But "of all the government investigations now underway into Donald Trump, the one that is receiving the least attention may end up being the most consequential," Michael Barbaro said in a recent episode of The New York Times podcast The Daily. "And that's the one unfolding right now in Georgia," where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is overseeing a sprawling investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn President Biden's electoral victory in Georgia.

Willis is playing her cards close to the vest. But there is widespread speculation that Willis may be preparing to hit Trump or people in his orbit with racketeering charges, using Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Here's a look at how the Atlanta-area district attorney could prosecute the Trump campaign as if it were a criminal enterprise:

What is RICO, and how does it work? When most people think of RICO, "they conjure an image of a Mafia boss overseeing a vast organized crime ring," a group of legal experts at the Brookings Institution wrote in an October 2021 analysis of Fulton County's Trump investigation. "To be sure, RICO statutes were enacted with organized crime in mind, but over the past half century, federal and state RICO laws have been used more broadly to target criminal enterprises engaged in patterns of criminal conduct."

A RICO law "recognizes that if violations of individual criminal statutes by a single person are bad," the Brookings analysts write, "an enterprise that repeatedly violates the law is worse and should be subject to additional sanction."

"Honey when you're 59 years old and you get asked to walk a runway show you say YES!!!!!!!" she wrote in an Instagram post showcasing the epic moment.

The star received an outpouring of comments from fans and friends, including from Real Housewives of New York City's Leah McSweeney who shared a snap of the moment to her Instagram Stories: "[Lisa Rinna] looking FINE AF," she wrote.

Lisa's older daughter, Delilah Belle Hamlin, shared snapshots from the show to her Instagram, writing proudly, "MOM!!!!!!!!"

Rinna later shared both McSweeney and her daughter's sweet messages to her own Instagram account.

Following Rinna's runway look, she took time to speak with Interview magazine about the experience, saying that it was one of those moments where it was impossible to say no.

"I just think that at this point, at my age, you just have to f***ing do it and be yourself," she explained.

"I was in hair and makeup for a good two hours. They put on eyelashes and all this stuff and then they took it all off," she said of the prep beforehand. "This collection is so fabulous. For me, you could wear it on Watch What Happens Live. You could wear it on the show. You could wear it out. My girls could wear it. I can wear the dress that I wore today. I mean, I f***ing love this collection."

Just don't ask her to do midriffs.

"I would have my daughters do the midriffs," she said of particular looks in the collection. "I mean, there comes a point where you just don't. At my age, you don’t do midriffs. You can wear a bathing suit but you can't do midriffs."

Today, we’re excited to announce that a16z is leading a Series B investment in Matter Labs, which architected the zkSync solution. zkSync uses zero-knowledge proofs (specifically, zk-SNARKS), a type of cryptographic innovation, to scale Ethereum in a way that preserves its values of decentralization and security. The founders are brilliant: Alex Gluchowski has been a co-founder of three companies, and a CTO of four; Alex Vlasov is a deeply technical visionary with a research background and a PhD in Electrical Engineering. Together they lead a team committed to the long-term vision of scaling Ethereum, with an exciting roadmap ahead that includes more wallet integrations, permissionless token listings, and integrations with protocols and dApps.

zkSync 2.0 takes the computation performed by miners on Ethereum and moves it onto a zero knowledge-rollup that is processed off-chain. The computational proofs enable transactions at a lower cost and with more throughput than is available on mainnet, without sacrificing Ethereum’s security, decentralization, or composability. To achieve this latter feat, the team has built the first EVM-compatible zero-knowledge rollup, which will enable developers to reuse contracts already written in Solidity, and just as importantly, avoid needing to pay for multiple smart contract audits. 

Crucially, the zkEVM will allow contracts to call other contracts on the rollup in the same way you can call contracts on mainnet. In other words, it enshrines the same composability we find on Ethereum in the form of a zero-knowledge rollup. It also preserves all the network effects and tooling that have evolved around Solidity as the default smart contract language used by developers today. The first version of zkSync 2.0 is live on testnet, with a port of Uniswap V2 available to users. You can fill out this form if you’re on a team that’s interested in deploying on the zkSync 2.0 testnet. 

Many people thought the journey to an EVM-compatible zero-knowledge scaling solution would take years. The zkSync team went deep into the idea maze to come up with a solution much sooner than most people were anticipating. zkSync involves using the PLONK setup as a proof system  (if you want to grok PLONKs on a deeper level, we recommend watching this presentation by Alex Gluchowski or reading this post from Vitalik). As a final step, the team offers a compiler that can convert Solidity into zkEVM bytecode. The work that the zkSync team is doing is complementary to a lot of the other great work toward blockchain scalability in the Ethereum ecosystem.

One way to understand the history of modern cryptography is as a movement to secure and promote human freedom. Public-key cryptography, first proposed in the 1970s, evolved as a way to address two concurrent phenomena: advances in telecommunication that made widespread communication possible, and advances in adversarial surveillance that rendered private communication necessary. We can view cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum as continuations of this story: the SHA256 and keccak256 hash functions give us a way to create private and public keys that can authenticate transactions in an open network. Cryptography is the vital component of why these networks can operate in a trustless and decentralized manner – allowing the participants on these chains to be fully self-sovereign. The zkSync team is continuing this history. 

If Ethereum showed us what you can do with decentralization, composability, and developer freedom, Matter Labs will extend that vision by offering scalability. The activity on Ethereum L1, between DeFi, governance, NFT trading, DAO creation, and gaming has surpassed our wildest imagination in terms of creativity and progress. One way to explain the ingenuity we’re seeing comes back to the core idea of self-sovereignty inherent to cryptography, and essential to the ethos of web3. zkSync is building (and enthusiastically hiring!) for the next generation of developers, and will unleash rippling waves of originality into the already vibrant Ethereum ecosystem. We couldn’t be more excited to back the team and their inspiring vision for the future. 

Our first cohort of founders has now graduated, and three have since completed subsequent funding events, one company has a signed term sheet in hand, and two companies are actively in discussions with potential investors for future rounds of funding. 

We are now accepting applications for our second cohort!

We intend to run two, six-month long cohorts in 2022, with the first kicking off in January. We will keep the application link open ongoing, but please apply by December 31, 2021, if you would like to be considered for the January cohort.

If you or someone you know is a great candidate for the TxO program, apply here.

The TxO team is growing!

We learned a lot from the first cohort and as we launch our second, we are welcoming three new faces to the TxO team. 

• Jeff Jordan, a16z Managing Partner and General Partner, will now oversee TxO. Jeff brings decades of experience building consumer and marketplace companies, such as eBay, OpenTable, and Paypal, to mentoring TxO founders and their teams.

• Kofi Ampadu joined TxO as a Deal Partner based in New York City, NY. He will focus on sourcing and selecting companies for the program, as well as managing the network of downstream investors. After stints at Kraft and Accenture, Kofi built several of his own consumer-facing startups and bootstrapped his own pre-seed investing fund called SKU’d Ventures. 

• Tauri Laws-Phillips joined TxO as a Partner based in Austin, TX. She will focus on running TxO University and cultivating the network of TxO Partners, which include Amazon, Facebook, Google, and TikTok. Tauri comes to us with over 10 years of CPG marketing experience, both on the client side at Unilever and agency side, as an equity mentor, and most recently as the Program Director for The SKU Accelerator.

Of course, we couldn’t do any of this without contributions and support from our community. We see so much opportunity to connect resources to talented builders who aren’t in traditional networks.

As we’ve reached out to our ecosystem seeking volunteers, donors, and mentors, we have been overwhelmed by the interest in TxO and willingness to help make this program impactful for the founders.

If you know a person or organization that might want to help find, mentor, or coach TxO founders, we’d love to hear from you. 

-The TxO team

The first hearing that took place was at the House Committee on Financial Services, featuring six crypto company CEOs and resulting in a five-hour session that prompted headlines like “Congress Gets a Crash Course on Cryptocurrency.”

Then, the U.S. Senate’s Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee held its own hearing, this time focused on stablecoins, which are privately issued cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a stable asset such as the U.S. dollar, and are used in decentralized financial services.

We’ve covered crypto regulatory issues on 16 Minutes before with a16z experts, including an episode with former federal prosecutor  Katie Haun and former New York Stock Exchange regulatory chief Anthony Albanese. That discussion, which you can find in this feed under episode #50, was about a proposal by the Treasury Department’s financial crimes enforcement arm that included provisions for digital asset reporting.

(As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as investment advice, please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information.)

All of these hearings are also connected to the broader question of innovation, and keeping the U.S. competitive on a global stage.

So with that context, our guest today is a16z global head of policy Tomicah Tillemann, who before joining a16z served as senior advisor to two secretaries of state. He reports on the hearings and their significance, and gives a quick pulse-check on where we are with crypto regulation right now.

Last year when we announced Katherine joining the team, we used the term “American Dynamism” but left it largely undefined. Today, she has published our thesis: “Building American Dynamism”. It explains why we believe there’s never been a better time to build companies that support the national interest and solve critical problems for the country.

The American Dynamism practice invests in founders and companies that support the national interest, including but not limited to aerospace, defense, education, housing, transportation, public safety, supply chain, industrials, and manufacturing. We believe these areas represent tremendous venture-scale opportunities. More importantly, these categories serve as a critical foundation to making America the country people want to be from, immigrate to, and build a life and career or company in.

There is much to build and we want to help you build it. We’re committed to working with and investing in the best founders who want to make American dynamism real. 

We’re staffing up a team to invest in and support these companies and we’re making a long-term commitment to this thesis. We already have a growing portfolio of companies building technologies and solutions that support American dynamism — companies like Anduril, Flock Safety, Samsara, Shield AI, Skydio, and more — that you can read about here. If you’re a builder, we want to hear from you. You can reach us at dynamism at a16z dot com.

I was recently sitting in a board meeting of a successful SaaS company when the conversation turned to the slipping product release date. The problem was that the billing system wasn’t going to be finished in time. On the face of it, this seems like a silly thing to hold up a product launch, particularly at a deeply technical infrastructure company. But this is a situation I’ve seen many, many times over the years – including up close when I was building and shipping product at my company Nicira.

Building a billing system that can handle flexible usage-based billing is incredibly hard. To begin with, it is a very legitimate big data problem in its own right – the system has to be scalable and performant, with strict correctness requirements. Companies often iterate through multiple rounds of pricing models, and hardcoding these decisions can make change incredibly cumbersome. Further, full solutions help not just with getting products quickly into market, but also with pricing and packaging discovery, real-time data, and integrations. The SaaS world is going through a shift where the speed and flexibility of pricing iteration needs to match the velocity of product iteration, but the bottleneck still too often occurs around billing.

Supporting all of these requirements is a significant undertaking for internal engineering teams, especially given that billing is often (mistakenly) considered an ancillary component, so it rarely gets the attention it needs until too late. In fact, I’m embarrassed to admit that even though we had one of the top distributed systems teams at the time, for years we simply had customers self-report their exact usage because we never quite got our billing system working. 

Of course, pricing and billing have a direct impact on a company’s top line. Perhaps more so than any other back office system. So even though it’s often overlooked as a top development priority, it really should be a first-order business decision. 

This is why I was so eager to meet Metronome – the leading billing infrastructure company – after hearing praise from several portfolio companies evaluating the solution. Metronome is different from many earlier generations of billing software. It is a simple-to-integrate solution that tackles the gnarliest billing infrastructure needed for effortless consumption pricing. The founders, Kevin and Scott, had deep visibility into this problem during their time at Dropbox. As multiple-time founders that saw billing at scale, they understand the level of effort needed to get this problem right. 

For nearly all companies in software infrastructure, APIs, and B2B applications, SaaS is the dominant business model, and nearly all of them strive for a usage-based pricing model. But given my traumatic experience with the problem, I really only had one question – is there a universal system that can serve such versatile demands?

To my surprise, not only has Metronome built it, but they were already deeply engaged with some of the leading SaaS companies such as Cockroach Labs, Starburst, Cribl, and Truework, all of whom were paying customers and using Metronome in production!

I’m very excited to be leading the Series A for Metronome and joining the board to help them on their journey. They are an all-star team with the technical chops, the business acumen, and the market validation to tackle one of the biggest pain points in building a SaaS product today. I just wish the product would have been around a decade ago.

In this guide, we'll be taking you through the steps to stake small amounts of ETH, as well as sharing a brief overview on why you might consider setting up a validator node with Rocket Pool (for the more advanced users).

Monetization has always been a top priority for Creators.

After they discovered from 00' to 10's they could monetize their audience through Web2 platforms and that it was possible to earn a living from their passion, Creators then realized from 10' to 20 they could actually BE the brand, BE the product, and could do for them what they were doing for others.

Indeed, the emergence of new technologies cumulated to a paradigm shift in how GenZs see the Work has led us to a new era for creators.