Crypto Trends for 2025: Stablecoins, App Stores, UX, and More
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What is the overall purpose of the 2025 Crypto Big Ideas series?
So far in our four part 2025 Big Ideas series, you've heard from teams all over A16C, from American dynamism to healthcare to fintech and more. But one team you haven't heard from yet, A16Z Crypto. And that's because we have an entire episode dedicated to their 14 big ideas for 2025, ranging from crypto wallets for AI agents to decentralized chatbots to proof of personhood, prediction markets, crypto app stores, and so much more. After such a banner year where among other things, Bitcoin hit all-time highs above a hundred thousand dollars, it really should be no surprise that our Web3 team thinks there's a lot to come next year. So if you'd like to stay up to date with all things Web3 and the next generation of the internet, check out Web3 with A sixteen C.
And of course, if you'd like to see all 50 big ideas, including all 14 from crypto, head on over to a16z.com/slash big ideas.
Welcome to Web3 with A6 and Z. I'm Sonal, and today Robert and I are excited to bring you two special end-of-year episodes, which also look ahead to 2025. Because we're covering our annual big ideas, which includes some tech trends individual team members are excited about, it's a firm-wide list with crypto having the biggest showing every time. And this year, our team had 14 trends compared to nine last year and seven the year before. You can check out the full list at A6Z. Crypto.com slash big ideas. This episode is part one of two. You don't have to listen to them in any particular order, covering the trends of stable coins, app store distribution and discovery, where the next users will come from.
How builders improve and choose infrastructure and simplifying user experience. Our guests for each of those are Sam Broner, Maggie Sue, Darren Matsuoka, Yokim Noi, and Chris Lyons. Robert and I follow with some meta commentary at the end, so stay tuned till then. And be sure to also check out our other big ideas episode, which covers all the ideas at the intersection of crypto and AI. As a reminder, none of the following is investment, business, legal, or tax advice, please see asystenzy.com slash disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments. With that, let's begin with the first idea. Sam, your big idea was about stable coins. You've been writing a lot about stable coins, and Robert co-produced the state of crypto report with Darren.
And the big takeaway they had is that stable coins have found product market fit. But what we really want to hear from you is why now
So over the last year, there's been substantial platform improvement where stable coins went from costing five dollars to less than a tenth of a cent to send for person to person. And that unlocks a Huge, huge improvement in the cost structure of paying for anything, but they still haven't been adopted by the retailers, merchants, and other businesses that would most stand to benefit from that improved cost structure. I think people think that the first adopters are gonna be tech-centric businesses, but those are high margin businesses that don't need that improved cost structure. So the most margin-sensitive businesses, like the corners. Stores, the restaurants, the mom and pop shops are probably going to be the people who are most eager to start accepting stable coins.
We're talking about taking businesses like a coffee shop, which is running right now on a 2% margin and doubling it, really turning businesses that are hardly profitable today to being moderately profitable, a huge difference.
This was what kind of gave me in the aha moment, is when you talked about what the small businesses don't get from credit card companies. So they're not only paying these fees, but they're not even getting the benefits.
Yeah, what's so remarkable about credit cards is that they offered consumers fraud protection. And that was great for bootstrapping things like online sales. But fraud protection does basically nothing when the cashier is handing you a coffee as you give them the money. We're talking about 30 cents per transaction and an additional two percent on top of that.
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