On Sunday, the company announced its first non-U.S. office, a branch of its a16z crypto fund in London. The move comes amid an increasingly hostile environment toward crypto in the U.S., including a lawsuit on Tuesday by the Securities and Exchange Committee against its one-time portfolio company, Coinbase.

Whats going on now with the Biden administration is theyre basically just trying to kill off the technology, Chris Dixon, the influential general partner at a16z and the leader of its crypto fund, told Fortune in an interview.

The firms decision demonstrates the firms confidence in the U.K. as an emerging crypto powerhouse as lawmakers, led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, seek to regulate the industry.

It just has all the ingredients that you want to see for an emerging tech hub, Dixon said.

The office, scheduled to open later this year, will be led by Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at a16z. As part of the move, the venture firm announced a $43 million investment in the U.K.-based Gensyn, a crypto-meets-A.I. startup. Dixon described the project as the Airbnb for GPUs, creating a blockchain-based marketplace for companies looking for computing power. Previously, a16z has invested in other U.K.-based crypto companies, including Arweave, Aztec, and Improbable.

The firm also plans to work with universities to develop blockchain clubs and foster talent for the crypto space, including with its Crypto Startup School accelerator program, which is aimed at supporting entrepreneurs building Web3 startups. The most recent iteration had around 8,000 applicants and 26 companies, which received investment and mentorship from a16z.

More crucially, a16z crypto is looking at the U.K. as a potential safe harbor and global leader for crypto as prospects dwindle in the U.S., at least for now. Sunak was an advocate of crypto and blockchain as finance minister, and other lawmakers such as MP Lisa Cameron are pushing for digital asset regulation.

Brian Quintenz, the head of policy at a16z crypto and a former commissioner at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said the U.K. is considering a regulatory regime that resembles a draft bill released by the Republican chairs of the House Financial Services and Agriculture committees about a week ago.

Were thinking of this as an investment in the U.K. with the appropriate regulatory treatment that ensures a high bar of customer protectionbut that embraces decentralization, Quintenz told Fortune in an interview.

The U.K. is still grappling with how to approach regulationin mid-May, the parliaments Treasury committee advised that cryptocurrency trading should be treated as a form of gambling rather than as a financial serviceand Quintenz said a16z crypto hopes to guide discussions, including working closely with 10 Downing Street.

As we cement the U.K.s place as a science and tech superpower, we must embrace new innovations like Web3, powered by blockchain technology, which will enable start-ups to flourish here and grow the economy, Sunak said in a statement shared with Fortune. Thats why I am thrilled world-leading investor Andreessen Horowitz has decided to open their first international office in the U.K.

Despite the expansion, Dixon said a16z remains a U.S. firm. He expressed optimism that lawmakers would change their minds on the need for crypto regulation, as they did with early internet legislation, citing that commerce was illegal on the internet until Congress passed a series of bills in the 1990s.

I would say the [crypto] industry will continue, he said. I think the U.S. will eventually get it right.

In 2005, Paul Graham cofounded Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup that invested early in Airbnb, Stripe, and other successful ventures.

On Saturday, Graham mused on why some company leaders have soured on remote work after embracing it. 

Ive talked to multiple founders recently who have changed their minds about remote work and are trying to get people back to the office, he tweeted. I doubt things will go all the way back to the way they were before Covid, but it looks like they will go most of the way back.

He didnt name individuals or companies, but examples abound.

In April, Lyfts CEO issued a return-of-office mandate one day after laying off more than a thousand employees, despite the company boasting a year earlier about letting staff choose where to work. A similar thing happened at the insurance company Farmers Group recently, with some employees getting angry because they made life changeslike moving to a new cityafter being told theyd be remote workers.

Graham suggested on Saturday that the effectiveness of remote work fades over time. That could help explain why some company leaders have grown slowly less enamored with it.

Why were all these smart people fooled? he wrote. Partly I think because remote work does work initially, if you start with a system already healthy from in-person workand partly because it seemed to solve recruiting, which is always a bottleneck.

He isnt the only prominent VC to question remote work.

Keith Rabois, a general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, told The Logan Bartlett Show last month that younger workers learn by osmosis, which requires in-person interactionand supervisors discover hidden talent by watching them. Neither he nor his firm, he added, would invest in a startup centered around remote work.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who led Y Combinator after Grahams tenure, recently described remote work as a mistake. 

I think definitely one of the tech industrys worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didnt need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity, he said during a fireside chat in San Francisco organized by the fintech company Stripe. I would say that the experiment on that is over.

Meanwhile companies are getting stricter about enforcing return-to-office mandates. Google told employees this week that office attendance would be an element of their performance review if they didnt comply with the three-day minimum for in-office work. A union slammed the move, saying professionalism has been disregarded in favor of ambiguous attendance tracking practices tied to our performance evaluations.

At Amazon, employees staged a walkout this month over the companys return-to-office mandate, which requires employees be in the office at least three days a week. The company seemed unfazed by the protest and is sticking with the mandate. 

Theres more energy, collaboration, and connections happening, a spokesperson told Fortune, and weve heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices.

Graham acknowledged that there will definitely continue to be remote-first companies.

There were before Covid, he noted. It works for some businesses. And there will be types of jobs, like customer service, that will commonly be done remotely. But remote-first wont be the default.

Transportation officials warned of extensive delays and street closures and urged drivers to avoid the area in the northeast corner of the city. Officials said the tanker may have been hauling hundreds of gallons of gasoline. The fire was reported to be under control.

Video from the scene showed a massive concrete slab had fallen from I-95 onto the road below. There were no reports of injuries.

The northbound lanes of I-95 were gone, and the southbound lanes were compromised due to heat from the fire, said Derek Bowmer, battalion chief of the Philadelphia Fire Department. Runoff from the fire or perhaps broken gas lines were causing explosions underground, he added.

Some kind of crash happened on a ramp underneath northbound I-95 around 6:15 a.m. The northbound section above the fire collapsed quickly, state Transportation Department spokesman Brad Rudolph said.

Mark Fusetti, a retired Philadelphia police sergeant, said he was driving south toward the citys airport when he noticed thick black smoke rising over the highway. As he passed the fire, the road beneath began to dip, creating a noticeable depression that was visible in video he took of the scene, he said.

He saw traffic in his rearview mirror come to a halt. Soon after, the northbound lanes of the highway crumbled.

It was crazy timing, Fusetti said. For it to buckle and collapse that quickly, its pretty remarkable.

The southbound lanes were heavily damaged, and we are assessing that now, Rudolph said Sunday afternoon.

There was no immediate time frame for reopening the highway, but Rudolph said officials would consider a fill-in situation or a temporary structure to accelerate the effort.

Motorists were sent on a 43-mile (69-kilometer) detour, which was going better than it would do on a weekday, Rudolph said. The fact that the collapse happened on a Sunday helped ease congestion.

He expected traffic to back up significantly on all the detour areas.

Most drivers traveling the I-95 corridor between Delaware and New York City use the New Jersey Turnpike rather than the segment of interstate where the collapse occurred. Until 2018, drivers did not have a direct highway connection between I-95 in Pennsylvania and I-95 in New Jersey. They had to use a few miles of surface roads, with traffic lights, to get from one to the other.

Officials were also concerned about the environmental effects of runoff into the nearby Delaware River.

Todays going to be a long day. And obviously, with 95 northbound gone and southbound questionable, its going to be even longer than that, said Dominick Mireles, director of Philadelphias Office of Emergency Management.

Thousands of tons of steel and concrete were piled atop the site of the fire, he said, and heavy construction equipment would be required to start to remove the debris.

The fire was strikingly similar to another blaze in Philadelphia in March 1996, when an illegal tire dump under I-95 caught fire, melting guard rails and buckling the pavement.

The highway was closed for several weeks, and partial closures lasted for six months. Seven teenagers were charged with arson. The dumps owner was sentenced to seven to 14 years in prison and ordered to pay $3 million of the $6.5 million repair costs, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

More recently in Atlanta, an elevated portion of Interstate 85 collapsed in a fire, shutting down the heavily traveled route through the heart of the city in March 2017. A homeless man was accused of starting the blaze, but federal investigators said in a report that the state transportation departments practice of storing combustible construction materials under the highway increased the risk of fire.

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Associated Press writers Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Jake Offenhartz in New York contributed to this report.