A member of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) hinted at the potential of an upcoming blockchain product, as seen in two separate tweets on April 18th.
engineer tweet orange circle
a16z engineering partner Noah Citron tweeted a picture of the orange circle emoji.
coming soon pic.twitter.com/8kADUuervL
—ncitron.eth (@NoahCitron) April 18, 2023
The tweet doesn’t contain any details about the upcoming product, but it’s very similar to previous tweets from Coinbase. In February, Coinbase tweeted a blue dot (along with its own color scheme) before launching its Layer 2 network Base.
A16z maintains a cryptocurrency sector and often invests in crypto companies.
This fact, combined with the similarity of the orange circle to Coinbase’s advertising scheme, suggests that the company’s upcoming offerings are likely to be blockchain-related.
An optimistic connection is unlikely
However, the similarities to Coinbase go so far. Coinbase built the Base network on top of the existing Layer 2 network Optimism. This has sparked speculation that a16z might do the same.
However, Eddy Lazzarin, CTO of a16z Crypto, said: said on Twitter Future products are “not L2”. That statement seemingly broke this line of speculation.
Despite reports to the contrary, such speculation does not appear to have had a significant impact on the value of OP tokens in optimism. The value of Optimism (OP) is up 2.6% over the last 24 hours, while the overall cryptocurrency market is up 2.0% over the same period.
Optimism is the 65th largest cryptocurrency with a reported market cap of $845 million. Around the time of the airdrop in February, its value increased significantly.
Post A16z alludes to blockchain products by mimicking Coinbase’s “Blue Dot” campaign, which first appeared on CryptoSlate.