Smart Contract Security

Paradigm

Check: Paradigm says it backs founders at every stage from first check through public markets, but it does not publish Alpin's personal check range or decision authority. A 2024 firm filing described vehicle investments from $1M to $100M or more; that historical firm range is not treated as his current personal range.

Alpin partners with crypto founders and researchers who have strong instincts about the future and the courage to follow them. His work centers on protocol, market, and mechanism design—especially systems that take explicit architectural tradeoffs to improve a core product or maximize performance. He is interested in how specialized new networks exploit incumbent dogma, how markets can improve collective decisions, and how open benchmarks can safely accelerate AI-assisted smart-contract security.

Electric Capital

Check: Electric Capital's current website publishes a $1M–$15M+ range from pre-seed through Series A; its January 2026 user-owned-technology thesis says it invests $1M–$20M in that theme. No separate personal range is published for Ren.

Ren backs deeply technical, trust-minimized systems and the builders who can turn them into usable infrastructure. His work combines protocol security, consensus game theory, smart-contract code analysis, developer activity, liquidity, volatility, and market structure. A central test in his published thinking is whether a protocol truly compresses verification cost for a sufficiently standardized asset or interaction—and whether it can overcome the friction, coordination, and funding disadvantages that usually pull products back toward centralized platforms.