning of “security” had not been formally defined, through the publication of the Diffie-Hellman paper and the open problem that ultimately led to RSA. Rivest recounts the night the core idea came together, why the difficulty of factoring made the system plausible, and why no one initially knew whether it would survive sustained attempts to break it.

The conversation also explores the other cryptographic primitives that underpin blockchains and the modern internet. Rivest explains why digital signatures interested him even more than encryption, how he designed the MD family of cryptographic hash functions, and why standards such as RSA, DSA, and SHA were shaped as much by politics, patents, and government pressure as by mathematics.

Finally, Rivest shares his unusually candid views on quantum computing, post-quantum security, and the deeper theoretical possibility that P could equal NP. Either development could threaten the foundations of modern cryptography — but, as Rivest argues, cryptographers have a responsibility to prepare for even the worst-case scenarios.

Highlights

00:00 – Intro: the two problems that could break modern cryptography
01:10 – Why Ron Rivest’s work underpins the internet and blockchains
08:10 – Before public-key cryptography, there was no theory of security
11:05 – The open problem that led to RSA
13:55 – The night Ron Rivest discovered the core idea behind RSA
17:55 – Why digital signatures were the real breakthrough
19:14 – The RSA challenge — and a prediction that was off by quadrillions of years
28:33 – How government pressure shaped cryptographic standards
30:36 – Designing the hash functions that made digital signatures practical
33:26 – The Fiat–Shamir transformation, explained
38:04 – Building a cryptography company before the web existed
42:31 – Will quantum computers ever become powerful enough to break RSA?
48:02 – The cryptography securing the internet, elections, and everyday life
50:11 – What surprised Dan: Quantum giveth and quantum taketh away

About First Principles

First Principles is a special limited series from a16z crypto about the scientific roots of modern computing — especially blockchains — told through rare conversations with the pioneers who helped shape the foundational ideas behind distributed systems, consensus protocols, economics, mechanism design, cryptography, zero knowledge, and more.

People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it.

Subscribe to follow along:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjQ9HCQMu_8yIg60YAq67HDdvp7E_T5e8

Hear more from:

Ron Rivest: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden
Dan Boneh: https://twitter.com/danboneh

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As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

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Long before onchain markets made mechanism design a daily engineering problem, Nobel Prize winner Paul Milgrom was asking how prices actually form — and how better auction rules could reshape actual markets.

His work helped transform auction theory from an elegant branch of economics into a practical toolkit for allocating scarce resources, from wireless spectrum to digital ads to financial markets.

In this episode of First Principles, Tim Roughgarden, Head of Research at a16z crypto, sits down with Milgrom alongside Scott Kominers — Harvard Business School professor and a16z crypto research partner — for a conversation about auctions, information, price discovery, and the design of complex markets.

Together, they explore Milgrom’s foundational work on auction theory, the famous Milgrom-Weber paper, the Grossman-Stiglitz paradox and the Glosten-Milgrom model of market microstructure, and why understanding how prices form matters for everything from prediction markets to decentralized finance.

They also discuss Milgrom’s work designing the FCC spectrum auctions — including the auctions that helped allocate wireless spectrum for technologies like mobile broadband and 5G — and the later FCC incentive auction, a massive market design challenge that combined economics, computer science, policy, and real-world implementation.

Highlights

00:00 Intro: economics assumptions that are “just wrong”
02:19 Scott Kominers on the genius of Paul Milgrom
05:35 The price discovery problem economics forgot
07:48 The auction theory breakthrough of the 1980s
17:15 Why market microstructure matters for DeFi
24:17 When math teaches economics something new
29:22 Designing auctions people can actually use
32:40 How theory became spectrum auction design
36:22 The floppy disk that helped convince the FCC
41:05 What changed when auctions moved online
45:28 The auction that reorganized television
57:25 Why the best auctions feel simple
1:07:30 What economics and computer science can learn from each other
1:13:22 Futures markets for compute
1:15:12 Paul Milgrom’s advice for builders

About First Principles

First Principles is a special limited series from a16z crypto about the scientific roots of modern computing — especially blockchains — told through rare conversations with the pioneers who helped shape the foundational ideas behind distributed systems, consensus protocols, economics, mechanism design, cryptography, zero knowledge, and more.

People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it.

Subscribe to follow along:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjQ9HCQMu_8yIg60YAq67HDdvp7E_T5e8

Hear more from

Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden
Scott Kominers: https://twitter.com/skominers

Follow a16z crypto

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Long before crypto made coordination programmable, Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth was designing markets where coordination could save lives. 

In this episode of First Principles, Roth tells the story of how he helped build systems for some of the hardest matching problems in the world, from where doctors train and where students go to school to how kidney donors can reach the patients who need them. 

He joins Tim Roughgarden, Head of Research at a16z crypto, and Scott Kominers — Harvard Business School professor, a16z crypto research partner, and one of Roth’s former students — for a conversation about how market design moves from theory into the real world. They explore how economic theory becomes practical engineering, whether that's matching riders to Ubers, doctors to medical residencies, students to New York City high schools, or organ donors to people whose lives depend on it. 

They also cover how these same problems show up in today’s crypto networks. Roth explains why markets are not just natural forces, but engineered systems; why the details of timing, congestion, incentives, and trust can make or break a marketplace; and why some of the most important markets are the ones where simply exchanging money can’t do the work. 

This is a conversation about economics at its most practical and profound: how to design systems that coordinate people, solve real problems, and sometimes save lives. 

00:00 Intro: Why market design matters
04:18 The economist as engineer 
08:09 When theory meets the real world 
07:02 Fixing the medical residency match 
15:32 Why markets unravel 
18:22 Redesigning NYC high school admissions 
28:05 The hidden problem of congestion 
34:47 How kidney exchange saves lives 
45:26 How the internet changed market design 
48:25 Airbnb, Uber and smarter marketplaces 
51:28 Repugnant transactions and moral economics 
53:32 When markets need social support 
54:32 The unexpected effects of criminalizing surrogacy 
01:04:58 Preference signals and the job market 
01:18:53 A broken market: resettling refugees and other migrants 

Hear more from: 
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden 
Scott Kominers: https://twitter.com/skominers 

Follow a16z crypto: 
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto 
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/ *

** As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

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Before blockchains could reach consensus, Leslie Lamport had to define what agreement even meant when computers fail, lie, or disappear. 

In this episode of First Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology, Turing Award-winning computer scientist Leslie Lamport joins Tim Roughgarden Head of Research at a16z crypto and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, and a16z crypto Research Partner Ittai Abraham to trace the ideas that helped define modern distributed computing. 

Lamport’s work formalized some of the field’s deepest questions: how to reason about concurrent systems, how distributed systems can agree despite failures, and how to prove that protocols do what they are supposed to do. His work on logical clocks, state machine replication, the Byzantine Generals problem, and Paxos has shaped everything from cloud infrastructure to the consensus protocols underlying modern blockchains. 

The conversation begins with Lamport’s early work on concurrency and the origins of the Byzantine Generals Problem, and then turns to fault tolerance: what happens when machines crash, behave unpredictably, or even act maliciously? We also cover the feedback loop between theory and practice, the long arc of fundamental research, and how blockchains are inheriting and extending decades of distributed systems work. 

Highlights 

00:00 – Intro: The problem every blockchain is built to solve 
02:52 – Why concurrent systems are surprisingly tricky 
04:40 – The origins of the bakery algorithm 
07:37 – What does it mean for a protocol to be “correct”? 
12:03 – The origins of the Byzantine Generals problem — and what happens when some computers fail 
17:49 – How Paxos emerged from an attempted impossibility proof 
23:47 – Why theory and practice need each other 
33:48 – Government funding, DARPA, and the long arc of foundational research 

About First Principles 
First Principles is a special limited series from a16z crypto about the scientific roots of modern computing — especially blockchains — told through rare conversations with the pioneers who helped shape the foundational ideas behind distributed systems, consensus protocols, economics, mechanism design, cryptography, zero knowledge, and more. 

People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it. 

Hear more from: 
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden 
Ittai Abraham: https://twitter.com/ittaia 

Follow a16z crypto: 
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto 
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/ 

*** 
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

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Every blockchain today leans on replication ideas worked out in the 1980s, by a Turing Award winner who wasn’t thinking about how it might apply to money at all. 

In this episode of First Principles, a16z crypto Head of Research and Columbia professor Tim Roughgarden speaks with Barbara Liskov, MIT professor, Turing Award winner, and one of the most influential computer scientists in programming languages, data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing. a16z crypto research partner Ittai Abraham joins the conversation. 

The discussion traces Liskov’s path from programming languages and modularity to distributed systems research; from CLU and Argus to viewstamped replication; and from benign failures to Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, or PBFT — a protocol family whose ideas now shape many modern blockchain systems. Liskov explains why modularity matters, how systems researchers thought about replication in the 1980s, why view changes were such a key idea, and how PBFT extended earlier work to handle malicious behavior on the internet. 

The conversation also explores the bridge between theory and practice, the importance of proofs and specifications, and why the next generation of systems research may be reshaped by AI. First Principles is a special, limited series from a16z crypto about the scientific roots of modern computing — especially blockchains — told through rare conversations with the pioneers who helped shape the foundational ideas behind distributed systems, consensus protocols, economics, mechanism design, cryptography, zero-knowledge, and more. People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and behind blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. 

First Principles is a guide to that lineage, as told by the people who helped build it. 

Highlights: 

00:00 Intro: How do systems stay reliable when parts fail? 
01:18 Barbara Liskov’s path from programming languages to distributed systems 
05:45 Why modularity is “everything” 
07:22 The replication problem: keeping data available across many machines 09:58 Viewstamped replication and the “ledger” before blockchains 
16:32 Why good research starts with what you don’t understand 
18:10 Leslie Lamport, Paxos, and the inevitability of ideas in the right time, in the right place 
21:48 Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance: what changes when replicas can lie 
19:35 How PBFT bridged theory and practical systems 
22:38 Why you should never trust an individual replica 
28:39 Why blockchains are state machine replication in the wild 
31:27 AI, verification, and the future of computer science 

Follow: 
Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden 
Ittai Abraham: https://twitter.com/ittaia 

Follow a16z crypto: X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto 
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/ 

*** As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

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Bitcoin often gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t. 

The problem was named decades earlier — in the world of distributed computing — and researchers spent years studying how machines could reach agreement even when some participants were faulty, adversarial, or corrupt. What Bitcoin did was something different: It solved a classic Byzantine agreement problem in a radically new, permissionless setting. And it took the research world years to fully recognize what Satoshi had done.

In this episode of First Principles, a16z crypto Head of Research and Columbia professor Tim Roughgarden is joined by a16z crypto research partner Ittai Abraham — one of the world’s leading researchers in Byzantine agreement and consensus protocols, a founding member of VMware’s blockchain project, and founder of the technical blog Decentralized Thoughts — to unpack the scientific roots of blockchain consensus. 

Together, Tim and Ittai trace the line from classic distributed systems research to Bitcoin, proof-of-stake, Tendermint, Casper, DAG-based protocols, Solana’s Alpenglow, and the modern race for higher throughput and lower latency. Along the way, they explain why concepts like Byzantine fault tolerance, state machine replication, safety, liveness, and partial synchrony are not just academic abstractions — they are the language and design principles behind today’s blockchain protocols. 

This conversation kicks off First Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology — a special, limited series from a16z crypto on the scientific ideas behind modern computing — especially blockchains — told through conversations with the pioneers who helped create them, including Barbara Liskov, Leslie Lamport, and more. Hosted by Tim Roughgarden, the series explores the foundational concepts behind distributed systems and consensus protocols; economics, mechanism and market design; and cryptography, from digital signatures to zero knowledge. People often tell the story of the Bitcoin whitepaper as if it appeared out of nowhere. 

But the ideas behind Bitcoin — and behind blockchains more broadly — come from decades of computer science, economics, mathematics, and cryptography. First Principles is a guide to that lineage, told by the people who helped build it. 

Highlights 

00:00 Introduction to First Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology 
00:56 Why consensus matters for blockchains 
02:30 Byzantine agreement: The old computer science problem Bitcoin made practical 
04:34 Blockchains as a shared system of record: State machine replication and blockchain state 
06:41 How two research worlds — distributed computing and crypto — began to converge 
07:49 Proof of work vs. proof of stake 
09:27 Why Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake took years 
11:08 When crypto rediscovered decades of distributed systems research 
11:50 Why BFT became practical 12:49 Throughput, latency, and modern consensus design 
14:05 DAG-based protocols and faster blockchains 
15:25 Peace time vs. war time: why modern blockchains need two modes 
16:47 Theory, practice, and the future of blockchain research 
 

Follow: 

Tim Roughgarden: https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden 
Ittai Abraham: https://twitter.com/ittaia 

Follow a16z crypto: 

X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto 
Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/ 

** 
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

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Crypto has been walled off from the real economy for years — that's changing. 

Sonal Chokshi and Robert Hackett sit down with Eddy Lazzarin, a16z crypto's newest General Partner, to break down why crypto is entering a completely different phase and what gets built once the rules finally catch up to the technology. 

The discussion spans: 

- what the CLARITY Act actually does and why it changes the design space for crypto founders 
- the difference between a network token and a security, and why it needs to be written into law 
- why stablecoins are crypto's first real killer app and how the rest of the economy is reconfiguring around them 
- how tokens let builders decouple pricing from growth in a way stocks never could 
- why 97.8% of the value created in capitalism leaks out, and what that means for anyone trying to capture any of it 

Highlights: 
00:00 Intro 
01:25 What it means to be a GP 
02:00 Consensus vs. non-consensus bets 
04:27 Network tokens and the CLARITY Act 
09:35 Revenue, value capture, and network-token business models 
21:18 Stablecoins as crypto’s first killer app 
28:52 Engineer-philosopher mindset 39:04 Intellectual influences 
52:40 Eddy’s path to crypto 1:03:15 The exuberant adoption phase of AI 
1:14:38 Being "pro–AI psychosis" 

Follow: Eddy Lazzarin: https://twitter.com/eddylazzarin 
Sonal Chokshi: https://twitter.com/smc90 
Robert Hackett: https://twitter.com/rhackett 

Follow a16z crypto: 
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto 
Subscribe for more industry reports, trend updates, news analysis, builder guides, and other resources: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/ 

As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

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Following a string of major DeFi exploits, we unpack what’s driving the recent rise in hacks across crypto.

a16z crypto GP Eddy Lazzarin and security engineer Matt Gleason join host Robert Hackett to take a closer look. Their argument: AI is not introducing entirely new vulnerabilities. It is making existing weaknesses easier to identify and exploit. The question is whether defenders can evolve as quickly as attackers.

They also cover:

- why “AI-powered hacking” is difficult to measure
- how geopolitical tensions may be influencing cyber activity
- why defenders should be aggressively stress-testing their own systems
- how AI could eventually outperform humans at resisting social engineering
- what users can do today to protect themselves online

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
00:57 - The surge, explained
01:37 - Did attackers use AI
04:19 - How AI can help defend against attacks
09:16 - The doomsday marketing debate
17:17 - DeFi transparency: opportunities and challenges
21:00 - Social engineering and how to stay safe

Follow along here:
Eddy Lazzarin: https://twitter.com/eddylazzarin
Robert Hackett: https://twitter.com/rhackett
Matt Gleason: https://twitter.com/mg_486662

Follow a16z crypto:
X: https://twitter.com/a16zcrypto
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto

Subscribe for more industry reports, trend updates, news analysis, builder guides, and other resources: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/

As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

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We're announcing a16z crypto's Fund 5: $2.2B in committed capital to back the startups and founders who are building the next era of crypto. All four GPs sat down to talk through where crypto is right now, what's changed, and where it may be headed next. Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, Guy Wuollet, and Eddy Lazzarin join Robert Hackett to cover...

00:00 Open 
01:31 Why raise Crypto Fund 5 now 
02:10 The GENIUS Act and what regulatory clarity unlocks for builders 
04:32 Why stablecoins are crypto's WhatsApp moment 
08:54 Why the next era of crypto founders will be pragmatic, not ideological 
11:49 From cypherpunk revolution to crypto's "collared shirt era" 
15:02 Programmable money meets AI 
21:15 Onchain capital markets for compute, energy, and credit 
25:57 Why finance is the foundation, not the ceiling 
28:48 AI agents as first-class economic actors 
38:19 Why privacy is the only moat 
41:26 Jevons paradox and the future of blockspace demand 
43:20 Jolt and the zero-knowledge breakthrough 
58:15 Writing the next chapter of Read Write Own

Resources: 
Chris Dixon: https://x.com/cdixon
Ali Yahya: https://x.com/alive_eth
Eddy Lazzarin: https://x.com/eddylazzarin
Guy Wuollet: https://x.com/guywuolletjr
Robert Hackett: https://x.com/rhackett

Follow a16z crypto: X: https://x.com/a16zcrypto 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16zcrypto

Subscribe for more industry reports, trend updates, news analysis, builder guides, and other resources: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subscribe/

*** 
As always, none of the following should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

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Agents can now do almost anything a human can do with a computer. So what happens when they start spending money on your behalf?

Sam Ragsdale (founder and CEO of Merit Systems, a startup building infrastructure for the agentic economy) joins a16z crypto's Eddy Lazzarin, Noah Levine, and Robert Hackett on the open agentic commerce stack, and why the internet's business model is about to get rewired.

00:00 – Intro 
01:33 – Two flavors of agentic commerce 
04:30 – What is an agent, actually? 
12:57 – The headless merchant thesis 
17:17 – What happens to existing friction? 
24:45 – The economic contract of the web is broken 
27:46 – Will agents get distracted by ads? 
35:152– Stablecoins vs. credit cards 
41:54 – Sam's bear case on interchange 
49:11 – The killer app for agentic commerce
 

Sam Ragsdale on X: /samrags_ 
Eddy Lazzarin on X: /eddylazzarin 
Noah Levine on X: /nlevine19 
Robert Hackett on X: /rhackett 
 

Follow a16z crypto: /a16zcrypto 
Subscribe for more news and updates: a16zcrypto.substack.com

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A few big companies control most of the infrastructure behind AI.

Most people experience AI through a wide range of different apps that actually depend on a deeply centralized stack of data and compute. In this conversation, Ben Fielding and Harry Grieve — cofounders of decentralized machine learning protocol Gensyn — explain why this matters, and what it would take to rebuild AI as open infrastructure instead.

From unused global compute to the philosophical implications of machine intelligence, they argue that the next evolution of AI must be owned, coordinated, and verified in a fundamentally different way.

Highlights 
00:00 – Intro 
00:29 – The biggest misconception about AI infrastructure 
01:20 – Why centralization in AI is a deeper problem than people realize 
04:19 – Why AI needs crypto 
05:51 – How AI models are trained 
08:15 – The rise of autonomous AI agents with onchain identities 
10:37 – Lightning round

Ben Fielding on X: https://x.com/benfielding 
Harry Grieve on X: https://x.com/harrygrieve 
Gensyn on X: https://x.com/gensynai 
Follow a16z crypto on X: https://x.com/a16zcrypto 
Subscribe for more news and updates: a16zcrypto.substack.com

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