“Layer 2” rollups are computer networks that are designed to help scale “layer 1” blockchains such as Ethereum — and they’ve been bustling with activity recently, especially since Ethereum implemented its scaling-related EIP-4844 (“Dencun”) upgrade in March. Jesse Pollak, who is Coinbase’s head of protocols and who founded and leads …...Read More

For consumer products, the rubber hits the road at retention. It’s the lifeblood of an app and the hardest metric to move, as I learned viscerally during my time running the growth team at Snap. To attract repeat users, companies can’t just fill a product with the latest and greatest …...Read More

The Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) team is often asked by portfolio founders how exactly cultural leaders can be a game-changing asset for their companies. On the flip side, athletes, entertainers, and C-level executives also ask what they should expect when investing in technology startups and working with founders looking to …...Read More

In the year and a half since ChatGPT launched a new AI wave, a crucial shortfall has dominated headlines: the insatiable demand for GPU computing resources. But when we talk to cloud leaders and data center operators to understand why there’s a compute crunch, it’s clear that access to power …...Read More

Justin Thaler is Research Partner at a16z and an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University....Read More

This article is the final installment in our series, How Fintech Companies Can Simplify Their Funding Strategy. Read part 1 on Choosing the Right Funding Structure here. Read part 2 on Trade-offs Across Terms here. Read part 3 on Executing a Debt Raise here. Congratulations! After weeks (or months) of …...Read More

As mentioned in the first guideline, if you need stakeholders to participate in staking and governance to secure your protocol, then you may need to coordinate with custodians ahead of time. Protocol developers should not assume that custodians will support staking and governance for their tokens by default. Custodians need …...Read More

This is critical. Projects should apply transfer restrictions to all of the tokens issued to insiders (employees, investors, advisors, partners, etc.), affiliates and anyone that may be involved with the distribution of tokens. These restrictions should apply for at least one year from the token launch. The SEC has successfully …...Read More

Launching and having a live token requires a number of changes to a project’s operations. Getting started early can help projects get ahead of operational challenges, and ensure critical tasks are not an afterthought. Funding : Most DevCos aim to have at least 3 years of runway post-token launch. These …...Read More

Another way for projects to avoid legal uncertainty in the U.S. is to eliminate the possibility of the public investing in their tokens. To accomplish this, projects can issue transfer-restricted tokens (TRTs) or use off-chain “points” instead of tokens. TRTs use the ERC-20 standard to limit who can hold a …...Read More