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Emerging technologies evolve in cycles; in crypto, this includes periods of high activity, followed by so-called crypto winters. In the period marked by our now-annual State of Crypto report, it would be easy for a casual observer to overlook the rapid progress the crypto industry is making. Major infrastructure improvements like The Merge – a momentous achievement in decentralized and open source development – simply don’t make headlines as often as high-profile bankruptcies, busts, and flameouts. a16z's 2023 report aims to address the imbalance between the noise of fleeting price movements – and the data that tracks the signals that matter, including the durable progress of web3 technology. Overall, the report reflects a healthier industry than market prices may indicate, and a steady cycle of development, product launches, and ongoing innovation. Download the full report This year, we’re also introducing something *new*: the State of Crypto Index, an interactive tool to track the health of the crypto industry from a technological, rather than financial, perspective. To offer a more accurate and nuanced measure of the state of crypto, the index represents the weighted average monthly growth of 14 industry metrics – from the number of verified smart contracts to the number of transacting wallets and more. In other words, the index displays, in a single chart, the rate of innovation and adoption of web3. The tool is also interactive, so you can tweak the parameters to form your own views. Explore the index Some key takeaways: Blockchains have more active users, and more ways to engage. Active addresses hit an all-time high last month – 15 million – doubling over the last two years, as a growing variety of apps and services, like on-chain games, offer people new ways to engage. DeFi and NFT activity appear to be rising again as promising new uses and applications emerge. After a frenetic speculative period and subsequent cooldown, more people seem to be buying NFTs in recent months. Meanwhile, on decentralized exchanges, more than $100 billion traded last month, marking the third consecutive month of positive growth in trading volume. The number of active developers in the crypto industry has held steady. Builders drawn in by the 2020 bull run are sticking around. Almost 30K developers contributed to, or built on, crypto projects last month – steadily increasing over 60% in the last three years. Blockchains are scaling through promising new paths. A proliferation of protocols and projects are working to scale blockchains, facilitating more transactions using a number of different approaches and technologies. Last year, “Layer 2” (L2) scaling solutions accounted for 1.5% of the total fees paid on Ethereum. Today: 7%. New technologies, once practically impossible, are becoming very real. We’re seeing decades-in-the-making work on “zero knowledge” systems advance at a staggering pace, which will unlock further blockchain scalability and a new category of privacy-protecting applications (not to mention applications in AI). The data shows a positive trend in ZK-related research, developer activity, and usage. The U.S. is losing its lead in web3. Between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of crypto developers based in the U.S. vs. the rest of the world fell 26%. Thoughtful regulation can encourage crypto builders to innovate and grow these technologies safely in the U.S. Zooming out shows progress across key indicators. Market cap, developer activity, and funding activity have all increased steadily over the last decade. Stepping back from short-term volatility reveals a more predictable pattern: a price-innovation cycle where price swings propel new ideas forward. Want a deeper dive? Subscribe to the ‘web3 with a16z’ podcast Sign up for the a16z crypto newsletter 7 takeaways from the State of Crypto 2023 1. Blockchains have more active users, and more ways to engage Prices have steadied this year from the dizzying highs of 2021. The industry seems to be settling: speculation has cooled, and the story of how people durably, organically use and interact with web3 is starting to unfold. We’re seeing more monthly active addresses – unique addresses transacting on-chain each month – than ever. Last month we saw 15 million sending addresses, more than twice as many as two years ago when prices were still elevated. One possible explanation: There are increasingly more ways to engage with blockchains and web3 applications. From DeFi to web3 games – more than 700 of which launched last year – a variety of new applications create addresses for their users to interact with, without having to download or connect a wallet. Better tooling and scaling technologies are also attracting more transactions with lower gas fees. Notably, the total number of blockchain transactions has grown by over 50% in the past two years. 2. DeFi and NFT activity appears to be rising again Activity across DeFi and NFTs, meanwhile, seems to be on the rise again after falling from the fizzy highs of 2021. As speculation cooled, more organic uses seem to have emerged, across lending, remittances, art, collectibles, on-chain gaming, and more. Still, the promise of NFTs and decentralized finance – to transform the economics of the internet – endures. In recent months, for example, we’ve seen an uptick in both NFT buyers and DEX volume. In fact, Uniswap – a decentralized exchange – has seen higher trading volume than Coinbase – the largest centralized exchange in the U.S. – for the last two consecutive months. Users and creators benefit from web3’s structurally lower “take rates” (that is, the share of revenue that platform owners take from users). In crypto, users genuinely own their digital goods and can, importantly, bring these goods to any platform they please. The easier it is for people to switch platforms, the more competition can heat up, and the less platforms can extract from users (or suddenly change the rules on them). Low platform pricing power often leads to lower take rates. In the last two years, NFT marketplaces have paid out nearly $2 billion worth of royalties in secondary sales to creators. Compare that to web2, where Meta, for instance, earmarked $1 billion for creators through 2022. This comparison is all the more stunning considering that Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more – have around 3.74 billion monthly users compared to the estimated tens of millions of web3 users today. It’s worth noting that web3 take rates are, if anything, trending downward over time. While web3 creator royalties are in flux as best practices and technologies evolve in the space, we expect even more innovation and experimentation here. 3. The number of active developers in the crypto industry has held steady Prices can be misleading, particularly without looking under the hood of web3 technology at its dynamic – and growing – ecosystem of builders. Notably, there was, and continues to be, sustained development across crypto. There are nearly 30K monthly active developers in the crypto industry today. And a steady increase of 60% since the start of the bull run in 2020 indicates that developers that may have been attracted by rising prices are sticking around. As far as what they’re building: nearly 50K unique addresses deployed smart contracts last month, a 40% rise just this year. More of these contracts were verified, and more core developer libraries were used to interact with them, than we’ve ever tracked. A key feature of crypto – an open source, decentralized computing platform – is that projects can act as a multiplier when their composable components are reused, recycled, and adapted by others. Composability is to software (as a16z crypto founder and managing partner Chris Dixon says) as compounding interest is to finance: an exponential force. “There are various exponential forces in the world to look out for, as they can be indicators of rapid future growth. In hardware, the most powerful exponential force is Moore’s Law. In finance, it’s compounding interest. In software, it’s composability.” Consider Uniswap: it started as a protocol for exchanging tokens, and it has developed into critical infrastructure enabling an ecosystem of new DeFi applications. 4. Blockchains are scaling through promising new paths Blockchain scaling welcomes more people, more transactions, and more complex applications into the fold. Now we’re seeing many promising new paths; it’s a dynamic design space for web3 developers trying to solve foundational challenges. Let’s start with “Layer 2” blockchains: the technology designed to scale underlying Layer 1 blockchains, like Ethereum, by offering up more blockspace, increasing transaction throughput, and lowering fees. Last year L2s accounted for 1.5% of the fees paid on Ethereum. That share has since more than quadrupled to 7% of the total fees paid on Ethereum – indicating that more applications are choosing to build on L2s. We expect this trend to continue, and benefit end users. Finally, one of the most momentous events in the history of open source development – given the scope of the challenge, the nature of the distributed coordination, and more – took place last fall. Ethereum underwent a major upgrade when the network transitioned from “proof-of-work” to a “proof-of-stake” consensus mechanism. “The Merge” marked an architectural shift that massively reduced Ethereum’s energy footprint: Compare this to web2 giants: YouTube consumes an estimated 244 Terawatt hours annually, or 94,000x as much energy per year as Ethereum. 5. New technologies, once practically impossible, are becoming very real Over the last year we have seen rapid progress in the field of “zero knowledge” systems — powerful, foundational technologies that unlock blockchain scalability, along with a proliferation of new use cases including privacy-preserving applications and verifiable compute that could enable decentralized machine learning/AI. These systems (including zero knowledge proofs) involve cryptographic methods for proving or verifying a set of facts is true without revealing any information about those facts. This work, decades in the making, has moved from theory to practice in the last few years. We seem to see the technology following “Moore’s Law”-like paces here. Though evaluating benchmarks requires a lot of nuance, the acceleration of progress, from provers and verifiers to circuits and hardware and more is incredibly promising. 6. The U.S. is losing its lead in web3 As a set of emerging technologies, crypto needs thoughtful policy and regulatory guardrails to safely grow and meet its economic potential for the U.S. economy. There has been much debate, but little regulatory clarity, which has hindered web3’s growth. As a result, America’s edge may be slipping. Between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of crypto developers based in the U.S. vs. the rest of the world fell 26%. There are some positive signs, however – including a growing, bipartisan push for legislation that could provide much-needed clarity. We hope that this momentum will continue, and that policymakers will fight for the future and the potential of these technologies. 7. Zooming out shows progress We’re still early in web3, but we’re no longer at the beginning. Stepping back from short-term volatility reveals a more predictable pattern: a steady product cycle that is distinctly different from the financial cycles that saturate media attention. We’ve underscored the significance of the “price-innovation cycle” – the observation that prices and development activity are intertwined in a positive feedback loop – many times; it’s a useful mental model for navigating market cycles and understanding the indicators driving them. When crypto prices rise, more people get interested and join in. The attention, in turn, inspires (and funds) new ideas, startups, and projects, some of which lead to greater adoption in the long term. Over time, these cycles move the industry forward in technological waves. We may be in the middle of the fourth such cycle since Bitcoin’s inception in 2009. Taking a longer view suggests many indicators appear to be trending steadily upward. This is why focusing on short-term market movements – and not enough on underlying technology trends – obscures the bigger picture. It’s also why we asked ourselves: What if there were a way to track durable progress along more meaningful dimensions than financials alone? So we created the State of Crypto Index, a regularly updated and interactive index to track the industry’s growth. More specifically, the index shows the weighted average monthly growth among a set of key industry metrics. Alongside the index, you can view all the metrics – a collection of supply-side and demand-side measurements that serve as indicators of web3 innovation and adoption, respectively – and the assumptions under which they’re blended. ***

At the end of October 2025, 1X Technologies' humanoid robot Neo swept through the tech world like a heatwave. This sleek robot, backed by OpenAI, is touted as the first truly home-friendly physical assistant. Priced at around $20,000 or $499 per month for leasing, Neo can clean, carry items, and even learn new tasks through imitation. In just a few days, it became the internet's focal point — seemingly, a tireless family companion has finally arrived. Yet, behind the cheers, a profound reflection on "autonomy" quietly unfolds. Remote control offers the illusion of convenience, but it exposes a core pain point in the AI industry: human operators still lurk in the shadows, and what happens to your privacy data? As Curious CEO David Tomasian puts it: "True autonomy is the only way machines can belong to us." An Illusion: The Myth of Humanoid Robot "Autonomy" Neo's launch is indeed exhilarating: standing 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing 66 pounds, it uses tendon-driven actuators mimicking human muscles, wrapped in a soft shell for safety. Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf exclaimed on X that Neo has "advanced" his timeline for home robot adoption. In demos, Neo waters plants, opens doors, washes clothes, and scrubs dishes, turning mundane chores into something poetic and efficient. But this excitement was quickly doused by reality. The Wall Street Journal's hands-on report reveals that many of Neo's movements are still remotely controlled in real time by "experts" via VR. This isn't sci-fi — it's the current state of AI, where remote piloting aids companies in training models through imitation and reinforcement learning, yet reduces the robot from "independent helper" to "human extension." Tomasian sharply notes that under this model, your "private robot" isn't truly private: it not only observes your life but uploads data to the cloud, fueling the manufacturer's training. When a robot can "see" your home layout, recognize your voice, and analyze your habits — yet remains tethered to the manufacturer's servers — who does it really belong to? From Factory to Home: The Privacy Cost Beneath Autonomy The wave of humanoid robots is flowing from factories to living rooms. Figure AI's Figure 02 and Tesla's Optimus aim to reshape industry, while Neo pushes the vision into consumer territory — not just productivity, but companionship itself. This trend is especially urgent in elderly care. Pilot projects in Japan, Korea, and parts of Europe are testing robots for assisting daily activities, monitoring health, and providing emotional support. But Tomasian points out: "The difference between aid and true care lies in understanding context and emotion." If data isn't encrypted and stored locally, "the robot isn't yours—it's someone else's lens." Privacy expert Kohei Kurihara disclosed on X that Neo users must sign a waiver allowing manufacturers access to certain operational data. This "tech-for-convenience" pact hides cracks in trust. A Medium article bluntly states that this $20,000 robot "needs a human babysitter", with complex tasks requiring an appointment for "expert mode," making users feel like they're renting a "surveilled puppet." Tomasian emphasizes that for embodied intelligence to evolve like language models, three things are essential: on-device reasoning, multimodal understanding, and encrypted autonomy. AI must not just execute commands but comprehend "why" they are given, ensuring data sovereignty belongs to the user. True care reliability stems from security and privacy, not algorithmic complexity. In other words, autonomy isn't just a technical issue — it's a social contract: Machines should embody trust, not extend surveillance. From Embodied to Digital: AI Agents' Lessons on Autonomy Neo's controversy reflects a deeper trend: "Autonomy" isn't confined to mechanical limbs — it's also about digital intelligence. Rather than teaching robots in your living room how to wash dishes, why not have agents on the network learn to "act on your behalf"? AI Agents are the extension of this direction. They're not humanoid replicas but digital extensions of human will — capable of executing tasks, making decisions, and completing transactions on behalf of users, with data ownership retained by the individual. IBM's "2025 AI Agent Report" states that Agentic AI promises an 8x productivity boost, hinging on autonomous reasoning combined with privacy protection. Google Cloud research shows 52% of enterprises using generative AI have deployed AI Agents. Deloitte predicts half of companies will enable Agentic AI by 2027. Gartner forecasts that within four years, agents will autonomously handle 15% of daily decisions. This shift redefines "autonomy": no longer machines mimicking human limbs, but agents learning to represent human intent. XWorld: A Real-World Experiment in "Machines Belonging to People" Amid this trend, the XWorld platform's explorations stand out. Since its 2023 launch, it has built a self-sustaining "agent economy" by combining AI training with token incentives: users can create, deploy, and monetize their own AI Agents. The integration of stablecoins makes settlements lower-friction, ensuring value flows under user control. Today, XWorld boasts over 11 million downloads and 1 million monthly actives in its Telegram MiniApp ecosystem, with cumulative token trading volume exceeding $34.7 million. Here, autonomy is no illusion — it's a reality co-built by users, developers, and agents: machines not only execute instructions but become "intelligence we own." Epilogue: Who Truly Owns the Machines? Neo reminds us: when "autonomy" becomes a selling point, oversight and trust must evolve in tandem. The future shown by the AI Agent industry offers another possibility: Machines are no longer just used, but truly "owned"; They no longer serve the network, but human will and data sovereignty. XWorld's experiment may provide the answer: when "agent autonomy" merges with "user ownership," machines finally begin to belong to us. In the future, when robots no longer need human eyes, that may be humanity's true liberation. 🔗 Learn more and join XWorld Website | Whitepaper | Twitter | Telegram | Youtube | Linktree

The Advent of Gaming Miracles: From Zelda to Genshin Impact In the realm of digital entertainment, the gaming world is a universe full of marvels and miracles. As technology advanced, we witnessed an evolution in gaming, with each new version surpassing the last in terms of graphics, gameplay, and narrative. From the fantasy world of Zelda to the immersive universe of Genshin Impact, and the boundless sandbox of Minecraft, these games have set unprecedented standards, offering rich, multifaceted experiences to gamers worldwide. Each of these games, in their unique ways, have pushed the boundaries of what is possible within the realm of virtual entertainment, creating intricate worlds that captivate and engage players on levels beyond just simple amusement. They have successfully managed to transport gamers into their fantastical worlds, creating an emotional investment that keeps players coming back for more. The Limitations of Web2 Games: A Closed Economic System However, as impressive as the Web2 era games are in terms of entertainment value, they operate within a closed economic system. While these games offer players the thrill of adventure and the satisfaction of achievement, the economic benefits they provide are limited and confined within the boundaries of the game itself. Players invest time, effort, and sometimes real money into these games, but the returns are often only virtual rewards, with no real-world value. The ownership of the in-game assets, too, is limited, leaving gamers yearning for more control and participation. The Inevitable Shift: Embracing Web3 with XWORLD As we stand on the brink of a new technological era, there is a paradigm shift happening in the gaming industry. The transformation of games into the Web3 industry is not just a possibility but an inevitable trend. Web3 games promise to revolutionize the gaming industry, offering players not only an immersive gaming experience but also an opportunity to participate in the game’s economy, giving them a sense of ownership and control. This is where XWORLD emerges as a game-changer. The XWORLD Mission: Bridging the Gap Between Gamers and the Web3 Dividends XWORLD was born with a mission to bridge the gap between the gaming world and the Web3 dividends. It aims to allow hundreds of millions of game users to reap the benefits of Web3 as early as possible. With XWORLD, gamers can quickly gain wealth, not just in the form of in-game currency but real economic value. The ownership of the game is also decentralized, giving players a greater sense of control and achievement. This transformative approach is set to redefine the economics of gaming, making it more inclusive and rewarding for players. Innovative Strategies: XWORLD’s Use-to-Earn Game Dividend Mechanism One of the notable features of XWORLD products is the innovative use-to-earn game dividend mechanism. This unique approach allows players to not just play but also earn, creating a more engaging and rewarding gaming experience. In most traditional games, players spend money to purchase in-game assets. But in XWORLD, the tables are turned. Here, players can earn dividends through their gaming activities, which can be converted into real-world value. This radical shift in the gaming model ensures that the time and effort invested by the players are adequately rewarded, making gaming not just an entertainment activity but also a profitable endeavor. Revolutionizing Gaming: The Introduction of NFT Accelerated Mining XWORLD has introduced NFT accelerated mining, taking gaming to the next level. Players can now delve into the exciting world of NFTs while enjoying their favorite games. NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens are unique digital assets that players can own, trade, or sell, providing them with an additional avenue for earning. NFT accelerated mining in XWORLD allows players to earn NFTs through their gaming activities. These NFTs can be traded on the marketplace, providing players with real-world economic benefits. This integration of NFTs into the gaming ecosystem is a significant step towards the democratization of digital assets, giving players an opportunity to participate in the digital economy actively. Engaging Players: The Power of Staking Voting in XWORLD Staking voting is another innovative feature that XWORLD has incorporated into its gaming ecosystem. This feature gives players more control and say in the game’s development and direction. In traditional games, the game’s development is often a top-down process, with developers making decisions and players having to accept them. However, with staking voting, players can have a say in the game’s future development, making the gaming experience more democratic and engaging. Web3 Wallets and Trading Markets: Revitalizing the Game World Economy Recognizing the need for a secure and efficient platform for transactions, XWORLD has developed convenient and easy-to-use Web3 Wallets and trading markets. These platforms are designed to revitalize the game world economy, providing a robust and reliable system for transactions. These wallets and markets facilitate the buying, selling, and trading of in-game assets and NFTs, making the in-game economy more dynamic and vibrant. They ensure that the value generated within the game can be realized in the real world, bridging the gap between the virtual and the real economy. Join the Quest: How to Become a Part of the XWORLD Community Interested in joining the XWORLD community and becoming a part of this transformative journey? Follow us on Twitter at ​https://x.com/xworld_store and join the quest at ​https://xworld.store/quest. Embrace the future of gaming with XWORLD and experience the thrill of Web3 gaming today. As we navigate through the dawn of the Web3 era, XWORLD stands at the forefront, ready to revolutionize the gaming industry. It offers a promising glimpse into the future of gaming, where players are not just participants but integral parts of the gaming economy. XWORLD is not just a game; it’s a paradigm shift, a new era of gaming that promises to be as exciting as it is rewarding. XWORLD — Pioneering Web3 Games & Apps Store. Earn Profits & Assets From Your App Usage Time Website | Litepaper | Telegram | Discord | Facebook | X ( Formerly Twitter)