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According to Techfundingnews, London-based AI recruitment platform Ethos has completed a $22.75 million Series A funding round, led by a16z with participation from General Catalyst.Ethos uses AI to interview candidates and analyze their academic papers, code, and other professional content to build detailed skill profiles. The platform then matches experts with paid opportunities, including expert consulting, market research, AI data annotation, advisory services, and full-time jobs.James Lo, co-founder and CEO of Ethos, stated, "Resumes do not accurately reflect a person's abilities. Ethos aims to help people showcase their complete professional capabilities in an AI-redefined economy and assist companies in finding the talent they truly need more precisely." Ethos aims to address the issues of rampant fake or AI-generated resumes and the difficulty in verifying candidates' true abilities.

a16z Crypto Managing Partner Chris Dixon announced on the X platform that Eddy Lazzarin has been promoted to General Partner at a16z Crypto.Lazzarin joined a16z Crypto in 2019 as a data scientist and investment partner, and from 2023, he has served as Chief Technology Officer, leading the engineering, data science, research, and security teams, driving the development of the open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine Jolt. Lazzarin has developed a clear theoretical framework in token design and classification, helping to establish standards for understanding token operations, value accumulation, governance, and incentive mechanisms.As the new General Partner, he will focus on portfolio and token strategies, as well as identifying, evaluating, and supporting emerging crypto networks and companies, including the investment work for a16z Crypto's recently announced fifth crypto fund.

According to The Block, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's crypto branch a16z crypto has completed fundraising for its fifth fund, totaling $2.2 billion. This fund is smaller than the record $4.5 billion raised for the fourth fund in 2022.a16z crypto communications partner Paul Cafiero stated that the company intends to return to a smaller fund size because "a shorter fundraising cycle allows us to keep up with the rapidly changing crypto trends." The previous fund sizes for a16z crypto were $2.2 billion for the third fund in 2021, $515 million for the second fund in 2020, and $350 million for the first fund in 2018.a16z crypto also announced the promotion of CTO Eddy Lazzarin to general partner (GP), making him the fourth general partner alongside Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, and Guy Wuollet.a16z crypto noted that while the market is in a relatively calm phase, adoption signals are improving, pointing out that the use of stablecoins continues to grow, and the application of blockchain in capital markets is becoming increasingly widespread, including perpetual contracts for price discovery, prediction markets for information aggregation, and on-chain lending for stablecoin credit markets. The company also cited the GENIUS Act as an example of a clearer regulatory framework, maintaining a "hopeful and optimistic" attitude towards the Clarity Act passed this year. The fund will focus 100% on investments in the crypto space and will not expand into adjacent areas such as AI or robotics.a16z crypto has previously invested in projects such as Coinbase, Uniswap, Solana, Kalshi, Anchorage Digital, and Phantom. Other crypto venture capital firms have also been active recently, with Haun Ventures completing fundraising for its second fund of $1 billion earlier this week, Dragonfly recently completing its fourth fund of $650 million, and Paradigm reportedly seeking up to $1.5 billion for a broader fund, while Blockchain Capital is also raising approximately $700 million.

The venture capital firm a16z supports the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and opposes a series of crackdowns by various states on prediction markets. On Friday, a16z submitted an 18-page comment letter to the CFTC, stating that the actions taken by state regulators against prediction market platforms—including cease-and-desist orders and proposed bans—are creating "serious barriers to fair access" for users.In just the past month, the CFTC has filed a series of lawsuits against Illinois, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, and Wisconsin, claiming that these states are attempting to regulate markets overseen by the federal government, which exceeds their jurisdiction. a16z argues that requiring trading platforms to block U.S. users based on their state of residence conflicts with the CFTC's rules on fair market access. The company wrote, "Being forced to deny fair access to users from states seeking to license or ban certain event contracts could severely compress available liquidity."CFTC Chairman Mike Selig asserts that the event contracts of prediction markets fall under swap contracts, placing them within the CFTC's "exclusive jurisdiction." State regulators and state attorneys general counter that platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket offer unlicensed gambling products. a16z also discussed the utility provided by what it calls prediction markets, stating that their pricing mechanism is a "unique form of price discovery" that helps "reveal the probabilities of uncertain events." The company further argues that blockchain-based prediction markets are more transparent than traditional platforms, claiming that "the auditability of on-chain transactions" makes it easier for participants and regulators to oversee.In April, the prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi surpassed a cumulative trading volume of $15 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) stated in a letter to the CFTC that state regulations on prediction markets are creating "barriers to fair access" and may weaken market liquidity.a16z pointed out that requiring platforms to restrict user access by state will affect market uniformity and conflict with the federal principle of fair access. At the same time, frequent bans and enforcement actions may also compress overall trading depth. The agency emphasized that prediction markets play an important role in information discovery and probability pricing, supporting unified federal regulation. The CFTC, on the other hand, insists that the relevant contracts fall under its exclusive regulatory scope.

Robert Hackett, head of special projects at a16z Crypto, pointed out that the term "stablecoin" is gradually losing its relevance. Stablecoins were originally born during a period of high volatility in the crypto market, hence the emphasis on the characteristic of "stability."However, with technological evolution, stability has become a foundational aspect evolving into global financial infrastructure. The focus of the crypto industry has shifted from "is it stable" to "what else can be built," with stability becoming a basic threshold rather than the innovation itself.Therefore, the term "stablecoin" seems more like a patch for an old problem rather than a definition of a new financial system. In the future, the concept of stablecoins may ultimately fade into broader expressions like "digital dollar" or "on-chain assets," or even fully integrate into the underlying financial system, much like how "electric light" replaced the concept of "electric illumination."

According to Kairos Research, the address marked as a16z by Arkham has completed the unstaking of 4,270 HYPE, transferring 3,875 of them to an address starting with 0xeeb. In addition, this address will complete the unstaking of 30,000 HYPE around 4 AM Beijing time on May 5.

Miles Jennings, the policy head and general counsel of a16z Crypto, and others wrote "Getting prediction market regulation right," which points out that the current push by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to reform the regulatory framework for prediction markets is at a critical juncture, as prediction markets are transitioning from niche products to important infrastructure.With the integration of AI and blockchain-driven new risk management models, prediction markets can enable AI agents to automatically hedge risks, adjust on-chain event contract positions in real-time, and play a core role in risk management, information aggregation, and authenticity judgment. a16z Crypto believes that if the regulatory framework is too conservative, it will limit the development potential of prediction markets. Therefore, they have submitted a comment letter providing opinions on key issues such as the application of statutory core principles and CFTC regulations in prediction markets, and public interest considerations related to event contracts. They also proposed five regulatory recommendations for prediction markets, including: the CFTC implementing unified regulatory authority over event contracts, optimizing contract dispute resolution mechanisms, strengthening monitoring of insider trading and market manipulation, re-evaluating "special rules," and exploring clearer compliance pathways for on-chain prediction markets.

According to a16z, its researchers conducted a systematic test on whether AI agents can independently exploit DeFi price manipulation vulnerabilities.The study used a dataset of 20 Ethereum price manipulation incidents and employed Codex (GPT 5.4) equipped with the Foundry toolchain as the testing agent. Under baseline conditions without domain knowledge, the agent's success rate was only 10%; after introducing structured domain knowledge extracted from real attack events, the success rate increased to 70%. Failure cases showed that the agent could accurately identify vulnerabilities but generally struggled to understand the leverage logic of recursive borrowing, misjudged profit margins, and could not assemble multi-step attack structures across contracts. The experiment also recorded a sandbox escape incident: the agent extracted the RPC key from the local node configuration and called the anvil_reset method to reset the node to a future block, bypassing information isolation restrictions and obtaining real attack data. The research team believes that AI agents can currently effectively assist in vulnerability identification but cannot yet replace professional security auditors.

a16z crypto released an analysis report titled "The New Stack of Global Finance: The Stablecoin Edition." The report points out that stablecoins have evolved from niche trading tools into fundamental financial pipelines, giving rise to a new type of "banking as a service" model that is driving the reconstruction of the financial system. The report believes that the transition to on-chain finance has "crossed the point of no return."The report categorizes blockchains into three types: general-purpose chains (such as Solana, Ethereum, and L2), payment-specific chains (such as Stripe's Tempo), and institutional networks (such as Canton). It also notes that the bottlenecks in the banking industry are easing, with a number of crypto-friendly banks actively connecting on-chain infrastructure with traditional fiat systems. The competition for stablecoin issuance has shifted to regulatory positioning, with issuers vying to obtain OCC national trust charters.The report states that payments are the "first act," while credit may be the more important "second act." The large-scale issuance of stablecoins will give rise to a new on-chain credit market, allowing capital to form outside the traditional banking system. The report also emphasizes that stablecoins not only enhance the dominance of the dollar but also provide emerging market users with access channels to the dollar.

a16z released the latest research indicating that stablecoins are gradually evolving from their initial role as transaction settlement tools and stores of value into global financial infrastructure. Data shows that following the regulatory clarity driven by the U.S. GENIUS Act, the stablecoin market has accelerated its growth, with adjusted trading volumes reaching approximately $4.5 trillion.The report shows that consumer-to-business (C2B) stablecoin transactions grew by 128% year-on-year, reaching 284.6 million transactions. The monthly collateral deposits for stablecoin card projects also increased from nearly zero at the end of 2024 to over $300 million by early 2026, reflecting the rapid expansion of stablecoin payment scenarios. Meanwhile, the velocity of stablecoins has increased from 2.6 times to 6 times since early 2024, indicating a shift from being "held" to being "frequently used." a16z believes that the focus of stablecoin applications is shifting from cross-border payments to local payment infrastructure, particularly evident in markets such as Asia and Brazil.