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Articles by Michael Blau
How NFT royalties work: Designs, challenges, and new ideas
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.
Let's get digi-physical: From 'tap' chips to Taylor Swift
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.
Secrets, and how to prove them: A magician’s guide to zero-knowledge proofs
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.
A few of the things we're excited about in crypto
Editor’s note: a16z just released an omnibus list of “big ideas” tech builders may tackle in the year ahead, according to various a16z domain partners spotlighting a big idea that startups in their fields may tackle in 2023. The list spans everything from consumer tech and games to enterprise and American Dynamism to enterprise and AI to fintech and of course, crypto.
'Proof-of-Merge' NFT to Commemorate Ethereum
“The Merge” – a major planned Ethereum upgrade – is set to take place imminently. The update will switch Ethereum over from “proof-of-work,” a transaction verifying system that requires vast computing resources, to “proof-of-stake,” a more efficient alternative for reaching consensus on blocks of transactions. The change should drastically reduce the network’s energy consumption, broaden its accessibility, and amp up its security.
A Tool for Detecting Metamorphic Smart Contracts
A critical Ethereum security assumption is that smart contract code is immutable and therefore cannot be changed once it is deployed on the blockchain. In practice, some smart contracts can change – even after they’ve been deployed. With a few clever tricks, you can create metamorphic smart contracts that “metamorphose” into something else – and by understanding what makes them possible, you can detect them.
Identifying Authentic NFTs (Especially Against Attackers)
As an NFT collector, you should care about on-chain provenance. The most authentic provenance for an NFT is when it is initially minted directly from a creator’s wallet or a smart contract that the creator owns. However, with a few clever smart contract illusions, someone could manipulate NFT provenance using a technique known as Sleep Minting.
a16z Crypto Investments | Andreessen Horowitz
Historically, new models of computing have tended to emerge every 10–15 years: mainframes in the 60s, PCs in the late 70s, the internet in the early 90s, and smartphones in the late 2000s. Each computing model enabled new classes of applications that built on the unique strengths of the platform. For example, smartphones were the first truly personal computers with built-in sensors like GPS and high-resolution cameras.
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