Noah Citron

“Layer 2” rollups are computer networks that are designed to help scale “layer 1” blockchains such as Ethereum — and they’ve been bustling with activity recently, especially since Ethereum implemented its scaling-related EIP-4844 (“Dencun”) upgrade in March. Jesse Pollak, who is Coinbase’s head of protocols and who founded and leads the popular layer 2 rollup Base, joins a16z crypto engineer Noah Citron and host Robert Hackett to discuss bottom-up vs.

Decentralization is crypto’s defining promise: Networks that have no single point of failure are more secure and more resilient than their centralized counterparts. In practice, we often see emerging points of centralization as potentially vulnerable – their failures can compromise an entire network. Ethereum’s switch to Proof of Stake, for example, drew attention to the potential risk of relying on a single client at any layer.

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.