The crypto industry is getting a fresh start, according to Chris Dixon, general partner at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. “There was obviously FTX and a lot of negative things that happened,” Dixon said during a Bloomberg Television interview Tuesday. “I now see a real renaissance beginning.”
Dixon, who founded and leads Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto investment arm, said that the firm continues to “consistently deploy capital” in the digital asset industry through token and equity investments, that they’re more than willing to back new founders and that they’re keeping up their crypto lobbying efforts in Washington ahead of the 2024 presidential election. While discussing his new book, “Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet,” which was released Tuesday and focuses on the advantages of blockchain, he said that the technology could serve as a counterbalance to the dominance of tech giants over the internet and the growing use of artificial intelligence.
“Generative AI lets you create content very cheaply and therefore will put downward pressure on a lot of creative people’s business models,” he said. He noted that blockchain can help creators gain ownership over their content and show provenance, including demonstrating that a particular video is real and not AI-generated. Explicit deepfake images of singer Taylor Swift raised concerns last week about the misuse of imagery created by AI.
Andreessen Horowitz raised a record $4.5 billion crypto fund in 2022 and was one of the top deal-makers among the industry’s venture capital investors last year, despite a steep decline in overall funding for the space, according to data from research firm PitchBook. Dixon declined to comment on his firm’s returns from its crypto-related investments.
