. These digital chits use clever cryptography to prove, without the need for a central authenticator, that a buyer owns a unique piece of digital property. Alongside cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, NFTs are the most visible instantiation of “web3”—an idea whose advocates and their venture-capital backers hail as a better, more decentralised version of the internet, built atop distributed ledgers known as blockchains.
Pitted against them are the sceptics. They range from Mr Marlinspike, highly respected even among the techno-Utopians for creating the secure-messaging app Signal, to Jack Dorsey, who founded two platforms of the sort that web3 promises to supersede . They argue that a truly decentralised internet is a pipe dream—“You don’t own ‘web3’. VCs and their [limited partners] do,” Mr Dorsey warned last month.
Other a16z investments are serving end users. Dapper Labs creates NFT applications such as NBA Top Shot, a website where sports fans can buy and sell digital collectables such as key moments in basketball games. Syndicate helps investment clubs to organise themselves into “decentralised autonomous organisations” governed by “smart contracts”, which are rules encoded in software and baked into a blockchain. And Sound.xyz allows musicians to mint NFTs to make money.