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

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

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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

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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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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

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
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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

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/a16zcrypto/posts/
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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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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

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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

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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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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

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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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