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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

Justin Slaughter

VP of Regulatory Affairs

Dominique Little

Policy Associate

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

Alex Grieve

VP of Government Affairs

Gina Moon

General Counsel

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

Georgios Konstantopoulos

General Partner & CTO

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

Releasing Reth 1.0!

Doug Feagin

Partner, Investing & Research

Charlie Noyes

General Partner

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

DaniPopes

Accelerating the EVM by compiling to native code.

Releasing Revmc

James Prestwich

Matthias Seitz

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

Matt Huang

Co-Founder & Managing Partner

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

Dave White

Research Partner

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

From Staking to Restaking

Dan Robinson

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

Data Associate

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

Personal

Ciamac Moallemi

Research Advisor

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.

Joining Paradigm as an EIR

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.

Paradigm and a16z File Joint Amicus Brief in SEC v. Coinbase

Any legislation on stablecoins should promote openness and competition while recognizing that stablecoins are inherently different from bank deposits and MMFs.

The Future of Payments Includes Stablecoins

Paradigm is a group of builders that supports other builders. Some of our most fruitful collaborations involve deep work with entrepreneurial teams to solve important business and research problems.

Collaborate with Paradigm

Alex Grieve joins Paradigm as Government Affairs Lead.

Joining Paradigm

Paradigm filed an amicus brief rejecting the SEC's unsupported attempt to expand its jurisdiction to secondary market trading of crypto assets.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief in SEC vs. Bittrex

Alloy is a Rust interface to Ethereum. It is a rewrite of the popular ethers-rs crate, using our learnings from the last 4 years of Rust Ethereum engineering, to create stable and useful foundations for the next 5 years.

Introducing Alloy: Fast, battle-tested and well-documented building blocks for Ethereum, in Rust

Alvin Hsia

Emily Hsia

Alvin & Emily Hsia join Paradigm as Entrepreneurs-in-Residence.

Joining Paradigm as EIRs

Reth is a new Ethereum execution node written in Rust that is modular, contributor-friendly and blazing-fast. Reth is now entering public alpha and we’re excited to invite node operators and developers to try it out. 

Releasing Reth

Through this haphazard rulemaking, the SEC inappropriately attempts to bring crypto trading platforms, including DEXs, under its remit and regulate them as securities exchanges. It thus appears that after suing Coinbase for failing to do the impossible—registering as a securities exchange when it was incapable of doing so—the Commission now intends to force DEXs into the same Hobson’s choice.

Paradigm Comments on the SEC's Proposed Redefinition of Exchange

Load testing is a critical step in the development of resilient, high-performing data systems. Nevertheless, load testing has not been widely applied in the development of cryptocurrency infrastructure. We're thrilled to bridge this gap with the introduction of flood, a benchmarking tool specifically designed for performance analysis of RPC endpoints.

Introducing flood: a load testing tool for benchmarking EVM nodes

Paradigm filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit that Coin Center and others brought in Florida to challenge the government’s sanctioning of the Tornado Cash open-source code.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief in Coin Center Lawsuit over Tornado Cash Sanctions

Quintus Kilbourn

The road to centralisation is paved with good intents.

Intent-Based Architecture and Their Risks

Paradigm filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit that the NY AG brought against KuCoin, in which the OAG alleged that certain tokens traded by KuCoin, including ETH, are securities. Our brief highlights the unfairness of the OAG’s tactics, which deprive the most affected parties an opportunity to defend themselves in court.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief in NY AG's Case Against KuCoin Pushing Back Against Allegation that ETH is a Security

Today Paradigm filed an amicus brief in support of Coinbase’s lawsuit that seeks to compel the SEC to respond to the company’s pending rulemaking petition.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief Supporting Coinbase’s Writ of Mandamus

Paradigm submitted a comment letter to the SEC regarding the Commission’s proposed amendments and redesignation of rule 206(4)-2 (better known as the Custody Rule).

Paradigm Files Comment Letter in Response to Proposed Amendments to the Custody Rule

Frankie

We're excited to open source Artemis, a framework for writing MEV bots in Rust. Artemis is designed to be simple, modular, and fast.

Artemis: An Open-Source MEV Bot Framework

transmissions11

Research Associate

Galaga

Toad

Pacman

Blend is a peer-to-peer perpetual lending protocol that enables lending against arbitrary collateral with no oracle dependencies.

Blend: Perpetual Lending With NFT Collateral

Mike Neuder

Introduction On April 2nd, a malicious Ethereum network participant stole $20M from a MEV searcher by exploiting a vulnerability in the mev-boost-relay (see Flashbots’ post-mortem). In the following days, developers addressed

Time, slots, and the ordering of events in Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

The recent events surrounding Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) provide a lens for reexamining age-old questions about the relationship between money and credit — and crypto’s important role in the future.

Moneyness In the Digital Age

Paradigm was not an investor in the Terra ecosystem and our brief was filed in support of neither party’s motion—our only interest was to push back against the SEC’s continued attempts to expand their jurisdiction over crypto.

Paradigm Files Amicus Brief in SEC vs Terra

The grand bargain of the US securities laws is that any issuer selling securities to the general public must provide the public with a set of disclosures approved by the SEC. These laws are intended to address information asymmetry and ensure that the investing public has the material information necessary to make informed investment decisions. The securities laws are not intended to turn the SEC into a gatekeeper or “merit regulator” that itself decides which projects are investable and which are not. Congress meant for discretion to remain solidly in the hands of individual investors.

The Current SEC Disclosure Framework Is Unfit for Crypto

Paradigm filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit that six Tornado Cash users brought to challenge the government’s unprecedented sanctioning of the Tornado Cash open-source code.

Paradigm Files Van Loon Amicus Brief

John Heinemann

While Washington sits on the sidelines, Americans want regulatory clarity on crypto. That's the bottom line on a poll we recently conducted to better understand how Americans view crypto.

March 2023 Public Opinion Poll

SEC Chair Gary Gensler would like the American public to believe that it is just as simple and easy for crypto founders to register tokens or crypto products with the SEC. It’s not.
