Expanding our Research Team

At Paradigm, we have always been focused on finding special people, whether it’s the entrepreneurs we back, or the people we bring onto our team. We value slope over intercept, personal attributes over specific experience, and achievements over credentials.

We’ve followed this philosophy when assembling our Research team, a unique group of crypto researchers and protocol developers who work with our investment team and portfolio to advance the frontier of crypto:

• We invented the Research role for Dan Robinson. I’ve known Dan for over 20 years, and in the early days of Paradigm, we knew we wanted his brilliant mind on the team in some way. The role we designed together was unusually unstructured for a typical investment firm, but has proven to be appropriate for the deeply technical and fast-evolving nature of crypto.

• Then, we added Georgios Konstantopoulos. A brilliant engineer and researcher hailing from Greece, Georgios kept showing up as a star engineering consultant at many of our portfolio projects.

• When a pseudonymous anime character started finding all the bugs, we knew we had to track down the legendary samczsun.

• When we had a Uniswap-related research question nobody at the firm could solve, we put it out into the world as an open problem. Dave White came to us with a solution and joined the team soon thereafter.

• Anish Agnihotri, our newest researcher, grew up as a crypto-native in Toronto and had his first crypto wallet at age 11. Prior to Paradigm, Anish was shipping new products faster than most companies.

Having a research institution embedded within an investment firm began as an experiment, but it’s become a key part of our ability to contribute to our portfolio investments and the crypto community. In addition to working closely with our investment team and our portfolio on projects like Uniswap v3 and Flashbots, our Research team has a mandate to help move the crypto world forward, whether by publishing new ideas like everlasting options, raising the profile of topics like miner-extractable value, or advancing the state of the art in smart contract security.

Now that we’ve seen our experiment around Research prove out beyond our expectations, what should the group and its function look like three years from now? Five years? Ten? Like Paradigm itself and crypto more broadly, the answer has yet to be written and the potential excites us. Most importantly, we know we want to invest further in what’s been working and put structure in place to allow the Research team to continue to grow.

As part of that structure, we are excited to announce that Dan Robinson will be taking on an expanded role as our Head of Research. He will be responsible for stewarding the broader vision for the research function, as well as growing the team with more world-class talent.

Just as we think about Paradigm’s potential on a generational timescale, we think our Research team has the potential for a lasting legacy. If you’re a talented researcher or protocol developer building your career in the crypto industry, please reach out to Dan at dan@paradigm.xyz.