Paradigm Policy Team

Paradigm’s Policy Anchors guide how we engage on policy matters globally on behalf of our portfolio companies and all of crypto.

Paradigm Policy Anchors

Paradigm Policy releases its Policy Anchors, and adds six new members to its Policy Council.

Introducing Paradigm’s Policy Anchors and New Policy Council Additions

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Georgios Konstantopoulos

General Partner & CTO

The Reth team’s view on what should happen in Fusaka, Ethereum’s next hard fork after Pectra.

What comes after Ethereum’s Pectra hard fork?

George Niculae

Jennifer Parak

zerosnacks

Yash Atreya

Arsenii Kulikov

Dani Popes

Matthias Seitz

Foundry, the leading smart contract development framework, releases v1.0.

Announcing: Foundry v1.0.

Alex Grieve

VP of Government Affairs

Jonathan Hurowitz

Counsel

A primer on the debanking of crypto companies and entrepreneurs in advance of the February 2025 House and Senate hearings on the subject

What You Should Know Before Watching the Congressional Debanking Hearings

Dan Robinson

General Partner

Matt Huang

Co-Founder & Managing Partner

Charlie Noyes

Ethereum Acceleration

Gina Moon

General Counsel

Justin Slaughter

VP of Regulatory Affairs

Paradigm files amicus brief outlining why the mere usage of blockchain technology does not turn digital creations into investment contracts.

Paradigm Files Amicus Supporting NFT Creators’ Lawsuit Against SEC

Dave White

Research Partner

This paper introduces distribution markets, a new kind of prediction market for events whose outcomes aren't just "yes" or "no" but could be any number.

Instead of betting on a particular outcome or range, traders can express how likely they think each different possibility is across the whole infinite range of outcomes.

Distribution Markets

Paradigm files amicus in case against the CFTC to make sure Americans can access election-related prediction markets

Paradigm Files Amicus to Support Keeping Election Markets in the US

Programmable cryptography enables fun, safe, and intelligent experiences.
Hardware is necessary to achieve programmable cryptography at scale.
How to think about the levels of secure hardware?
Let’s get to Level 5.

The 5 Levels of Secure Hardware

Why the game theory for sovereign adoption of BTC has changed.

Bitcoin for the Sovereign

DaniPopes

A blazingly fast, modular and contributor friendly Solidity compiler, written in Rust

Introducing Solar

Personal

Ciamac Moallemi

Research Advisor

Introducing pm-AMM: an automated market maker designed for prediction markets. We introduce a new methodology for deriving AMMs for particular assets, and apply it to prediction market tokens, creating an AMM that may provide more consistent liquidity and reduce the risk of losing everything.

pm-AMM: A Uniform AMM for Prediction Markets

Dominique Little

Policy Associate

Crypto will matter at the ballot box this November. Our October poll, the last of our election series, confirms it: a surprising percentage of American voters identify themselves as single issue crypto voters.

October 2024 Public Opinion Poll

Paradigm and other investors file amicus brief supporting DEF and Beba's lawsuit against the SEC

Paradigm Provides Amicus Support for DEF and Beba’s Lawsuit Against the SEC 

Sofiane Larbi

Sofiane Larbi joins Paradigm as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

Joining Paradigm as an EIR

We are excited to announce Paradigm’s $20M investment in Ithaca, a new company with the mission to accelerate crypto development across the entire stack.

Introducing Ithaca

Hayden Adams

Mark Toda

Alex Karys

Xin Wan

Daniel Gretzke

Eric Zhong

Zach Wong

Daniel Marzec

Robert Miller

Hasu

Karl Floersch

Unichain is an optimistic rollup optimized for efficient markets by delivering fast state updates, offering a framework for applications to internalize MEV, and providing an economic finality system for quick settlement across blockchains.

Unichain

Guru Vamsi Policharla

MEV-Boost, the current sidecar protocol for MEV extraction in Ethereum, relies heavily on centralized actors called relays.

Using a novel form of silent threshold encryption, a non-interactive construction that can leverage validators' existing BLS keypairs, we propose an alternative architecture that allows builders and proposers to communicate directly, with purely cryptographic privacy assumptions.



How to Remove the Relay

Brendan Malone

Policy Manager & Head of Policy Lab

Rodrigo Seira

A data-driven analysis of the SEC's actions against the crypto industry under Chair Gensler. 

Regulation by Enforcement Isn't Just a Meme

A personal reflection on working at the intersection of crypto and policy

Looking Back / Looking Forward

Democratic voters are increasingly gravitating towards crypto. That’s the primary takeaway of our new poll of registered Democrats, the complement to our poll of Republicans from June. These results dovetail with recent reports that Democratic candidates for office and Members of Congress are becoming pro-crypto, indicating that political figures are following the lead of their voters.

July 2024 Democratic Public Opinion Poll

Paradigm files comment letter in response to the CFTC's proposed rule on prediction markets and election contracts.

Paradigm Files Comment on the CFTC’s Overbroad Proposed Rule on Political Event Contracts and Prediction Markets

Paradigm has submitted an amicus brief supporting Lejilex and the Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas's lawsuit against the SEC.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief Supporting CFAT and Lejilex’s Lawsuit Against the SEC

Katie Biber

CLO, Partner

In June, Paradigm conducted a first-of-its kind poll of Republican voters to better understand how they think about crypto. The results were clear: Republicans embrace financial freedom and want the current Administration’s crypto approach to end.

June 2024 Republican Public Opinion Poll

The Reth Team

Reth is now feature-complete, stable, and recommended for production usage and staking.

Releasing Reth 1.0!

Doug Feagin

Partner, Investing & Research

We’re launching the 2024 Paradigm Fellowship, a program to gather crypto’s most formidable young engineers and researchers.


Paradigm Fellowship 2024

Paradigm has filed a second comment letter regarding MiCA.


Paradigm Files Comment Letter on ESMA’s Market Abuse Consultation

Accelerating the EVM by compiling to native code.

Releasing Revmc

James Prestwich

Zerosnacks

Enrique Ortiz

After a year of development we're excited to release Alloy, an ecosystem of performant, well-tested and well-documented libraries for interacting with EVM-based blockchains.

Releasing Alloy

Paradigm Policy Lab-funded research argues that public blockchains can be used to settle financial transactions, stressing the importance of developing proactive and multi-faceted solutions to settlement vulnerabilities before a “black swan” scenario occurs.

Policy Lab RH-001: Settling the Unsettled

Paradigm has raised our third fund: an $850M venture fund focused on crypto projects at the earliest stages.

Announcing Paradigm's Third Fund

Arjun Balaji

Introducing Symbiotic, a generalized, permissionless protocol providing shared security through restaking.

From Staking to Restaking

In this post, we introduce MEV taxes, a mechanism that arbitrary applications can use to capture their own MEV. This mechanism could be used today on OP Stack L2s like OP Mainnet, Base, and Blast, because the block proposers on those chains follow a set of rules we call competitive priority ordering.

Priority Is All You Need

Paradigm filed an amicus brief supporting the Blockchain Association and Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas motion for summary judgment in their challenge to the SEC’s new Dealer Rule, which could have sweeping implications for DeFi and all of crypto.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief Supporting Challenge Against the SEC’s Dealer Rule, Which Could Have Sweeping Implications for DeFi

Some parts of crypto seem alien when compared to traditional finance. They make more sense when you view them in the context of a broader shift away from banks toward digital financial services provided by a range of people and companies. Innovation in finance is moving from the core to the edges. 


The Edges of Finance

Storm Slivkoff

In this post we continue our investigation of Ethereum scaling from Part 1, now turning our attention from state growth to history growth. Using high resolution datasets, our goal is to 1) build a technical understanding of Ethereum’s scaling bottlenecks, and 2) help frame the discussion around what Ethereum gas limit is optimal.

How to Raise the Gas Limit, Part 2: History Growth

Execution Extensions (ExExes) are post-execution hooks for building real-time, high performance and zero-operations off-chain infrastructure on top of Reth.

Reth Execution Extensions

Achal Srinivasan

Design Collaborator

awkweb

jxom

We’re excited to open source Frame Interface Guidelines (Fig), which outlines best practices for building great Farcaster Frame experiences, inspired by Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.

Fig: Frame Interface Guidelines

Paradigm has filed a comment letter in response to a consultation as part of the EU’s landmark crypto law, known as MiCA. 

Paradigm Files Comment Letter on ESMA’s Financial Instruments Consultation

Reth’s performance roadmap and how we intend to scale Ethereum.

Reth’s path to 1 gigagas per second, and beyond

Reth AlphaNet is a testnet OP Stack-compatible rollup aimed at maximizing Reth performance and enabling experimentation of bleeding edge Ethereum Research.

Reth AlphaNet

Central banks love to publicly question crypto. And yet their use of crypto technology tells a much different story: central bank future-of-finance efforts increasingly leverage crypto Open Source Software (OSS).

Crypto's Biggest Skeptics are EVM-pilled

Paradigm filed an amicus brief supporting Coinbase’s lawsuit against the SEC, which seeks judicial review of the agency’s refusal to provide rules for crypto.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief Supporting Coinbase's Lawsuit vs. SEC

Key findings about American voters use of crypto and the importance of this growing voting bloc.

March 2024 Public Opinion Poll

After 21 alpha releases Reth is entering beta.1 and preparing for our 1.0 “production ready” release in the next few months. In this post, we discuss the core features, performance, and stability of Reth Beta.

Announcing Reth Beta!

Joe Clark

Andrew Leone

Power perps are assets that target the power of an index price. It’s a fun rabbit hole to go down. The longer you think about power perps, the more you see how everything resembles a power perp.

Everything Is A Perp

I'm excited to announce that I've joined Paradigm as a Research Advisor. I am excited to be working with Dan Robinson, Matt Huang, and the rest of the Paradigm investing

Joining Paradigm as Research Advisor

The goal of this blogpost series is to develop a scientific approach for understanding and enacting Ethereum's scaling roadmap.

How to Raise the Gas Limit, Part 1: State Growth

Paradigm filed an amicus brief in SEC vs. Kraken that supplements the arguments made by Kraken and explains, once again, why the SEC's approach is unsupported by case law and is an unlawful attempt to grant itself new and unpermitted regulatory authority.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief in SEC v. Kraken

Ludwig Thouvenin

Karthik Srinivasan

Leaderless Auctions are decentralized auctions with no auctioneer. They address the “last look” problem that can emerge when one participant is allowed to act after all others.

Leaderless Auctions

Paradigm filed an amicus brief in support of Kalshi's lawsuit against the CFTC, which challenges the Commission's disapproval of the listing of a prediction market on Congressional control.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief in Support of KalshiEx Congressional Control Contract Case vs. the CFTC

Paradigm today filed a comment to FinCEN’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which labels all “convertible virtual currency mixing”–defined broadly–as a primary money laundering concern, and seeks to impose a new reporting requirement on all related transactions.

Paradigm Files Comment Letter on FinCEN's Proposed Reporting Requirements for Mixers

Where we outline the Paradigm Reth team's current view on possible next steps for Ethereum's upgrade after Cancun, Prague.

What comes after Ethereum's Cancun hard fork?

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed a rule intended to regulate large centralized digital payment companies, but captures crypto wallets in the process. Paradigm urges the Bureau to appropriately narrow the scope of the rule to exclude crypto wallets, which are quite different than the rule's ostensibly intended targets.

Paradigm Responds to the CFPB’s Proposed “Larger Participants” Digital Wallet Rule

Josh Harris

Josh Harris joins Paradigm as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

Last week, Paradigm filed an amicus brief in the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple Labs, Inc. Our goal is to help the Court avoid the unintended consequences of casually endorsing the SEC’s position in this case, which conflates an investment scheme with the crypto asset sold in that scheme.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief in SEC’s Lawsuit Against Ripple

The IRS and Treasury Department's crypto broker rule is unduly broad and burdensome, indiscriminately implicating wide swaths of the crypto industry. Paradigm's comment letter urges the IRS to substantially revise the proposed rule to ensure it is properly tailored and practically administrable.

Paradigm Files Comment Letter on IRS' Unduly Burdensome Proposed Crypto Broker Rule

The recent SEC Inspector General report highlighted the impact that limiting crypto ownership has had on the SEC’s hiring efficacy. In light of this, Paradigm Policy revisited and revised our suggested updates to government ethics rules.

You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand (2.0)

Paradigm filed an amicus brief in support of James Harper’s lawsuit against the IRS, which challenges the agency’s ability to use “John Doe” summons as a dragnet to surreptitiously obtain the private records of large groups of crypto users.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief in Harper vs. IRS

Paradigm filed an amicus brief in the SEC lawsuit against Binance. Paradigm was not an investor in Binance and has no direct financial interest in the outcome of the lawsuit. However, we believe it is critical to stand against government overreach regardless of who the defendant is.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief in SEC's Case Against Binance

Settling the crypto frontier begins with a speculative step.

The Casino on Mars

Austin Adams

Maher Latif

An analysis of the historical evolution of financial markets — and why crypto is about more than just making existing processes digital.

Electronification, Trading, and Crypto

Tom Meagher

Jake Moxey

Rivet is a developer wallet & tools, akin to React DevTools. It enables developers to inspect, debug, modify, and manipulate the state of Ethereum.

Introducing Rivet

 The Open Problems of Onchain Games

Paradigm and a16z filed a joint amicus brief in SEC vs. Coinbase that supplements the arguments made by Coinbase in its filing last week and demonstrates why the SEC's approach is unsupported by case law and represents a significant and problematic expansion of its regulatory authority.