You can’t demand compliance while refusing to explain what compliance requires. @milesjennings on why the CLARITY Act matters: “For the entire time that the industry has existed, it’s been very unclear whether or not digital assets have been subject to securities laws, how those securities laws apply, and how entrepreneurs can comply.” The bill creates a tailored framework for digital assets, draws jurisdictional lines between the SEC and CFTC, establishes guardrails for exchanges, and protects entrepreneurs from being unfairly targeted. “It’s targeting the key areas of uncertainty that have plagued the space for a long time, and really impeded innovation.” @MTSlive

America’s software leadership was built on openness. We have the same opportunity in AI. If we want a competitive, secure AI ecosystem whose benefits extend far beyond a handful of companies, we need to preserve access to open-weight models.

If the CLARITY Act passes, it will let the U.S. lead once again, just as it did with the commercial internet. Failing to act means innovation will migrate elsewhere, under frameworks devised by others. @cdixon

For over two decades in Congress, I saw how bold, forward-looking legislation can move our country ahead, and how outdated rules leave us scrambling to catch up. The Clarity Act is Congress’s chance to be proactive: establish consumer protections, provide regulatory certainty and give entrepreneurs the confidence to build. As I write in Fortune, Congress can seize the moment & break the cycle of reactive regulation. Now is our chance.

Here's a wide-ranging conversation (medical residents, kidneys, middle schools, refugees, surrogacy, ...) with Al Roth, one of the all-time greats of applying economic theory to improve lives. Co-hosted with @skominers, part of the First Principles mini-series @a16zcrypto. Outline: 00:00 Intro: Why market design matters 04:18 The economist as engineer 08:09 When theory meets the real world 07:02 Fixing the medical residency match 15:32 Why markets unravel 18:22 Redesigning NYC high school admissions 28:05 The hidden problem of congestion 34:47 How kidney exchange saves lives 45:26 How the internet changed market design 48:25 Airbnb, Uber and smarter marketplaces 51:28 Repugnant transactions and moral economics 53:32 When markets need social support 54:32 The unexpected effects of criminalizing surrogacy 01:04:58 Preference signals and the job market 01:18:53 A broken market: resettling refugees and other migrants link to full video:

We often hear that TradFi is "skeptical" of blockchains and DeFi... in reality it's just discipline. These institutions aren't waiting to believe in the tech. They're just telling us a COGS story. @cc_crowley and I talk about the near-term vs. long-term opportunity in programmable financial infrastructure 👇 Capital Markets players are adopting exactly the primitives that improve unit economics: atomic settlement, programmable money, tokenized collateral. Decentralization, the part with no line item, maybe gets left behind? CLARITY would be a real step toward the "elegant convergence" everyone predicts. But there's a long window where the short game and the long game both matter. Not competing bets, but parallel ones. Near-term, builders can help institutions adopt the primitives that move more capital onchain. Long-term, an open system continues to evolve and push the innovations that may eventually subsume the old system. @a16zcrypto

Is there anything computers can't do? Does Alan Turing's revolutionary work remain relevant in a world with generative AI and quantum computers? Announcing a new mini-series, for a general audience, on Computation and Its Limits. This is one of several short courses on the new Ergo platform, "a nonprofit that publishes long-form philosophical lectures online, without ads or paywalls." Get started at