What if the future of lending doesn’t need banks at all?

Paul Frambot, cofounder and CEO of Morpho, explains what it means to build lending infrastructure without banks, and why DeFi’s real breakthrough isn’t “risk-free” loans, but open, onchain markets that make lending more transparent, competitive, and efficient.

In this conversation, Paul breaks down the biggest misconception in DeFi lending, how to think about risk onchain, why institutions are learning faster than expected, and where banks, asset managers, fintechs, and stablecoins fit into the next wave of adoption.

He also shares his long-term vision for finance: a world where open blockchain infrastructure replaces siloed financial systems, access to capital gets broader, and financial products become cheaper, more personalized, and easier to build.

Highlights:

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:36 What Morpho actually does
• 1:22 DeFi’s biggest misconception
  5:26 Why Wall Street is paying attention now
• 6:46 Who’s adopting onchain finance first: Banks or asset managers?
• 9:57 The race for a Euro stablecoin
• 10:49 The future of finance, 5–10 years out
• 11:16 Why finance is still broken
• 13:30 What open mortgage and credit markets could become on open blockchains
• 15:14 The worst advice Paul's received as a founder
• 17:17 What's wrong with an $8 croissant (besides the obvious)

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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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What if opening a trading account was as easy as downloading an app?

Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito — a Solana-based liquid staking protocol — breaks down why he thinks all of finance is moving onchain, and what his small team is doing to make that happen.

During the 2022-2023 bear market, Jito was getting pitched constantly to jump ship to other chains. Lucas explains why they turned everything down, doubled down on Solana, and chewed a lot of glass.

We also cover how Jito acts like a Cloudflare for Solana, why cheap transactions create surprising problems, what convinced Lucas that the Solana engineers were in it for the right reasons, and his vision for a financial system anyone can access with just a phone.

Follow Jito: https://www.jito.network/

Follow Lucas: https://x.com/buffalu__

Highlights

• 0:00 — Intro
• 0:49 — What is Jito and why does it exist
• 1:11 — Why Solana transactions are less than a penny
• 2:00 — What attracted Lucas to Solana from Ethereum
• 2:39 — How Jito is like Cloudflare for blockchains
• 5:02 — The $1,500 Ethereum transaction fee problem
• 7:21 — The vision: all of finance onchain
• 7:46 — Onchain vs. opening a Robinhood account
• 8:37 — Lucas's journey from robotics to crypto
• 9:55 — Solana's rate of improvement and Anatoly's Law
• 10:44 — The pitch for people new to crypto
• 15:00 — Staying lean at 21 people
• 15:17 — Nicotine as a productivity hack
• 15:58 — Sleep, alcohol, and the Oura ring
• 16:40 — Smallest hill you'll die on: littering and shopping carts

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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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Should we push AI forward as fast as possible, or be more careful about how it develops?

Two competing views are emerging:

• e/acc (effective accelerationism): go faster, progress is the only path forward
• d/acc (defensive / decentralized acceleration): accelerate, but carefully, or risk losing control

In this episode of the a16z crypto show, Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder) and Guillaume Verdon aka "Beff Jezos" (Extropic founder & CEO,) join Eddy Lazzarin (a16z crypto CTO) and Shaw Walters (Eliza Labs founder) for a deep debate about these two perspectives and what they mean for AI, crypto, and the future.

They discuss:

• Whether acceleration is something we can control
• The biggest risks of AI, from surveillance to concentration of power
• Why open source and decentralization may shape who benefits
• Whether slowing down AI is realistic or even desirable
• How humans stay relevant in a world of increasingly powerful systems
• What the next 10, 100, and 1,000 years might look like
• At its core, this episode asks: Can acceleration be steered, or is that beyond our control?

Highlights:

00:00 Opening

07:02 Thermodynamics and first principles

16:04 Acceleration, entropy, and civilization

28:29 The core disagreement

32:42 Comparing and contrasting e/acc and d/acc

36:20 Open source, open hardware, and local intelligence

54:18 Should AI be slowed down?

1:02:35 Autonomous agents and artificial life

1:21:07 Crypto as the trust layer between humans and AI

1:35:37 Closing arguments

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