Author: Jason Rosenthal, Operating Partner at a16z
Compiled by Hu Tao, ChainCatcher Selection
Many of the greatest companies in history have been built by positioning themselves within the “flow of capital”—facilitating the creation and transfer of value within networks and taking a share of it. The more value that flows through the network, the larger the company typically becomes.
Cryptocurrency is the first modern technology originally built for this purpose. If your startup has not yet designed your product and business architecture to benefit from these principles, you’re missing out. Thanks to stablecoins, funds and value now flow at internet speed—24/7, globally settled, and end-to-end programmable. Payment channels are frictionless, unit economics are transparent, and every dollar of movement is accessible worldwide.
Specific mode
Blockchain is inherently designed as a network business. Every transaction is settled on a shared ledger. Each new participant strengthens the same underlying network that the next builder can use. As more people use it and build on top of it, the network becomes more valuable to all users.
Most companies spend years building network effects on top of traditional infrastructure. Crypto founders inherit them as a starting condition.
Network tokens amplify this. Well-designed tokens align users, developers, suppliers, validators, and the protocol around a single outcome—network growth—and compensate each participant proportionally to their contribution. But the protocol’s revenue belongs to those who use it. No partner rebates, no secret deals. Just a feedback loop between value flowing through the system and value accumulated in the hands of those who build and grow it.
This is not a new model. Cryptocurrency has simply made it easier for startups to access and scale it for the first time.
Railroad companies don't make money from locomotives—they make money from every ton of grain, coal, and steel that crosses their tracks. Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and AT&T were all companies positioned within the flow of capital. Google and Meta replaced print and television not because their ads were better, but because they sat at the bottleneck where attention is converted into commerce, allowing them to capture a portion of trillions of dollars in commercial intent. AWS sits within the flow of computation.
This pattern is consistent: identify where value flows and position yourself in the middle.
Financial markets make this model even clearer. Visa processed $15.7 trillion in payment volume in fiscal year 2024 and reported $35.9 billion in net income. Jane Street posted $20.5 billion in net trading income last year—exceeding that of Citigroup or Bank of America. The top five market makers in the U.S. handle 87% of order flow payments: they do not predict markets; they are embedded in every order flow and earn more as trading volume increases.
These companies also share another common trait: network effects. Visa becomes more valuable to more merchants because there are more cards, and more valuable to more cardholders because more merchants accept it. The same applies to order flow—each additional broker narrows the spread, attracting more brokers, which in turn attracts more traffic.
Cash 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 talking about retail at the time, but it applies even more to traditional financial services—the world’s largest profit extraction pools. Payments, custody, lending, foreign exchange, securitization, settlement, market-making—all of them. Visa and Mastercard charge 2-3% transaction fees on networks designed in the 1960s. Remittance channels take 6-9%. Prime brokers and custodians skim a cut from every securities trade. Even after the U.S. moved to T+1 settlement in 2024, funds still sit idle overnight, acting as a structural tax on every participant.
Each of these profit margins is a target: reduce costs, increase speed, and potentially expand the entire market. Stripe and Square have demonstrated that this is achievable in the payments space.
Crypto founders have the opportunity to build the next version—programmable, instant, global, and natively embedded in the flow of funds.
And the frontier extends far beyond financial services: computing and GPU markets, memory chips, AI training data, energy, robotics, space, and rare earth metals. Each category is a domain where global value can begin to flow at volumes never designed for by existing systems.
Each is an open domain for cash flow businesses built from the ground up on programmable infrastructure. These markets have no existing tracks, no entrenched intermediaries, and nothing to defend.
As the founder, ask yourself:
1. Are you in the flow of funds today?
2.When the value of your product's promotion increases tenfold, will your revenue increase accordingly?
3. If you're building a new product, where is the highest profit extraction relative to the value being created in your target market?
The opportunity is there. Seize it, join the new trend, and let the network begin to accumulate growth from there.