Partner, Investing & Research at Paradigm
Check size: 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.
Start with the technical or market dogma you are rejecting and the user benefit unlocked by that choice. Make every architectural tradeoff explicit: performance, security, decentralization, permissioning, finality, specialization, and upgrade path. Bring benchmarks, adversarial cases, or mechanism simulations. Show why the founders have a non-consensus view of the future and the courage and technical depth to turn it into a durable protocol or company.
Founders with strong future instincts, courage to pursue unpopular technical conclusions, deep protocol fluency, explicit tradeoff reasoning, products improved by specialization, mechanisms that turn dispersed information into better decisions, open-source builders, and teams willing to work close to the technical frontier.
He publishes no personal pass list. His writing implies weaker fit for undifferentiated Layer 1s, designs that inherit incumbent assumptions without examining them, general-purpose infrastructure with no core product advantage, mechanisms that cannot scale liquidity or participation, and teams unable to articulate why a deliberate tradeoff benefits users. These are inferred filters.
Identify an assumption the incumbent cannot abandon without threatening its identity or ecosystem, then show how a new protocol turns the opposite choice into meaningful user advantage.
List what the design gives up and gains across performance, decentralization, permissioning, finality, specialization, security, and upgradeability; reject claims of improvement that hide the cost.
Evaluate security systems on real and unreleased vulnerabilities in isolated production-like environments across detection, repair, and exploitation, with verified solvability and repeatable scoring.
Allow one deposit to support comparable trading across many current and future proposals, select on a common outcome metric, and revert losing proposal worlds to conserve capital.
AI security agents need realistic open evaluation across vulnerability detection, patching, and exploitation so the ecosystem can measure and shape rapidly improving capabilities.
New Layer 1 networks earn room to compete by exploiting dogmatic assumptions incumbents cannot easily abandon, then converting a deliberate architectural tradeoff into a product advantage.
Decision markets can evaluate a dynamically expanding set of proposals with shared collateral, making futarchy far more capital-efficient and compatible with generative AI participation.
His investing and research focus is protocol, market, and mechanism design, particularly strong tradeoffs that improve a core product, alongside founders with conviction about the future.
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