Michael Blau

Michael BlauScott Duke KominersDaren Matsuoka NFTs royalties tech trends Automatically enforced royalties on secondary sales have always been an important value proposition for NFTs. In an ideal world, creators could set royalties onchain that would be paid automatically whenever their work is sold anywhere on the internet, and without relying on marketplaces and other third parties to honor royalties out of goodwill.

Chris Lee is cofounder of IYK, a startup that makes digital experiences tangible through NFC chips. Michael Blau is a deal partner at a16z crypto and part-time generative artist. And Robert Hackett is an editor at a16z crypto. They discuss the merging of the digital and physical, new consumer experiences enabled by chipped goods, the challenge of counterfeits and bots, and more.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (or so science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said). One such area of science-fiction-like progress is that of zero-knowledge proofs (or ZKPs), a cryptographic tool that addresses two critical challenges in web3: scalability and privacy. In particular, ZKPs could be the key to unlocking lower transaction fees, designing new privacy-preserving applications, and, as a result, welcome the next billion crypto users.