A16Z is the “worst and largest” scammer of all, says CEO of Swan Bitcoin (2022)
It&#x27;s overwrought takes like this that fail to see the real issues at play. Many of those projects were all good faith efforts and I haven&#x27;t seen a shred of evidence that a16z was mass dumping tokens (most articles confuse a16z&#x27;s first crypto fund, which did well, with the funds that were deployed in 2020&#x2F;2021).<p>With all that said, a16z (and other top VC firms) are at or near the top in the list responsible for inflating the crypto bubble.<p>1. They weren&#x27;t aligned with their LPs. The economics fundamentally changed for them as their funds 10x&#x27;d in size and they started bringing in $100M+ in management fees. They should have been asking themselves if they could responsibly invest anywhere near this amount in a crypto market with very few real users, but they decided to cash the checks instead.<p>2. They used social media to promote these tokens to retail and lobbied to reduce barriers for more retail investment. They were more than happy to sign off on plans for their portfolio companies to sell what were basically securities in seed companies to retail investors at orders of magnitude inflated prices. Then, they used their own Twitter accounts and podcast appearances to play up a potemkin digital revolution and raise their next fund, all while retail investors took a bath.<p>3. Due diligence was universally awful. They might have avoided most of the worst frauds, but plenty of investments were in unsustainable mechanisms where the collapse could have easily have been predicted.