> venture capitalists have long traded a lack of Wall Street-style oversight for the promise that they invest mainly in new shares of private companies. It was a tradeoff firms gladly made—until the age of crypto, a type of high-risk investment the SEC says requires more oversight. So be it, says Andreessen Horowitz. By renouncing its venture capital status, it’ll be able to go deeper on riskier bets: If the firm wants to put $1 billion into cryptocurrency or tokens, or buy unlimited shares in public companies or from other investors, it can.

Pitchforks and funding purism aside (forget about blockchain debates), crypto assets are here to stay. They're the new publicly traded vehicles and function as a way for new startups to raise capital from new truly global 'capital markets' along with being a valuation metric. a16z figured this out. They knew what happened with facebook in SecondMarket [1] and also knew the largest upside in shareprices (aka IPOs/exits) are dictated by a public market marketplace, not with private startups.

Factor what Fidelity with $6T AUM has already released in rolling out global crypto services [2].

Separate crypto, as a capital raising vehicle and trading vehicle, from 'blockchain' and then it all begins to make sense. Real scientific and technical due diligence will help too [3].

[1] http://fortune.com/2012/05/18/facebooks-pre-ipo-pricing-hist...

[2] https://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-most-influential-blockchai...

[3] https://medium.com/@492727ZED/vectorspace-ai-due-diligence-d...