On a late September evening in Mexico City’s Hipodromo Condesa neighborhood, a heated debate was raging. It’s a big drama, a debate about one of the biggest issues in economics today: whether alternative currencies like Bitcoin represent the future of financial services or a 21st-century Ponzi scheme.

And on both sides of the debate, two of The country’s intellectual heavyweights, both of whom are well known, were blunt: On one side is Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist. On the other is Kathryn Haun, a prominent federal prosecutor turned recent venture capitalist.

Mr Krugman’s position is no surprise. He has long argued that the rise of decentralized blockchain networks, represented by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, is an unnecessary copy of the old days when precious metals were the dominant currency.

“I don’t think cryptocurrencies are about to usher in a new era.” He said. Like Other Wall Street titans such as Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of jpmorgan Chase, he has dismissed the cryptocurrency frenzy, saying repeatedly that “it will look like a Pets.com farce in 15 years’ time.” He was referring to Pets.com as a poster child for the dot-com boom and bust, a company that had an inflated market value that eventually disappeared.

Kathryn Haun disagrees. She sees virtual currencies and blockchain technology as saviours of society: the last hope for people to wrest power from greedy banks and Internet monopolies.

“Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, they control the rules,” Haun said, and new technology allows dedicated, entrepreneurial developers to challenge “their absolute power” and challenge the giants.

She’s all for the democratizing dreams that a new generation of tech talent has engendered in cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are still in the “dial-up era,” she says, and “critics are confusing the current phase of innovation with the endgame.”

Haun’s resonance with an audience made up largely of the tech elite prevailed. They also liked the vision she outlined.

As she spoke, photos of crimes brought to justice during her career as a prosecutor, mainly corrupt American law enforcement officials, flashed across five jumbo-size screens. But it wasn’t just that she was the “sheriff” who kept order in the wild West of cryptocurrencies that thrilled viewers. It was that she was now on their side.

Kathryn Haun is now a new partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a silicon Valley heavyweight. In her new job, she heads Andreessen Horowitz’s cryptocurrency investment fund, A16z Crypto, which seeks out emerging giants in the cryptocurrency world to help their founders succeed without breaking the law.

It’s a career-turning step at a dangerous time. The cryptocurrency market has fallen sharply throughout 2018. A global speculative frenzy last year that pushed the total value of the cryptocurrency market to more than $800 billion in January has now plummeted to $200 billion. Bitcoin has lost two-thirds of its value this year, while ETH is down 90%.

Kathryn Haun and her new colleagues at A16Z are committed. Investment booms often inflate bubbles, but if true believers are right, they burst, leaving behind a new industry. After all, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the Andreessen Horowitz Fund, started his career by turning the first commercial web browser into Netscape, the famous start-up that propelled the early Internet, The venture capital industry has reaped tens of billions of dollars from the Internet industry.

A lack of professional investment experience has not dented Haun’s confidence. “For entrepreneurs who want to work with you, they need to think of you as someone who has some strategic vision, some gimmickry, and the ability to get things done,” she says. She says it takes the same skills as a prosecutor to convince FBI agents and others they work with.

The leader of the technology age meets an iron-fisted prosecutor

At Andreessen Horowitz’s menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, co-founder Ben Horowitz reposes on a couch in his office with a famous black-and-white poster of hip-hop artist Nas above his head. A mannequin in the NFL’s Oakland Chargers jersey stands at his desk. This offbeat mix is in keeping with his company’s reputation as a lone ranger in the West.

Founded just nine years ago, the firm has quickly become one of silicon Valley’s leading VCS, investing in Skype, ride-sharing service Lyft, GitHub, the host of open-source software projects, and many others.

Andreessen Horowitz has long seen itself as a trendsetter. With more than $7 billion in assets under management, it was one of the first major VCS to make an aggressive move into crypto.

Andreessen Horowitz launched a separate crypto-focused fund with $300 million under management this summer, even as the cryptocurrency market plunged. Ben Horowitz himself confidently compares cryptocurrencies to an earlier era of the Internet. After the dotcom bubble, he says, many people thought it was a fool to invest in the Internet.

“That’s the dumbest idea, because they missed the Internet boom. I think the same is true with cryptocurrencies.” Ben Horowitz said.

Andreessen Horowitz has already invested in some cryptocurrency-related projects. Among them: U.S. heavyweight cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, reportedly valued at $8 billion; The Ripple project behind XRP, the third-largest cryptocurrency market by market capitalization; ChainNews took a look at Polychain, the world’s largest cryptocurrency fund, which has seen its valuation skyrocket in the last two years amid the cryptocurrency boom. Andreessen Horowitz even invested in Dapper Labs, which makes CryptoKitties.

The concepts of digital currencies and blockchains are so new that no one has a long-term trajectory to invest in them. Hiring someone with Kathryn Haun’s resume is easy to understand. “I don’t have much experience as an investor, either,” says Ben Horowitz, an early netscape executive before turning investor and later cofounding Opsware, a technology firm, with Marc Andreessen. “Most of the people in our institutions are not very experienced investment professionals when they come in.”

Still, Kathryn Haun, 43, has broken multiple ceilings at Andreessen Horowitz.

First, she became the fund’s first female general partner, which sits at the very top of the venture capital hierarchy. Second, she was not the founder of any company before, which would have been a prerequisite for most Andreessen Horowitz partners. Third, having spent most of her career as a public servant, she was at odds with the private sector.

But that’s not a problem. Chris Dixon, who co-leads Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund arm with her, says Kathryn Haun’s strengths are an authority on regulation and her ability to keep entrepreneurs and others excited about emerging fields. “One of the things that is really important here is communicating and explaining the benefits of emerging technologies and bringing more talent to the field, and KatieHaun has the ability to articulate the importance of the field and articulate it in front of a large group of people.”

How do you make an iron-fisted prosecutor

The son of an oil company executive, Kathryn Haun spent her childhood moving around the world, living in Texas and Colorado, Egypt, Greece and France.

She attended Stanford Law School in part because she believed familiarity with corporate law would give her opportunities to work around the world. “She was one of the craziest and most intense law students you could see,” recalls Derek Schaffer, a Stanford classmate who is now a corporate litigator in Washington. He also recalled that Kathryn Haun often studied the case on a treadmill she had installed in her dorm room.

After graduation, Kathryn Haun has maintained a high intensity and fast pace. She took a job with top law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore and moved to New York. But she changed her mind, accepted a clerkship at a prestigious circuit court, and rose to become a clerk for Justice Kennedy.

In 2006, she joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia in the U.S. Department of Justice, a district known for its rapid and high probability of reaching federal office. There, she worked on national security and terrorism cases, and she specialized in collecting electronic evidence using new technologies, then novel, such as the use of cellphone base stations to locate data.

Three years later, Kathryn Haun returned to California to prosecute prison gangs and bikers, murder, drug cartels, car theft and embezzlement. She has even sued Wells Fargo, a buffett-controlled bank, for allegedly hacking into the accounts of deceased customers. In the end, a panel of Wall Street regulators settled with Wells Fargo, which paid a $2 million fine.

Kathryn Haun first heard about the concept of bitcoin in 2012. At the time, her boss asked her to prosecute such cases, regardless of what bitcoin was.

The concept of bitcoin was little known at the time, but Kathryn Haun soon studied it in depth. In bitcoin’s early history, scammers, pornographers and other shady industries used it as a way to transfer wealth. Kathryn Haun formed the first federal team the following year, bringing together the justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department to fight financial crime networks and other government agencies. The team investigated the massive loss of bitcoins by hackers at Mt. Gox, then the world’s largest bitcoin exchange. She then led legal action to shut down cryptocurrency exchange BT digital Currency Action Group C-E, which federal agencies accused of money laundering.

Kathryn Haun became famous in Silicon Valley for her work prosecuting these cases. Silicon Valley investors are watching the sector closely, trying to figure out whether the environment is ripe for legitimate, related start-ups, rather than a haven for criminals.

“She showed unmatched entrepreneurial flair,” says Josh Stein, chief executive of Harbor, a start-up. “She took the first case and turned it into a series of cases, into a category, and she became a public figure, moving into the realm of promoting public policy for the benefit of society at large.”

Andreessen Horowitz invested in Harbor, a startup that aims to “tokenize” traditional securities.

Career transition

Some well-known prosecutors chose to go into politics, but Ms Haun took a different path. Her high profile in the tech world led to business opportunities with start-ups.

In 2015, when she was in public office, Kathryn Haun spoke to bitcoin investors at the home of Dan Morehead, an earlier cryptocurrency manager, about her work leading a team of bitcoin-related investigators. Zooko Wilcox, chief executive of Zcash, which describes itself as a liberal “crypto punk”, said he had been afraid of the prosecutor.

That fear evaporated when the audience found That Kathryn Haun was on the same page as them, and they found that Haun was a great help in navigating their businesses through the regulatory maze.

She quickly became an indispensable speaker at cryptocurrency events.

She was speaking at the Blockchain Summit on Necker Island, which is privately owned by Virgin Group boss Richard Branson. She taped a 2016 TEDx talk. She was later invited by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to an exclusive club in Aspen. In every speech, she delivers a message about why the blockchain technology behind the companies she’s suing has a bright future.

In September 2015, Kathryn Haun made her first small investment in a financial software start-up called Chain. She met the company’s founder on the plane home from a blockchain conference. She clearly declared the investment to the Justice Department’s Ethics office. At the time, she chose not to invest in cryptocurrencies, even though she had the opportunity to do so, for fear of possible legal trouble down the road.

As her professional network grew, she says, business offers began to come in, including offers from companies to become senior executives. She couldn’t resist the lure of Silicon Valley. She describes her involvement with the private sector as an “Epiphany”, much like her decision to fight crime. “I feel like I’ve done what I wanted to do in my judicial career.”

In 2017, Kathryn Haun decided to resign from the JUSTICE Department and immediately joined Coinbase’s board. On the Coinbase board, she met Chris Dixon, who leads Andreessen Horowitz’s investments in cryptocurrencies and related companies.

Chris Dixon admires Kathryn Haun’s legal mind. In addition, her prosecutorial experience as a prosecutor, her speaking skills, and her experience as an educator — she has taught cryptocurrency-related courses at Stanford Law School and Business School — make her the perfect spokesperson for an industry that many see as a hoax or a joke.

Later, however, Kathryn Haun encountered a sweet affliction: a difficult job choice.

In February 2018, she joined the board of HackerOne, a SAN Francisco-based cybersecurity company. The search committee approached her about becoming U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California or a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But those offers pale in comparison to working for Andreessen Horowitz.

When Chris Dixon asked her to join the big-name fund earlier this year, she accepted.

Dune Road, the base camp of venture capital

On a Monday in early September, Kathryn Haun looked excited. Her green eyes sparkled. She has reason to be excited. As a venture capitalist in such a short career, her personal office at Andreessen Horowitz wasn’t even ready for her, but her first “very amateur” angel investment has borne fruit.

Chain, a start-up she invested in in 2015, has been acquired by others. Her small investment quadrupled, though she didn’t disclose the exact amount.

That win gave her confidence, and she now has the job of selecting the best of the many startups that Andreessen Horowitz asks to invest in. She says she listens to an average of 10 corporate presentations a week. Requests for meetings with her were so overwhelming this summer that she moved up her planned start as an investor from September to June.

Andreessen Horowitz has registered a16z Crypto, its cryptocurrency-related proprietary fund, with the SEC. This is what hedge funds typically do, but it is unusual for a venture capital fund. Typically, VCS hold unfashionable equity assets in a company until an “exit” opportunity arises, usually in the form of a sale or initial public offering.

Hedge funds buy and sell assets based on market conditions that can change from minute to minute. Kathryn Haun says her investments are for the long term, citing the typical five – to 10-year vc investment cycle for a startup as the trump card. In other words, while Andreessen Horowitz’s “crypto” fund buys highly volatile cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, it also intends to hold them for the long term.

For the management of A16z Crypto, Kathryn Haun and Chris Dixon plan to divide their responsibilities by domain: Haun will focus on consumer-facing applications, while Dixon will focus on more technical products, such as tools for developers. “One of my weaknesses is working with people, one of my strengths is working with machines,” Dixon said.

One area of particular interest to Kathryn Haun is cross-border payments.

“I think some of the strengths of blockchain technology can be found outside the US,” she said. She points to growing up in Egypt and Greece, both of which are going through financial troubles that silicon Valley people can’t imagine. “Financial freedom, financial acceptance, foreign exchange, international remittances, americans don’t often think of these things.”

Kathryn Haun points to Andreessen Horowitz’s Celo, which is building a blockchain system for payments. The company aims to optimize the technology that goes into Android, a relatively inexpensive mobile platform that is an important gateway to the Internet for people in many developing countries.

Remittances also featured prominently in Kathryn Haun’s recent debate with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman in Mexico City.

She said the global remittance market is worth $600 billion a year, with the United States and Mexico the most active, at $24 billion a year. Despite technological advances, money transfers through these channels remain slow and inefficient. “I expect that within 10 years, international remittances will no longer be as simple as going to Western Union and sending a telegram, but as simple as sending an email from your mobile phone.”

Kathryn Haun’s vision of the future is rooted in historical experience. “People asked those who first bought cars, ‘Why did you buy a car? The carriage is not good.'” She says it was a similar story in the early days of the Internet, when, in 1994, “I told you that soon you would have a tiny device in your pocket. You could download two hours of movies on it, watch them anywhere, shop on it… You’d think I was crazy, absolutely crazy.”

During the debate in Mexico City, she said cryptocurrencies were no exception and that attacks on the blockchain network behind them as slow, costly and immature were missing the point. “It’s as if we’re in the dial-up era of the early days of the Internet, and critics are confusing the current phase of innovation with the end phase of innovation.”

Ben Horowitz also believes in the revolutionary potential of cryptocurrencies, saying that “it’s very likely that most of the things we need will end up being crypto-monetized. We’ll have to rethink social organization.” But first, his female partner had to hand over some successful investments in the sector.

This article was originally published on Fortune by Robert Hackett.