Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), a leading venture capital firm operating in the crypto sector, has nabbed two of the leading engineers working on Facebook's digital currency project for its digital asset fund.

According to a Monday study from CNBC, Nassim Eddequiouaq and Riyaz Faizullabhoy accept jumped ship from Facebook to A16z after spending ii years working on the social media giant's Novi digital wallet (formerly Calibra).

Faizullabhoy volition serve every bit the main technology officeholder, while Eddequiouaq will take on the part of the primary information security officer at A16z'southward crypto sectionalisation. Faizullabhoy stated:

"Andreessen Horowitz has shown an impressive dedication to advancing the entire crypto ecosystem over the past decade, and we jumped at the chance to join their premier team and provide technical back up to their rapidly-expanding portfolio."

A16z founder Marc Andreessen has sat on Facebook's board since 2008 — one year prior to the launch of Andreessen Horowitz.

Anthony Albanese, main operating officeholder of A16z, described the business firm's new talent as having a greater "opportunity to impact the crypto ecosystem on a very wide scale" through their new roles.

"They're going to be advising our portfolio companies and protocols to help them make certain that they have the nigh secure and sophisticated systems around," said Albanese, calculation that their previous roles at Facebook were much more "specific."

Eddequiouaq and Faizullabhoy also worked at crypto custody firm Anchorage before joining Facebook's Novi project.

The pair are not the first engineers to have abandoned Facebook'southward digital currency projection, with Novi head of strategy Morgan Beller joining VC firm NFX in September 2022 and co-creator Kevin Weil heading to satellite imagery company Planet Labs in March of this twelvemonth.

Related: Andreessen Horowitz launches biggest-ever crypto venture fund at $ii.2B

While Andreessen Horowitz is viewed equally a leading crypto venture firm due to its successful and early on investments into the likes of Coinbase, Compound and OpenSea, the house has recently attracted controversy regarding how its governance voting rights for acme decentralized commutation Uniswap accept been disbursed.

While A16z's votes accept been divested to university law schools, including the Harvard Law Blockchain and Fintech Initiative (BFI), the Harvard BFI launched a governance proposal in May advocating for the creation of a decentralized finance lobbying group dubbed the DeFi Teaching Fund (DEF). The proposal recommended transferring $20 million worth of UNI to the grouping to fund its operations, with the grouping assuring that it would gradually sell the tokens over the grade of iv to five years.

However, less than two weeks afterwards the proposal passed and the tokens were transferred to the DEF at the outset of June, the DEF all of a sudden announced it had liquidated $10 1000000 worth of UNI to the shock of the decentralized finance community, attracting criticism of both the DEF and A16z.