Author: Jason Rosenthal, a16z Operating Partner

Compiler: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher Selected

Many of the best companies in history have been built by positioning themselves in the "flow of capital" — facilitating the creation and transfer of value within networks and extracting a portion from it. The more value that flows through the network, the larger the company typically grows.

Cryptocurrency is the first modern technology built natively for this purpose. If your startup has not architected its products and business to benefit from these principles, then you have missed a great opportunity. Thanks to stablecoins, capital and value now flow at the speed of the internet — round the clock, with global settlements, and with end-to-end programmability. Payment channels are unobstructed, unit economics are transparent, and every dollar moved around the world is accessible.

Specific Models

Blockchain is designed to be a network-oriented business. Each transaction is settled on a shared ledger. Every new participant strengthens the same underlying network that the next builder can use. As more people use and build on it, the network becomes more valuable for all users.

Most companies spend years creating network effects on traditional infrastructure. Crypto founders inherit them as a starting condition.

Network tokens amplify this. Well-designed tokens can enable users, developers, suppliers, validators, and protocols to align around a single outcome — the growth of the network — and distribute payments proportionally based on each participant's contribution. But the revenue of the protocol belongs to those who use it. No partner kickbacks, no private deals. There is only a feedback loop between the value flowing in the system and the value accumulated in the hands of those building and developing it.

This is not a new model. Cryptocurrency simply makes it easier for startups to access and scale it for the first time.

Railroads did not make money from locomotives. They made money from every ton of grain, coal, and steel that crossed their tracks. Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and AT&T were companies in the flow of capital. Google and Meta replaced print and television, not because their ads were better, but because they were positioned in the bottleneck where attention converted to business, enabling them to extract a portion from trillions of dollars of business intent. AWS is in the flow of computing.

The model is consistent: find where value is flowing and position yourself in the middle of it.

Financial markets make this model clearer. Visa processed $15.7 trillion in payments in fiscal year 2024 and reported $35.9 billion in net income. Jane Street reported $20.5 billion in net trading income last year - more than Citigroup or Bank of America. The top five market makers in the U.S. handle 87% of order flow payments: they don’t predict markets; they are in the flow of every order and earn more as trading volume increases.

These businesses also have another thing in common: network effects. Visa is more useful for more merchants because there are more cards; it is more useful for more cardholders because more merchants accept it. The same goes for order flow — every new broker narrows spreads, attracting more brokers, which in turn attracts more traffic.

Capital flow combined with network effects is one of the most enduring business structures ever.

Your Profit is My Opportunity

Bezos called it “your profit is my opportunity.” He was referring to retail at the time, but it applies even more to traditional financial services — the largest pool of profit extraction in the world. Payments, custody, lending, foreign exchange, securitization, clearing, market making, all without exception. Visa and Mastercard charged a 2-3% transaction fee on the networks designed in the 1960s. Remittance channels charge 6-9%. Major brokers and custodians take a cut from every security transaction. Even after the U.S. moves to T+1 settlement in 2024, capital will still sit idle overnight as a structural tax on each participant.

Each of these margins is a target. Compress costs, speed things up, and potentially scale across entire markets. Stripe and Square have proved this is achievable in payments.

Crypto founders have the opportunity to build the next version — programmable, instant, global, and natively in the flow of capital.

And the frontier far exceeds financial services. Computing and GPU markets. Memory chips. AI training data. Energy. Robotics. Space. Rare earth metals. Each category is a domain where global value can start to flow in volumes that existing tracks were never designed to carry.

Each is an open field for building capital flow businesses from the ground up on programmable infrastructure. These markets have no existing tracks, no entrenched intermediaries, and nothing to defend.

As founders, ask yourself:

1. Are you in the flow of capital today?

2. Does your revenue grow as the value of activities on your product increases tenfold?

3. If you are building a new product, where in your target market is the margin of profit extraction highest relative to the value being created?

The opportunities are there. Seize them, integrate into the new flow, and let the network begin to accumulate growth from there.

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