a16z Frames Crypto as Rival to Visa and Prime Brokers on Capital Flow, Not Price

Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto research arm has argued that the industry’s durable value will come not from token price appreciation but from control over the infrastructure that settles and moves capital, positioning blockchains as direct competitors to Visa, prime brokers and custodians. The thesis, published on 10 June 2026 by Jason Rosenthal, reframes crypto’s investment case around structural network economics rather than speculative trading.

The report contends that the most durable businesses historically have not won through superior products but by owning the rails commerce runs through, citing railroads that monetised freight volume rather than locomotives, and payment networks that scale revenue with transaction flow. Blockchains and network tokens, it argues, are built to occupy the same structural position within economic activity.

Legacy rails cited as the target

To illustrate the scale of the opportunity, the report cites Visa’s $15.7 trillion in payment volume and $35.9 billion in net revenue for fiscal 2024, alongside Jane Street’s $20.5 billion in net trading revenue last year, which it says exceeded that of Citigroup and Bank of America on the same metric. It also references data showing the top five US market makers handle 87% of payment-for-order-flow-related activity, framing positioning within transaction flow as more decisive than predicting market direction.

Rosenthal’s analysis singles out interchange fees commonly cited at 2–3% and remittance costs that can reach 6–9% depending on the corridor, alongside custody and prime brokerage cuts that persist even after the US shift to T+1 settlement in 2024. Crypto infrastructure, the report suggests, could compress these structural costs by challenging systems designed decades ago.

The report invokes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s maxim, “Your margin is my opportunity,” to argue that payments, custody, lending, foreign exchange, securitisation, settlement execution and market making all represent viable targets for crypto entrepreneurs, pointing to Stripe and Block as examples of firms that expanded markets by simplifying payments infrastructure.

Stablecoins positioned as the practical bridge

Stablecoins receive particular emphasis in the analysis as the mechanism most likely to connect crypto infrastructure with real-world capital movement. The report describes them as enabling money to move at “internet speed,” offering 24/7 settlement and end-to-end programmability that could support new business models built on more transparent unit economics.

That framing casts stablecoins not as a peripheral trading tool but as core plumbing for global payments and settlement, a positioning that has gained traction among institutional players exploring tokenised cash and settlement rails.

Network tokens as an incentive layer

The report argues that network tokens can accelerate the network effects blockchains rely on by aligning users, developers, validators and protocol operators around shared growth incentives. In well-designed systems, it says, rewards are distributed in proportion to contribution, enforcing at the protocol level what platform companies typically manage through contracts and business development.

a16z crypto research extends the thesis beyond finance, pointing to computing and GPU marketplaces, memory chips, AI training data, energy, robotics, space and critical materials such as rare earth metals as sectors where programmable networks could similarly reorganise how value and resources move, particularly where entrenched intermediaries are weaker.

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